In 1915, San Francisco held the World’s Fair. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition, as the fair was called, celebrated the Panama Canal, which had opened the previous year, and showcased the recovery and resilience of San Francisco, which had been rocked by a devastating earthquake in 1906.
Between February and December, More than 18 million people visited the fairgrounds, which covered 600 acres along the city’s waterfront. In the center of the exposition was the Tower of Jewels, a 435-foot high structure covered in more than 100,000 multicolored glass jewels. Almost all of the buildings at the fair were built using wood frames that were covered in plaster and hemp to mimic the appearance of Italian marble. Once the exposition ended, those structures were to be razed to the ground.
A striking photograph from the demolition is stored in the Morgue, The Times’s repository for newspaper articles, photographs and other archival materials.
The photograph captures one of the fair’s large domed towers in mid-collapse. An early form of photo editing is evident: Water-based paint was added to the image to give the impression of clouds, or perhaps smoke, in the sky. The black-and-white image, dated 1916 and kept in a Morgue folder titled “Expositions,” is credited to Underwood & Underwood, a global photography agency.
The image was published in The Times on April 30, 1916, in its Sunday rotogravure section, a showcase of photography. The caption read, in part: “One of the massive towers of the palace of Agriculture is here shown actually falling under the action of hammer, saw and dynamite.”
More than 100 years later, a few structures from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition still stand, including the Civic Auditorium (now the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium) and the Palace of Fine Arts, one of San Francisco’s many landmarks.
The post When the World’s Fair Came Tumbling Down appeared first on New York Times.
