Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere 9780292784949

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DESIGNING PAN-AMERICA

DESIGNING

PAN-

Robert Alexander González

-AMERICA U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere

ROGER FULLINGTON SERIES IN ARCHITECTURE

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS   AUSTIN

Publication of this book was made possible in part by support from Roger Fullington and a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

All rights reserved Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

∞  The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gonzalez, Robert Alexander, 1965–  Designing Pan-America : U.S. architectural visions for the Western Hemisphere / by Robert Alexander González. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Roger Fullington series in architecture) Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-1-4773-2667-1 (cl. : alk. paper) 1. Pan-Americanism and architecture—United States. 2. Architecture—United States—History—19th century. 3. Architecture— United States—History—20th century. 4. Architecture—Political aspects—United States. 5. United States—Relations—Latin America. 6. Latin America—Relations—United States. I. Title. II. Title: U.S. architectural visions for the Western Hemisphere. NA710.5.P36G66 2011 720.1'030973—dc22 2010018557

CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Robert W. Rydell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  vii PREFACE: Entre autopista y puente . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   xiii PAN-AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE CHRONOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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INTRODUCTION:

1 2 3 4

ENTERING PAN-AMERICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1 Mapping the Sources of the Pan-American Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4 The Pan-American Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7 Equal Representation for All Americans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15 THE BIRTH OF PAN-AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE HEMISPHERIC FAIRS, 1884–1901 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18 Logical Pan-Americanism at Two New Orleans Expositions . . . . . . . . . .  22 Before the White City: Quadricentennial Visions for 1892 . . . . . . . . . . . .  32 The Pan-American Exposition in an American Power City, 1895–1901  . . .  49 A RUBBER-FIG TREE FOR THE PATIO AMERICA’S PEACE TEMPLE, 1907–1913 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  66 The Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  71 After the Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  77 Transforming the “Latins” with Patio and Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  82 Nuestra Pan-América . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  96 IN SEARCH OF MODERN PAN-AMERICA THE COLUMBUS MEMORIAL LIGHTHOUSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  102 Kelsey’s Perfect Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  107 Pan-America’s Heritage Is Explored in Stage One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   113 Kelsey Orchestrates the Second Stage  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  128 Gleave’s Transformative Cross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  132 Building the Unwelcomed Columbus Memorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  144 GATEWAY TO THE AMERICAS DREAMING INTERAMA, HEMISFAIR LIVING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  148 Interama and the Inter-American Subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  154 HemisFair ’68 and New Liaisons with Las Américas . . . . . . . . . . . . .   179 The Last Hemispheric Fairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  194 EPILOGUE:

ENTER HERE: THE GREAT PAN-AMERICAN WAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  198 NOTES .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  205 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  229 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  237 BIBLIOGRAPHY .

FOREWORD Robert W. Rydell

T 

HE CONCEPT OF PAN-AMERICANISM FIRST

came into play in the early nineteenth century when Simón Bolívar advanced it to promote political and economic alliances between Latin American nations fighting for independence and struggling to establish their own republican forms of government. According to many scholars, a second phase of PanAmericanism, the subject of this book, began in the late nineteenth century when elites in the United States and Latin America misappropriated Bolívar’s idea in order to advance their own economic interests, largely to the advantage of the United States. While not rejecting recent analyses of Pan-Americanism in the context of assessing asymmetrical power relations between the hemispheres, Professor Robert González shifts the emphasis away from economics to examining the role the built environment played in both representing and shaping dominant belief systems. What post-Bolívar Pan-Americanists understood most fundamentally at the dawn of the twentieth century was this: To be understood by mass publics in the United States and Latin America, Pan-Americanism had to be seen. The task of making Pan-Americanism visible fell to a bevy of architects and designers, including John M. Carrère, Hugh Ferriss, Edward Durell Stone, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who seized the opportunities presented by the Pan-American Union Building, the Columbus Lighthouse competition, and multiple international expositions (generally called world’s fairs in the United States) to reach tens of millions of people with highly charged visual representations of hemispheric cooperation. The centrality of world’s fairs for promoting PanAmericanism is a vital thread that runs through PanAmerica: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere. Although not many of these events were held in Latin American countries, Latin American na-

tions did participate in the dozens of fairs held in the United States beginning in 1876. Indeed, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil joined President Ulysses S. Grant in opening the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. At subsequent expositions, Latin American elites joined their American counterparts in promoting U.S. investment in agriculture and extractive industries as well as in tourism. U.S. fairs were often branded with Latin American themes. This was especially the case with Buffalo, New York’s 1901 Pan-American Exposition, San Francisco’s 1915–1916 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Diego’s 1915–1916 Panama-California Exposition, multiple world’s fairs in the 1930s, and San Antonio’s 1968 HemisFair. But these fairs were not alone. Rare was the international exposition held in the United States between 1876 and 1968 that did not include significant exhibits from Latin American nations. Indeed, the ideal of Pan-Americanism was so embedded in the minds of modernizing elites that it permeated the renderings for Miami’s Interama, an exposition fully designed for a 1968 opening, but never built. Pan-Americanism, in Professor González’ argument, emerges as one of modernity’s signature—and visible—ideological formations. What makes this book so important is that at the moment of its publication, the rhetoric of cooperation and exchange, made manifest in the name of the Pan-American Union Building in Washington, D.C., increasingly seems like a distant memory. Ironically, in 2009, at the very moment many in the United States (and around the world) celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, North American nativists seemed closer than ever to realizing their dreams of constructing a hemispheric wall between the United States and Mexico. In the current context, the very idea of a HemisFair, the name of the 1968 world’s fair held in San Antonio, that aimed to bring together the people and cultures of both

hemispheres seems distantly utopian and, doubtless in some circles, unpatriotic. Professor González wisely refrains from speculating about the future. But wouldn’t it be ironic if the hemispheric wall that so many North American nativists want to construct actually helped Latin Americans realize Bolívar’s dream? And wouldn’t it be ironic if resurgent nativism north of the border actually weakened the American economy and respect for the United States around the world? Whether in Bolívar’s sense of the concept, or William Jennings Bryan’s turn-of-

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the-last-century’s vision of a Pan-American university, Pan-Americanism once bespoke confidence about the future. At its worst, it represented the velvet-covered fist of imperialism. At its best, it imagined new ideas about the meaning of citizenship in the face of massive economic disparities between the hemispheres. Can Pan-Americanism be reinvented and reimagined for the twenty-first century? Will architects, designers, and engineers be building walls or pavilions of hope? This may well be the most important challenge laid down by this book.

PREFACE ENTRE AUTOPISTA Y PUENTE

A  

BRASS PLAQUE MOUNTED ON THE U.S.-

Mexico Gateway to the Americas International Bridge in Laredo, Texas, animated our childhood jaunts to Mexico, or, as we called it, el otro lado (the other side).1 When my siblings and I walked past its embossed words, marking the exact border line, we would nonchalantly switch from speaking English to Spanish. As masters of “Spanglish,” we could do this in midsentence without skipping a beat. Though geopolitical exactness triggered this mocking behavior, we knew many regarded the bridge as a symbol. Each year, this imagined nexus served as a backdrop for national pageantry when officials from the two border cities met there during the George Washington’s Birthday festivities, which Laredoans have celebrated since the 1890s.2 This annual reception of officials evolved into a performance called El Abrazo (The Embrace), with two pairs of children appearing in national costumes. For many, this performance, and those that came before it, belied the fact that some Laredoans felt they occupied a separate zone in between these two nations, and still others felt that one larger border culture straddled the border itself, existing on both sides.3 The embraces that most often took place on the bridge were familial rather than diplomatic. Following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, many Tejano families were divided, with some deciding to settle in the adjoining town of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, choosing Mexican citizenship over remaining in the newly established United States (Figs. P.1 and P.2). In 1974, when the Pan-American Highway was upFig. P.1. The Abrazo children negotiating binational relations. (Courtesy of Elaine A. Peña) Fig. P.2. The Abrazo children representing Mexico and the United States with costumes and flags. (Courtesy of the Washington’s Birthday Celebration Association)

graded in the form of Interstate 57 to connect the nations at a new point east of the old bridge, resulting in the new Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge, many worried that the Abrazo ritual would be threatened if Laredo’s city center also shifted eastward. This highway extension proceeded to destroy one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. We saw history being erased before our eyes. I experienced this firsthand when I assisted in my sister’s photojournalism mission that year as she documented the houses that would soon be razed. Laredoans also worried about the potentially waning significance of the old bridge, which had long been such an important part of their everyday life. It was the umbilical cord that connected Laredo’s and Nuevo Laredo’s city centers. The bridge also led to an unusual streetscape

