Music Concourse - The 1894 World's Fair

Music Concourse - The 1894 World's Fair

Photo: Tobias Kleinlercher / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)

A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.

The sunken bowl around you, with its rows of clipped trees, began as the central court of the 1894 Midwinter Fair, staged to lift the city out of an economic depression. Fairgoers came to see exhibit palaces, a Japanese village and an electric tower in the middle of the court.

The great stone bandshell at the west end, the Spreckels Temple of Music, was a gift from sugar magnate Claus Spreckels and opened in 1900. Free band concerts have been played here for more than a century.

Museums have faced each other across the concourse since the fair. Today the de Young art museum and the California Academy of Sciences stand on opposite sides, both rebuilt in the 2000s after their older buildings were damaged in the 1989 earthquake.

More on Wikipedia: Spreckels Temple of Music · Claus Spreckels · De Young Museum

Stops on this tour

  1. Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
  2. Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
  3. Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
  4. North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
  5. Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
  6. Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
  7. The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
  8. Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
  9. Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
  10. Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
  11. The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
  12. The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
  13. Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
  14. South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom