The Jewel City | Page 5

annihilated by fire a few years before.
The entire cost of the Exposition, exclusive of the value of exhibits, is estimated by the Controller at $50,000,000. This total is made up of $20,000,000 spent by San Francisco and California, $10,000,000 laid out in state and foreign buildings and displays, $10,000,000 by private exhibitors, and $10,000,000 by the one hundred concessionaires on the Joy Zone. San Francisco contributed $12,500,000, the State of California $5,000,000, and its fifty-eight counties, $2,500,000. The amounts expended by foreign nations range from $1,700,000 by Argentina to sums as low as $100,000. The State of New York spent nearly $1,000,000.

II.
Ground Plan and Landscape Gardening

The Exposition a product of co-operation of the arts--The landscape made part of the scheme--Block grouping of palaces and courts--Plan of the buildings--McLaren's wonders in gardening--Succession of flowers throughout the Exposition--Changes overnight--Unique wall of living green.

The artistic quality which distinguishes this Exposition above all others in America or Europe rests on two outstanding facts: the substantial unity of its architectural scheme, and its harmony of color, keyed to Nature's coloring of the landscape in which it is placed. The site furnished the clue to the plan; co-operation made possible the great success with which it has been worked out.
"Centuries ago," said George W. Kelham, chief of Exposition architecture, "before the modern age of advanced specialization was dreamed of, had an architect been asked to create an exposition, he would have been not only an architect, but painter, sculptor and landscape engineer as well. He would have thought, planned and executed from this fourfold angle, and I doubt if it would have even occurred to him to think of one of the arts as detached from another." These words express the method of the Exposition builders. The scheme adopted was a unit, in which all of the arts were needed, and in which they all combined to a single end. Each building, each court, every garden and large mass of foliage, was designed as part of a balanced composition. To make the landscape an integral part of the Exposition picture, by fitting the Exposition to the landscape, was the common aim of architect, colorist, sculptor and landscape engineer. The Mediterranean setting offered by a sloping bench on the shore of the Golden Gate suggested, as most capable of high expression of beauty, the scheme of a city of the Far East, its great buildings walled in and sheltering its courts. The coloring of earth, sky and sea furnished the palette from which tints were chosen alike for palaces and gardens.
The beauty of this plan is matched by its practical advantages. The compact grouping of the Exposition palaces not only meant a saving of ground and labor, but it makes it easier to handle the crowds, and lessens the walking required of the visitor. There is no monotony. In developing the general idea, each architect and artist was left free to express his own personality and imagination. The result is that varied forms and colors in the different courts and buildings blend truly into the whole picture of an Oriental city, set in the midst of a vast amphitheater of hills and bay, arched by the fathomless blue of the California sky.
The ground plan is as simple as it is compact. Entering through the main gate at Scott Street, the visitor has the Exposition before him, practically an equal section on either hand. (See map, p. 30, 31.) On right and left in the South Garden are Festival Hall and the Palace of Horticulture. (p. 23, 24, 29.) In front is the Tower of Jewels, before it the Fountain of Energy. (p. 47.) The tower centers the south front of a solid block of eight palaces, so closely joined in structure, and so harmonized in architecture, as to make really a single palace. On the right and left of the tower are the Palaces of Manufactures and Liberal Arts; beyond them, on east and west, are Varied Industries and Education. Behind these four, and fronting on the bay from east to west, are Mines, Transportation, Agriculture and Food Products. In the center of the group, cut out of the corners of the Manufactures, Liberal Arts, Agriculture and Transportation Palaces, and entered from the south through the Tower of Jewels, is the great Court of the Universe, opened on east and west by the triumphal Arches of the Nations. (p. 59 and 63.) The Court opens northward between the Palaces of Transportation and Agriculture in a splendid colonnaded avenue to the Column of Progress, near the bay. (p. 57.)
Through the arch on the east the Court of the Universe opens into an avenue which leads to the Court of the Ages, cut out of the intersection of the four Palaces of Manufactures, Varied Industries, Mines and Transportation. (p.