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Fig. P.3. U.S. Congressman Henry Cuellar meets with participants of the Washington’s Birthday celebration in Washington, D.C., in full costume, September 2009. Visitors included the Abrazo children and locals depicting George and Martha Washington and Princess Pocahontas and Howling Wolf, Chief of Mystic Skies. (Courtesy of the Washington’s Birthday Celebration Association)

on the U.S. side, with street names that reflected our borderland culture and, interestingly, some of my own family’s ancestors. We are descendants of the founder of the George Washington’s Birthday (GWB) celebration, Mayor Samuel Matthias Jarvis, who had left his imprint on this unique streetscape.4 Jarvis, a New York engineer, had raised a Mexican American family in Laredo with his wife, Inocencia Flores, and decided, when he became the city surveyor, to inscribe his own

bicultural reality onto the local streets, renaming them after Mexican and U.S. political and military heroes, local figures, and his own daughters. These cultural constructions were further enriched by additional celebratory events, which continue today. In one such event, a symbolic historical account is performed in conjunction with El Abrazo. High-school-aged participants representing Pocahontas and her court of Indians, astride horses and on foot, lead a parade of extravagant floats carrying thirteen debutantes, who, in turn, portray U.S. colonial figures of note (Fig. P.3).5 Cultural engagements of another order helped Laredoans place this unique border life, with its nationally framed performances of ethnicity, in perspective. Local organizations and clubs introduced the concept of PanAmericanism long before the highway came. These included the Pan American Round Table, introduced in Laredo in 1921 after it was founded in nearby San Antonio in 1916, and the Pan American Student Forums, the popular junior-high and high-school clubs established in Texas in 1943.6 Both groups followed the initiatives of the Pan-American Society, which was founded in 1912 by U.S. diplomat John Barrett when he was serving as the Pan-American Union’s first director-general. The groups presented forums in which cultural identity was explored in relation to an imagined unified America and not as a product of divisive nationalist constructions. In Laredo, however, a different set of experiences stemmed from a predominantly Mexican American population, which had exceeded 95 percent since 1848. The Pan American Round Table in San Antonio, for example, was composed mostly of AngloAmerican members. Florence Terry Griswold founded the club after she opened her home to refugees from the Mexican Revolution. The roundtable’s mission of “concern for the welfare of Latins within our borders” has remained one of its main goals.7 This group later expanded to Mexico City and Costa Rica, and eventually formed an Alliance of Pan American Round Tables. Across the United States, these and similar organizations, which were quite popular and successful for several decades, chiefly functioned to introduce Anglos to the Latin cultures and the Spanish language.

Despite a growing acceptance of these types of PanAmerican activities through the 1960s and 1970s, many locals remained skeptical about the purported benefits offered by the Pan-American Highway, especially given the destruction it brought with its bulldozers and asphalt. Who would most benefit from this slithering plumed serpent? Laredoans wondered. This state of uncertainty only intensified as the highway’s connection to the Pan-American Union was better understood: The organization’s massive effort to link the Western Hemisphere’s northernmost and southernmost points divulged the extent of its heady ambitions. Laredo’s liminal existence between this freeway and the old bridge—entre autopista y puente—presented an alternative framework within which to consider this undertaking. Through these observations, my interest in the politics of national and cultural formations and negotiations in the built environment was piqued. Locals recognized the grandiosity of the highway’s mission to link all the nations of the Americas and evoke the same symbolism at each border crossing along the way. But Laredo was not just one point in this larger network of unity. It was an exceptional crossing, as it represented the United States’ link to all of Latin America. Given the mission the highway represented, it was ironic that it required so much historical destruction and apparent disregard for local cultural manifestations. As an aspiring architect, I was left with a yearning to see a more appropriate resolution unfold at this symbolically loaded intersection. The twelve-lane border station that was constructed simply did not fulfill the PanAmerican mission. I begin this history of Pan-American architecture with a description of my own binational cultural landscape because it explains how Pan-Americanism affected my daily life, and it gives a glimpse of a borderland condition that, as I propose in this book, is an important part of Pan-Americanism’s built legacy. It also shows how, since the late nineteenth century, generations of U.S. Americans have explored diverse ways of defining Pan-America’s spatial dimensions with built works, landmarks, and place-names.8 Between Laredo’s public rituals, the city’s street names, and the 1970s

