RON HENGGELER

Sunrise from my window.

Sunday Aporil 24, 2016

If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.

Pewter Mattiessen

The air has an indefinable softness and sweetness—a tonic quality that braces the nerves to a joyous tension, making the very sense of existence a delight.

Scribner's Monthly

This is the season in which I like San Francisco best; although we’re normally a Californian city, there’s a certain dreamy quality to the place that’s often at odds with the matter-of-factness of sunny day after sunny day. After all, aren’t we supposed to be the cool grey city of love?

Laurel Wellman

 

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.

Paulo Coelho

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Confucius

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

Colette

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

Peter Mattiessen

 

In 1939, the city of San Francisco hosted an international exhibition, named the Golden Gate Fair in honor of the construction by the city of the world's two largest suspension bridges, the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland, which spanned the San Francisco Bay. With all the skill that could be mustered by American engineers, an island was constructed amidst the Pacific waters, becoming the largest ever manmade island. Christened Treasure Island, this would be the location of the 1939 Exhibition.

Anna Burrows

The visions of a fair surrounded by the glory of the Pacific Ocean had finally materialized. However, this captivating scene took place as Europe verged on the edge of disaster. Germany had already begun its annexation of neighboring countries and threatened to unleash conflict on a global level. In only two short years the United States would be fully involved in this catastrophe. Furthermore, at the time of the fair the United States had just emerged from the Great Depression, which had affected the country in many ways. This fair seemed to provide a brief interlude between these two very difficult times in American history. For this event the U.S. decided to turn attention away from the international climate and focus on the beauty of the Pacific, which ironically is named for peace.

Anna Burrows

TREASURE ISLAND

Named after the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, Treasure Island was created to serve as the site of the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40. The fair was a celebration of the city’s simultaneous completion of the Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. It was attended by 17 million. There were 13 states and 37 nations participating in the fair, including Italy and Japan. Less than 14 months after the close of the festivities, the United States was at war with both nations.The event is commemorated in the Treasure Island Museum, located in the Administration Building, one of three buildings from the exposition to survive. The island was partially constructed with stone removed from the Bay Bridge tunnel on adjacent Yerba Buena Island. It was scheduled to become San Francisco’s airport, but was too small for air traffic and to close to the bridges. Only Pan American Airways China Clipper seaplanes to Asia and the Pacific flew from the island. When it was completed in 1937, 400 acre Treasure Island was the largest man-made island in the world. From SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder © Chronicle Books 1999

Treasure Island, an island built just for the occasion, juts out in the middle of the San Francisco Bay between the City and Oakland. With the Bay Area’s two famous bridges just completed, the GGIE and Treasure Island proclaimed to the world that San Francisco was resilient enough to create a Disneyland-like wonderland in the midst of the Great Depression. As with many of the famous world fairs of yesteryear, the GGIE of 1939 featured many peculiar attractions, such as an automobile racetrack for monkeys, a Western town with little people in cowboy costumes, and Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch. Elaborate architectural buildings, corny historical pageants, technological innovations, and plenty of good old-fashioned amusement-park fun and games were also what you could expect to enjoy at the exhibition. Today, with most of the exhibition buildings gone, Treasure Island is an unassuming flat piece of land jutting out from Yerba Buena Island in the Bay and it is easy to drive by without noticing it. But at the time of the exhibition, it was a grand fairground and world destination.

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,That we may record our emptiness.

Kahlil Gibran

A glimpsed view of the new Bay Bridge's tower seen from Treasure Island.

Photo was taken on Monday, April 25, 2016

 

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Joseph Campbell

 

 

 

The Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) (1939 and 1940), held at San Francisco's Treasure Island was a World's Fair celebrating, among other things, the city's two newly built bridges. The San Francisco-Oakland bay bridge opened in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. The exposition opened from February 18, 1939, through October 29, 1939, and from May 25, 1940, through September 29, 1940.

There are moments when troubles enter our lives and we can do nothing to avoid them.But they are there for a reason. Only when we have overcome them will we understand why they were there.

Paulo Coelho

A view of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge seen from Treasure Island.

Photo was taken on Monday, April 25, 2016

 

In 1939, with the completion of the two bridge's, San Francisco Downtown Association created the 49-Mile Scenic Drive to promote the exposition and the city. The drive started at San Francisco City Hall and ended on Treasure Island after winding around the picturesque "City by the Bay".

