The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940

3. "The Peers of their White Conquerors"

Chapter Three “The Peers of their White Conquerors” “The reason why this Exposition appeals with such overpowering force to the imagination of the visitor may not at once be apparent,” wrote William H. Holmes in the fall 1915 issue of Art and Archeology. The San Diego fair was not “stupendous as the international expositions, but an achievement far removed from these and possible only in the Southwest.”1 In one sense, Holmes’s words rang true. Balboa Park’s greensward, its pavilions, buildings, and plazas captured the imaginations of tourists and westerners alike when first opened. In January 1915, the first visitors approached the fairgrounds through the exclusive upper-middle-class neighborhood near the entrance at Park Avenue (now Sixth Avenue) and Laurel Streets. Crossing the span of the majestic Cabrillo Bridge, audiences entered the grounds on Calle del Prado. Perched on the highest plateau of Balboa Park, with views of San Diego Bay, Point Loma, and the Pacific Ocean, visitors found themselves within the vital heart of the fair where “Man’s Progress” took architectural and intellectual form. Looking east, there sprawled the complex of “low spreading—buildings flanked by broad lawns, surrounded by trees and shrubbery and the gorgeous flowers perpetually in bloom.”2 It was a quarter-mile thoroughfare of magnificent Spanish Renaissance and mission-style architecture. The California Quadrangle was evocative of the romance found in “a real Spanish city,” where “the man from the East and from the North and from the South, unfamiliar with the Spanish-American traditions” would be able to “leave behind him the rush and roar and bustle of the twentieth century—and find himself carried backwards 300 years.”3 In the glow of San Diego’s warm winter sun, the School of American Archeology and the United States National Museum introduced visitors to the complex cultural and racial history of the world and its connections to the Southwest. —80— 81 “The Peers of their White Conquerors” The California Quadrangle represented Bertram Goodhue’s eclectic approach to the architecture of the Americas. What could be more North American, reasoned Goodhue, than the architecture forged between Indians and Spaniards on the frontier of New Spain? The scienti fic heart of the exposition spread among the California, the Science of Man, the Fine Arts, and the Indian Arts buildings. With the aid of his talented apprentices, Clarence Stein, Irving Gill, Carleton Monroe Winslow, and William Templeton Johnson, Goodhue designed an expressive Renaissance architecture from the seventeenth-century styles of rococo, baroque, and churrigueresque. The vernacular building styles created in South America, mainland Mexico, and New Mexico prior to the mid-eighteenth century by native craftsmen impressed him as well. Indian and mestizo artisans had successfully wed indigenous and regional building methods with Spanish decorative styles. The exposition architecture embraced a dual heritage, in the words of the Figure 20. The Panama-California Exposition fairgrounds on the central mesa of Balboa Park, 1915. Courtesy of SDHS, no. 7654. 82 Chapter Three Prospectus, for it resembled “the Spanish art and architecture which was established on the lower coast [of California] in the latter part of the eighteenth century.”4 Goodhue distinguished the California expositions. He observed how “San Francisco nobly carried through a World’s Fair that as all know was very large, very beautiful and very successful.” However, he believed the event was “no more than the most recent of a great series of not very dissimilar things” regarding its architectural influences.5 San Diego’s architecture appeared more original and indigenous to the Southwest. Edgar Hewett and William Templeton Johnson deemed the choice as an organic style worthy of regional emulation. It maintained historical continuity with the region’s cultural heritage, “particularly because Spanish Renaissance architecture, with its gaiety and freedom, is wonderfully adapted to exposition buildings.”6 Writing thirty years later, Carey McWilliams judged these four buildings as the pinnacle of the fashionable Spanish colonial revival in the Southwest.7 Clarence Stein found himself “in charge of the design and production of drawings for the principal, dominant building—and the general layout of the fair,” the Moorish-Spanish styled California Building and the Quadrangle. Stein sought inspiration in colonial Mexican architecture because “there seems to have been not only unlimited wealth and architects who could plan in a big way, but also native workmen competent to execute most intricate carving.” Spanish building traditions and aesthetic styles were...