P R E FA C E : E N T R E A U T O P I S T A Y P U E N T E

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freeway, this border town engaged contrasting representations of the Americas. But one need only traverse the borderland states to see that representations of PanAmericana, which today are often linked to Latino communities, are abundant and ubiquitous. Furthermore, Anglo-American attempts to frame a Mexican heritage are often indistinguishable from Mexican American attempts to do the same. These cross-cultural mimetic practices are as complicated as those found in Laredo, where Mexican Americans historically portrayed Martha and George Washington in “white face” during the Abrazo ritual. My attempt to unravel this ambiguous landscape has led me to study U.S. architectural representations in East Los Angeles and Tijuana, Baja California, and in my graduate thesis on Sunset magazine, the promotion of the ranch house building type.9 I now turn to a significantly different body of work with the Pan-American Union Building in Washington, D.C., because of its central role in shaping the U.S. interpretation of the PanAmerican concept. The study benefited from my familiarity with the work of the two architects associated

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with this organization, Paul Philippe Cret and Albert Kelsey. Having spent my formative years as a student of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, I had developed a fondness for Cret’s work, especially the university’s landmark tower and its architecture building. Kelsey had designed one of my favorite structures in Austin, located right across from the School of Architecture, the Spanish Colonial revival-style University Baptist Church. I never imagined that my research would someday link these two structures with my interest in Pan-Americanism and the built environment. Although the Pan-American Union played an important role in defining the Pan-American concept, the alternative forms of Pan-America examined in this book will also broaden the U.S.-centric hemispheric perspective. I can only imagine that a Pan-America built for and by U.S. Latinos will have an increasing impact on the way Pan-Americanism continues to be interpreted in the United States. Robert Alexander González M I A M I , 2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 M

Y AUNT ESTHER LIKES TO REMIND ME

that “uno nunca sabe para quién trabaja” (one never knows for whom one is working), a saying that does not resonate any louder than when one begins a significant research undertaking. Intellectual investigations, although rooted in set systems of knowledge production, can also serve larger purposes (we would like to think). The question of a work’s value constantly brings one back to that Spanish saying. As this book evolved, I increasingly appreciated the guidance I received from the scholars and fellow educators who had a part in its early production. This book is based on a dissertation I completed in 2002 at the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to my advisor, Dell Upton, first and foremost, for the wise feedback he offered as I ventured into what appeared to be unknown trans-Americanist territory. My other committee members, Paul Groth, Laura E. Pérez, JeanPierre Protzen, and José Rabasa, inspired me to survey this landscape from their distinct vantage points, and I am indebted to them as well. The America that took shape in my mind was formed from their thoughtprovoking reflections on my work and, in the end, from their collective voice. I am also forever indebted to the students and educators I met there. The dissertation idea first emanated from invaluable conversations with Gregory Alan Castillo, Lynne Hariouchi, John Loomis, Anoma Pieris, and many others. As the manuscript developed, I gained valuable insight from Denise Bratton, C. Greig Crysler, George Dodds, Clara Irazábal, Stella Nair, Laura Schiavo, Katherine Solomonson, and Mabel O. Wilson. My sincerest gratitude also goes to Luis Carranza, Stephen Fox, and Robert W. Rydell for their indepth critical readings of the manuscript and for their generous support. The keepers of the rich repositories I was fortunate enough to visit over the last ten years also deserve ac-