As the boundaries of human intercourse are widened by giant strides of trade and travel, it is of vital import that the bonds of human understanding be maintained, enlarged and strengthened rapidly. Unity of the Pacific nations is America's concern and responsibility; their onward progress deserves now a recognition that will be a stimulus as well.Washington is remote from the Pacific. San Francisco stands at the doorway to the sea that roars upon the shores of all these nations, and so to the Golden Gate International Exposition I gladly entrust a solemn duty. May this, America's World's Fair on the Pacific in 1939, truly serve all nations in symbolizing their destinies, one with every other, through the ages to come.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, via radio, during the opening ceremonies.

San Francisco. "That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.” Robert Louis Stevenson

 

“There is no stupidity great enough to ruin the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge. It has been the subject of terrible poetry and worse paintings, but it rises easily and grandly above the mundane, its towers poking through the fogs, natural and man-made.” Herb Caen

Treasure Island, a flat, geometrically-shaped, artificial island attached to Yerba Buena Island, was built for the Exposition near where the Oakland span and the San Francisco span of the Bay Bridge join. Built by the federal government, Treasure Island was to be an airport for Pan America's transpacific flying boats, like the China Clipper. Due to wartime needs, it was turned into a naval base used by the US Navy from 1941 to 1997.

“To a traveler paying his first visit, San Francisco has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.” Friz Hugh Ludlow

A view of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge seen from Treasure Island.

Be light, light, light - full of light!

Peter Mattiessen

Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty. It is also, of all the cities in the United States, the one whose name, the world over, conjures up the most visions and more than any other, incites one to dream.

Georges Pompidou

The new eastern span of the Bay Bridge with the old span being demolished.

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The theme of the exposition was "Pageant of the Pacific", as it showcased the goods of nations bordering the Pacific Ocean. The theme was physically symbolized by "The Tower of the Sun" and a giant 80 ft statue of Pacifica, goddess of the Pacific Ocean.

 

 

 

You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.

Patrick Ness

 

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

John Keats

Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.

Peter Mattiessen

 

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Elliot

Four Quartets

 

 

The mystical perception (which is only “mystical” if reality is limited to what can be measured by the intellect and senses) is remarkably consistent in all ages and all places. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux...have the mind screens knocked away to see there is no real edge to anything, that in the endless interpenetration of the universe, a molecular flow, a cosmic energy shimmers in all stone and steel as well as flesh. . .

Peter Mattiessen

 

Coming home from other cities and other parts, one crosses the bay to reach San Francisco and sees first the gray silhouette of her hills, shingled with roofs and roofs and roofs; the royal fringe of masts and spars along her waterfronts; the gray fog circling and fuming softly over it all, and the gulls flying and crying. The little boats plying to and fro, sound their hoarse, sweet notes of warning, and perhaps the noon whistles and the Angelus bells take up the sound in a long chord that to some hearts say, “Welcome home!”

Each to his own city. But do you love them as we do, I wonder, you whose cities are not steep and narrowed streeted, scented with the spices of the Orient and the good tarry smell of ships and fishing, lulled by the deep rushing of ocean surges on a long beach, the lapping of the bay waters against piers?

MY SAN FRANCISCO

By Kathleen Norris 1932

Throughout the run of the Fair, multi-colored searchlights shot up for one mile in the nighttime sky, and were visible for 100 miles around. The official program described the lighting effects as “chromotherapy.” The 80-foot statue of Pacifica personified the theme of the Fair, emphasizing unity between Pacific nations. But the dominating feature of the Island was the 400-foot Tower of the Sun, which competed in stature with the towers of the Bay Bridge nearby.

 

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else . . . Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Herman Hesse

Siddhartha

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.

A.A. Milne

 

I ask not for any crown

But that which all may win;

Nor try to conquer any world

Except the one within.

Louisa May Alcott

 

 

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Alan W. Watts

 

 

 

 

 

At midnight on the very last night of the Fair, each of multi-colored lights was dimmed slowly, one by one, so that nothing remained but the street lamps and the illumination for the Tower of the Sun – which stayed lit until dawn the following day, so that it could never be said that the Sun went out over San Francisco Bay.

Hide not your talents, they for use were made,

What's a sundial in the shade?

Benjamin Franklin

"San Francisco is the genius of American cities. It is the wild-eyed, all-fired, hard-boiled, tender-hearted, white-haired boy of the American family of cities. It is the prodigal son. The city which does everything and is always forgiven, because of its great heart, its gentle smile, its roaring laughter, its mysterious and magnificent personality. There are no end of ways of enduring time in San Francisco, pleasantly, beautifully, and with the romance of living in everything. Eat any kind of dish the races of the world know how to prepare. Drink any kind of wine you like. Go to the opera. The symphony or a stage play. Loaf around in the high-toned bars, or in the honky-tonks. Sail the bay. If you are alive you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life. San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day. “ (circa 1891)