Treasure Island The Magic City 1939 1940

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History of California in the 1930s, discussing topics that include the depression, Utpon Sinclair's campaign for governor, Harry Bridges and the San Francisco general strike, and the public and private relief programs for the more than one million emigrants from the dust bowl.

Victor Arnautoff reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. Yet that was only part of an astonishing life journey from Tsarist officer to leftist painter. Robert W. Cherny's masterful biography of Arnautoff braids the artist's work with his increasingly leftist politics and the tenor of his times. Delving into sources on Russian émigrés and San Francisco's arts communities, Cherny traces Arnautoff's life from refugee art student and assistant to Diego Rivera to prominence in the New Deal's art projects and a faculty position at Stanford University. As Arnautoff's politics moved left, he often incorporated working people and people of color into his treatment of the American past and present. In the 1950s, however, his participation in leftist organizations and a highly critical cartoon of Richard Nixon landed him before the House Un-American Activities Committee and led to calls for his dismissal from Stanford. Arnautoff eventually departed America, a refugee of another kind, now fleeing personal loss and the disintegration of the left-labor culture that had nurtured him, before resuming his artistic career in the Soviet Union that he had fought in his youth to destroy.

When it was built in 1937, Treasure Island was considered to be one of the largest man-made islands in the world. Located in the middle of San Francisco Bay, the 400-acre island was constructed out of dredged bay mud in a remarkable feat of Depression-era civil engineering by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Its alluring name is an allusion to the fabled remnants of the California Gold Rush found in the ocean sediment that formed the island. This collection of essays tells the story of San Francisco’s Treasure Island—an artificial, disconnected island that has paradoxically been central to the city’s urban ambitions. Conceived as a site for San Francisco’s first airport in an age of automobile and air transport, Treasure Island hosted the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) in 1939 and 1940, celebrating the completion of the Golden Gate and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridges. With particular focus on Asia and Latin America, the GGIE promoted peace, harmony, and commerce in the Pacific. Treasure Island’s planned use as an airport was scuttled when World War II abruptly reversed the exposition’s message of Pacific unity, and the US government developed Treasure Island and the adjacent Yerba Buena Island into a naval training and transfer station, which processed 4,500,000 military personnel on their way to the Pacific theater. In the midst of a twenty-first-century high-tech boom and in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world, the city of San Francisco and its developers have proposed an ambitious model of military base reuse and green urbanism—a new eco-city of about 19,000 residents on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island. The project is synonymous with a growing global trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive land developments envisioned around ideas of sustainability and spectacular place making. Seen against the successive history of development, future visions for Treasure Island are part of a process of building and erasure that Horiuchi and Sankalia call urban reinventions. This is a process of radical change in which artificial, detached, and delimited sites such as Treasure Island provide an ideal plane for tabula rasa planning driven by property, capital, and state control. With essays by contributors well known for their interdisciplinary work, Urban Reinventions demonstrates how a single site may be interpreted in multiple ways: as an artificial island, world’s fair site, military installation, a semi-derelict relic of past lives, a toxic site of nuclear waste, and a future eco-city and major real estate development. The volume offers a wide spectrum of critiques of race, imperialism, gendered Orientalism, military land use, property capital exchange, new eco-cities, sustainability, and waste as a byproduct of development. The book will be of interest to general readers as well as teachers, scholars, and practitioners in the fields of geography, architecture, city planning, urban design, history, environmental studies, American studies, Asian studies, and military history, among others.

Published on the occasion of the expo's 75th anniversary, Into the Void Pacific is the first architectural history of the 1939 San Francisco WorldÕs Fair. While fairs of the 1930's turned to the future as a foil to the Great Depression, the Golden Gate International Exposition conjured up geographical conceits to explore the nature of the city's place in what organizers called "Pacific Civilization." Andrew Shanken adopts D.H. LawrenceÕs suggestive description of California as a way of thinking about the architecture of the Golden Gate International Exposition, using the phrase Òvoid PacificÓ to suggest the isolation and novelty of California and its habit of looking West rather than back over its shoulder to the institutions of the East Coast and Europe. The fair proposed this vision of the Pacific as an antidote to the troubled Atlantic world, then descending into chaos for the second time in a generation. Architects took up the theme and projected the regionalist sensibilities of Northern California onto Asian and Latin American architecture. Their eclectic, referential buildings drew widely on the cultural traditions of ancient Cambodia, China, and Mexico, as well as the International Style, Art Deco, and the Bay Region Tradition. The book explores how buildings supported the cultural and political work of the fair and fashioned a second, parallel world in a moment of economic depression and international turmoil. Yet it is also a tale of architectural compromise, contingency, and symbolism gone awry. With chapters organized around the creation of Treasure Island and the key areas and pavilions of the fair, this study takes a cut through the work of William Wurster, Bernard Maybeck, Timothy Pflueger, and Arthur Brown, Jr., among others. Shanken also looks closely at buildings as buildings, analyzing them in light of local circumstances, regionalist sensibilities, and national and international movements at that crucial moment when modernism and the Beaux-Arts intersected dynamically.

This volume explores how Italian institutions, dealers, critics, and artists constructed a modern national identity for Italy by exporting – literally and figuratively – contemporary art to the United States in key moments between 1929 and 1969. From artist Fortunato Depero opening his Futurist House in New York City to critic Germano Celant launching Arte Povera in the United States, Raffaele Bedarida examines the thick web of individuals and cultural environments beyond the two more canonical movements that shaped this project. By interrogating standard narratives of Italian Fascist propaganda on the one hand and American Cold War imperialism on the other, this book establishes a more nuanced transnational approach. The central thesis is that, beyond the immediate aims of political propaganda and conquering a new market for Italian art, these art exhibitions, publications, and the critical discourse aimed at American audiences all reflected back on their makers: they forced and helped Italians define their own modernity in relation to the world’s new dominant cultural and economic power. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, social history, exhibition history, and Italian studies.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A fascinating portrait of life as a Chinese American woman in the 1930s and ’40s.”—The New York Times Book Review “Superb . . . This emotional, informative and brilliant page-turner resonates with resilience and humanity.”—The Washington Post (One of the Best Books of the Year) San Francisco, 1938: A world’s fair is preparing to open on Treasure Island, a war is brewing overseas, and the city is alive with possibilities. Talented Grace, traditional Helen, and defiant Ruby, three young women from very different backgrounds, meet by chance at the exclusive and glamorous Forbidden City nightclub. The girls become fast friends, relying on one another through unexpected challenges and shifting fortunes. When their dark secrets are exposed and the invisible thread of fate binds them even tighter, they find the strength and resilience to reach for their dreams. But after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, paranoia and suspicion threaten to destroy their lives, and a shocking act of betrayal changes everything. Praise for China Dolls “A sweeping, turbulent tale of passion, friendship, good fortune, bad fortune, perfidy and the hope of reconciliation.”—Los Angeles Times “Bravo! Here’s a roaring standing ovation for this heartwarming journey into the glittering golden age of Chinese nightclubs.”—Jamie Ford, author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet “Lisa See masterfully creates unforgettable characters that linger in your memory long after you close the pages.”—Bookreporter “Stellar . . . The depth of See’s characters and her winning prose make this book a wonderful journey through love and loss.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)