knowledgment. The access I was offered at the Organization of American States to the Columbus Library’s extensive unpublished data gave me an opportunity to mine deeply and broadly. I frequented this vast collection of important documents associated with the PanAmerican Union Building, its surrounding structures, and the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse competition. Other institutions with equally rich collections also offered generous support, some even cataloguing material to meet my research requirements as this project developed. I enjoyed the fact that my investigative trek was also unearthing possibly forgotten texts and, with the new connections I was making, elevating their importance. The list of the many trained specialists who contributed to this book is very long, but I would like to give a special thanks to Mary Daniels at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design; Daniel Hammer at the Historic New Orleans Collection; Dawn Hugh at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida; Janet Parks at Columbia University’s Avery Library; William Whitaker at the University of Pennsylvania; and the staff at the Columbus Library, especially Stella Villagrán, who was truly instrumental in the completion of this book. Elizabeth Douthitt Byrne, at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design Library, also deserves a big thank-you. In Santo Domingo, the staff at the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse merit acknowledgment for their care of the archives. Local architects Marcos Barinas Uribe, Gustavo Luis Moré, and Eugenio Pérez Montás enriched my examination of the city. Finally, I would like to thank Ann Marie Siguoin for the assistance she provided in examining some unpublished original drawings of the Pan-American Union when I worked with the Paul P. Cret Collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. I am deeply grateful for the support I received from my fellow Latin Americanists at Tulane University, es-

pecially Hortensia Calvo and Guillermo Náñez Falcón, the director and past director of the Latin American Library. At the Southeastern Architectural Archives, Director Keli Rylance offered invaluable advice and research assistance, and she played an important role in the acquisition of key material for the book. At the School of Architecture the Digital Output Lab staff helped me through some critical periods. Over the years, I have been fortunate to receive good advice and patient assistance from many of my faculty colleagues, especially Errol Barron, who worked on Interama in Paul Rudolph’s office, and Ellen Weiss, who offered innumerable insights. The seminars I developed at Tulane also brought me face-to-face with some of the most dedicated students of architecture, Latin American studies, and art history. I am especially grateful to the students in my world’s fair seminar for their contributions, and to my graduate and doctoral students, Shannon French, Dan Gorecki, and Lisa Mosier. At the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., I worked for over three years on an exhibition proposal that led to a key phase in the book’s development. The exhibition was envisioned to coincide with the centenary celebration at the Pan-American Union on April 26, 2010. This project was indefinitely postponed in September 2008 because of the financial crash, but the positive influence this research had on this book must be noted. I would like to thank G. Martin Moeller for his unwavering faith, encouragement, and excitement for the project during this period. The book also grew in various capacities with the support of numerous institutional grants, including several Humanities Research Travel Fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley; a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship; a Canadian Centre for Architecture Fellowship; a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts Grant; and support from the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. At the University of Texas Press, where the book took its final form, I had the pleasure of working with Nancy Warrington and Leslie Tingle, and I owe a special thanks to Theresa May and the ever-

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patient Jim Burr for their editorial guidance. Special thanks also go to Sheri Englund, who offered invaluable assistance in bringing the book to its final phase. Ultimately, the historical narrative cannot escape one’s subjective reading of the complex arrangements individuals construct for themselves and for others. Because of this, when dealing with abstract subjects and ideologies, insights into people and places have a wonderful grounding and enlightening effect. The big picture I developed with this book drew heavily from my own experiences, but more so from the memories of so many who intersected with this history. I am particularly grateful to Albert and Pete Kelsey, who offered their insightful memories of their grandfather. David Gleave also helped me to fill in the gaps as I followed the course of his father’s life. Others offered stories and insights into the numerous projects examined in this book. This combination of archival investigation and familial and personal narratives made this book more than enlightening but also a truly pleasurable undertaking. The richness it has offered me is no doubt a result of my own educational formation, and for this, I would like to thank Stanford Anderson, Reed Kroloff, Donlyn Lyndon, Lawrence Speck, and the late Royston Landau. I have been fortunate that others have also been there to provide assistance of another kind when I needed it most, especially when the book’s development did not neatly synchronize with life’s challenges. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Hiroko Kawaguchi Warshauer; Rafael Longoria; my sweet aunt who raised me, Esther Ramírez Jarvis; my aunt Socorro Oliver; and my siblings. Of course, none of this would have materialized without my parents, Emerico and Leonor, who left my siblings and me with so many unfinished paintings and unanswered questions. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Stephen Redfield, who gave me the courage to delve into this immense research project and good criticism when I needed it most. He also reminded me to rein it all in at dusk each day and sleep on it. For this, I dedicate this book and everything it stands for to him and to our life together.

