The Amusement Zone at San Francisco’s 1915 World’s Fair
by Laurie Thompson
Excerpted from the Marin Journal, 21 January, 1915
The amusement section of the Exposition, the “Zone,” corresponding to the famous “Midway” at the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, will carry out the purpose of the Exposition to give every feature a high educational value.
Imagine for the purposes of illustration, the interest, action and novelty of ten great circuses like Barnum & Bailey’s combined into a single “greatest show on earth” and presented at ten times the cost of the single production and an idea is gained of the originality of this section. A total of more than eleven millions of dollars has been expended in its establishment.
These concessions, as these less serious features of the Exposition are known, include a great open air panoramic reproduction of the Yellowstone National Park and a similar representation of the Grand Canyon of Arizona, presented by two of the transcontinental railways. The Grand Canyon concession is built upon so prodigious a scale that visitors will view the canvases from a standard gauge railway coach running on a standard gauge track. A huge working model of the Panama Canal is so extensive that visitors seated in comfortable theater chairs will be carried along the route of the canal upon a moveable platform, and a Dictaphone at the arm of each chair will describe each scene as it comes into view.
A novel amusement feature will be provided by working submarine boats of sixty-five tons displacement, which will operate in an artificial lagoon. The Aeroscope, a huge inverted pendulum, operating like a giant seesaw, with a great balancing weight on the short end and a car for passengers at the extremity of its longer arm, will raise sightseers more than 325 feet above San Francisco Bay, affording an unsurpassed view of the Exposition City and the Golden Gate.
Originally published at https://annetkent.kontribune.com.
