Pan-Pacific expo also showcased city’s dark side

It is better to celebrate the past than to live in it. For almost a year now, San Francisco has been commemorating the 100th anniversary of the hugely successful and fondly remembered Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

There have been art exhibitions, speeches, books and celebrations, all honoring those great days in 1915 when San Francisco rose from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and managed to put on a world-class world’s fair. There were magnificent buildings full of new inventions, full of art and ideas. There were airplanes and Model T Fords. Thomas Edison, John Philip Sousa and Buffalo Bill Cody came, and so did almost 19 million ordinary people.

Casual racism

And yet there was a dark side to the fair, a pervasive racism, that was in the air, as common and accepted in those days as the summer fog that rolled in over the fairgrounds in what is now the Marina.

The heart of the fair was in its palaces and exhibit halls, which offered views of the wonders of the past and of the 20th century, but there were also examples of the racial views of the times. The worst were in the “Joy Zone,” a four-block area stretching along what is now Chestnut Street, from Webster Street to Van Ness Avenue. “A Mile of Amusement. All Good. All Clean. All Interesting,” the promoters called it.

For only a dime you could see Alligator Joe, visit a Monkey Hotel, be amazed by Captain Sigsbee, the educated horse, or Princess Olga and her trained leopards.

Or Dixieland, which featured a facade with five large caricatures of black men, posed over a watermelon. Inside, Dixieland told of “the antebellum days in the South when the slaves were “about the happiest and carefree beings on earth.’’

“We should not shy away from the negative aspects of the fair,” said Laura Ackley, a historian who wrote a definitive book on the exposition. “Some of it was pretty awful.” Her book, “San Francisco’s Jewel City,” has a section on how minorities were depicted at the fair.

‘We had no clout’

Other attractions featured giant heads of Africans, complete with rings in their noses and ears. There was even a troupe of real Africans in the “Joy Zone,” inhabiting a Somali village. The Somali Village lost money, however, and the fair directors evicted the 60 Africans, who ended up penniless at the immigration station on Angel Island. Most were deported.

One of the major examples of the casual racism of a century ago was “Underground Chinatown,” which purported to show the secret life of San Francisco’s Chinese neighborhood. This featured various scenes of opium dens, secret passageways and vice. There were wax figures and sometimes even live actors. In one scene, a white woman was shown being forced into sexual slavery by a Chinese drug lord.

An ad in The Chronicle for “Underground Chinatown” called it “The Talk of the Zone.”

Naturally, the local Chinese community was outraged. “But we had no clout,” said Sue Lee, the executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America. Others lacked influence as well: San Francisco had fewer than 2,000 black residents out of a population of about 417,000 in 1915.

But the Chinese government did have clout. So when Chen Chi, the official Chinese government representative, wrote to the fair mangers that “Underground Chinatown” was “a disgrace to the exposition and a slander on the Chinese people,” the promoter — who was Sid Grauman of Hollywood — backed down. It was rebranded as “Underground Slumming,” but San Franciscans knew what that meant.

“Underground Chinatown” has been reborn at the Chinese Historical Society museum on Clay Street in Chinatown. The free exhibit is a re-creation of the 1915 midway attraction. There is also a film display of silent movies of the time, with evil and exotic Chinese villains.

“It’s important for us to present this,” Lee said. “We let people come to their own conclusion.”

Opening eyes, minds

One of the visitors to the Chinese museum last week was Steve Miller, who grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the Sacramento Valley. He knew about the 1915 fair, of course, but not about the Chinatown sideshow exhibit. “It’s an eye-opener,” he said.

A century ago, women could not vote in federal elections, much less run for president. And the thought of a Chinese American mayor of San Francisco was beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. So maybe the good old days weren’t so good.