Tower of Youth

The Tower of Youth was to be Bernard Maybeck’s swansong. An exotic reprisal of his Palace of Fine Arts at the 1915 PPIE, it was taken up as an icon for the fair. In dozens of sketches, paintings, and models spanning several years, Maybeck and William Merchant imagined an orientalist fantasy of Cambodian towers, stupas, and vaguely “eastern” ornament. In the painting, the tower bursts out of a riot of costumed actors, colorful banners, lanterns, and umbrellas that fill out the multiple tiers of the stage. An Indian prince and princess on howdahs ride elephants. A Chinese opera reaches its crescendo as the central characters slash at one another with daggers. A South Asian orchestra plays sitars, santurs, and drums, while Maya, Aztec, and Inca people, bedecked in a sartorial fiction of gowns, wraps, and hats, stand in a passive tableau with a feathered serpent-god. This was the “Pageant of the Pacific.” For unknown reasons, the tower was scrapped and replaced by Merchant’s Pacific House.