Treasure Island

Treasure Island

Treasure Island was an artificial island created in the San Francisco Bay for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition. Among other things, the fair was a celebration of the city’s two newly constructed bridges, the San-Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (opened in 1936) and the eponymous Golden Gate Bridge (opened in 1937). The theme of the exhibition was ‘Pageant of the Pacific’ with the dramatic centrepiece of the fair being ‘The Tower of the Sun’, an 80-foot statue of the goddess of the Pacific ocean, Pacifica. The choice of San Francisco was a conscious effort to demonstrate an enlarged and strengthened sense of America’s global role, one which reached out across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As President Franklin D Roosevelt said at the exhibition’s opening ceremonies: ‘Washington is remote from the Pacific. San Francisco stands at the doorway’.

The Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library