The Jewel City

In February 1915, San Francisco unveiled the most ambitious world's fair ever mounted on American soil. Just nine years after earthquake and fire had reduced the city to ruins, its citizens chose to celebrate the Panama Canal's completion with an unprecedented vision: towers of colored glass catching Bay fog, palace after palace of Beaux-Arts splendor rising on 635 acres of newly created landfill. Ben Macomber walked these grounds as they opened, capturing an event that redefined what a city could be after catastrophe. The Jewel City traces every palace and pagoda, every sculpture and garden, the Tower of Jewels that blazed forty stories above the bay. This is not mere architectural cataloguing but a document of audacious hope, a city betting its future on beauty and declaring to the world that San Francisco had not merely survived its destruction but transcended it.