That makes at least 3 of us! hahaAyyyyyyy fellow Bay Arean!
I'm so glad you enjoyed! I love the history of World's Fairs, in many ways they're deeply connected to our modern theme parks. The tower is sadly gone, but there are some cool remnants left on Treasure Island where the expo took place. It's a fun place to take out of town visitors for a beautiful sunset over the SF skyline.This is a beautiful post, thank you so much for taking your time to share this with us. I learned a lot of new things, and the last image is jaw-dropping- imagine THAT instead of Buena Vista Street, with a tower visible from all lands and serving as a true icon for the park. I can assume it doesn’t exist anymore?
One of the most underrated ideas of DCA was to bring back lost wonders of California, which was seen slightly in DCA; the Cathay Circle Theater, Pan Pacific Gates, they’re all places we won’t ever get to visit anymore and being able to see them is like stepping back in time. This is definitely a concept that Imagineers should explore more with aid of historians. A Victorian turn of the century boardwalk long destroyed, contemporary buildings from the past in Avengers Campus, and bustling pre-earthquake San Francisco… it’s a romantic California Adventure where you’re truly stepping back in time.
What exactly is that tower? I would love to know
Here's a link to some of the remaining structures
To be clear, you never visited the Cliff House I showed a picture of, that magnificent structure burned to the ground in 1907. Unless of course Walt let you in on some of that sweet cryogenic technologyThank you for the long post. And while I see that you're passionate about this, as a California and specifically a Bay Area native that visited a lot of those places growing up (spent many summers at the Cliff House at the penny arcade) I don't need that in my Disney Park.
![Winking face :wink: 😉](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/7.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png)
That penny arcade was such a sweet place, they've moved most of it to the new Musee Mechanique in Pier 39 but it's just not the same
I actually don't disagree here. Starting with a blank canvas, choosing to theme your park to the state it's located is absolutely not an optimal design choice. My point was more, given that Paradise Pier is already built, and Disney won't completely bulldoze it, what's the best way to make a glorified mall feel more magical?I've long said that the Disneyfied version of California was not a good theme in my opinion for a Disney Park located in California, especially when one can just take a short drive to see the real thing. Obviously others, including you, have other options on that.
For me, it would be to anchor the Pixar stories in a fantasy, Victorian-ish (honestly I'd be down with also using Art Nouveau and Art Deco from the '39 Golden Gate Expo for some "neighborhoods") California seaside pleasure pier.
With all that said we are where we are with the Park, and to me I rather them lean into Mexican architecture given the IP rather than trying to bring it back to some Victorian era pier setting for Coco. Especially since a lot of California architecture was influenced by Mexican architecture of the era.
We'll see what they give us with this project in the coming years.![]()
I also don't necessarily think we disagree here. Mexican architecture is by no means mutually exclusive with a Victorian pier setting.
In fact, in my post I specifically called out San Diego's use of Spanish-colonial revival architecture for its Pan-California Expo which harkens back to the same era as much of Mexico's architectural heritage, although in California the revival is a little more inspired by the simpler, more rustic Missions whereas Mexican architecture in the same period was more baroque and eclectic.
Unless you mean leaning into Pre-Colombian Mexican architecture which I would also be pretty down with. In fact, the "gates" at the bottom of the last image are based on Mayan architecture fused with "Oriental" decoration:
I wonder if these elephants were inspired by the same DW Griffith film that gave us the old gateway to Hollywood Backlot....
So I guess I'm saying Disney could lean into both California AND Mexico's architectural heritage in a way that takes inspiration from some of the images I shared and generally fit that 1880-1920 sorta era. Creating a little Spanish Colonial Revival "neighborhood" for CoCo to have some food/merch would be a great start in my book.