New York City 1892 1913–14 1921 1927 1930 1939–40 1939–40 1940 1941–46 1951 1963 1964 2007 2008

Cayuga Island/Buffalo 1899 1901

Chicago 1893 1933 1959 1965

San Francisco

Paterson, NJ 1989

Denver 1991

1915 1939–40 1941–46

St. Louis 1892

Los Angeles

1945–present 1948 1989

Ft. Worth 1946

Austin Las Cruces 1968

Tucson 1999

San Diego 1915–16 1935 2001

1942 2005

San Antonio 1918 1968

Dallas 1937 1993–97

Houston 1965 1992

Washington, D.C.

New Orleans

1892 1910 1949 1950 1960 1960 1965 1965 1998

1885–86 1915 1925 1953

Laredo 2001 Galveston 1897

St. Augustine 1963–77 Tampa 1939

Edinburg 1952

Miami

Event Key

Realized Project

Proposal

Structures associated by name Exhibits, installations, murals, and pavilions World’s fairs and festivals Landmarks, monuments, parks, plazas, and streets

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Institutions, organizations, and schools/colleges

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1932 1935 1950–56 1963 1965–68 1970 1997 2005 2011

Santo Domingo 1928–31 1992

PAN-AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE CHRONOLOGY

Note: Asterisked items appear on the map on the facing page. 1815

Simón Bolívar’s Jamaica Letter proposing three Spanish-American federations 1823 Monroe Doctrine 1826 Pan-American Congress, Panama (Simón Bolívar) 1852 Don Antonio del Monte y Tejada proposes Columbus Lighthouse, Cape Isabela, Dominican Republic 1880 General Gregorio Luperón’s resolution to build Columbus memorial is passed 1881 Three Americas Railway proposed by Hinton Rowan Helper 1885–1886 *North, Central, and South American Exposition, New Orleans, LA 1889–1890 First International Conference of American States (ICAS), Washington, D.C. 1890 Inter-American Bank proposed at Inter-American Conference International Union of American Republics, representing eighteen nations, formed, to be served by the permanent secretariat, the Commercial Bureau of American Republics (CBAR) Pan-American Railway, first ground breaking, Corpus Christi, TX 1891 Inter-American coin proposed at InterAmerican Conference Pan-American Railway proposed from Victoria, TX, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1892 Exposición Histórico-Americana, Madrid, Spain Pan-American Monument proposed at the first ICAS in 1890 for Washington, D.C. *Quadricentennial Exposition proposed for New York, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. 1893 *World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois 1897 *Inter-American Exposition proposed for Galveston, TX

1898 1899

Spanish-American War *Pan-American Exposition proposed for Cayuga Island, NY 1901 *Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, NY Vice-President Roosevelt christens Navajo baby Pan-Anna-Ettseedo on May 23 at the PanAmerican Exposition 1902 International Bureau of American Republics (IBAR; new name for CBAR) 1903 Illegal seizure of Panama Canal Zone by the United States 1906 Brazilian Pavilion moved from the St. Louis Exposition to Rio de Janeiro, renamed Monroe Palace Construction of Panama Canal begins IBAR established as the Permanent Committee for future conferences 1907 IBAR architectural competition (150 entries) 1910 *Pan American Union inaugurated April 26, Washington, D.C. 1912 Brotherhood of North American Indians proposed and funded by Andrew Carnegie, with Albert Kelsey to serve as architect Inter-American University founded in San Germán, Puerto Rico Pan-American Society founded by John Barrett 1913–1914 *Pan-American Skyscraper designed as tallest building in the world, New York, NY 1914 William E. Pulliam proposes a Columbus Lighthouse Memorial Panama Canal completed 1915 *Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, CA *Pan-American Exposition/World’s Panama Exposition proposed for New Orleans, LA 1915–1916 *Panama-California Exposition, San Diego, CA 1916 Pan-American Monetary Unity proposed by Edwin W. Kemmerer Pan American Round Table founded in San Antonio, TX

*A Pan-American University in Miami, FL, and Panama City, Panama, proposed by William Jennings Bryan 1918 *Texas Bicentennial and Pan-American Exposition proposed for San Antonio, TX 1920 First Pan-American Congress of Architecture, Montevideo, Uruguay (see Table 2.1 for complete list) 1921 *Simón Bolívar monument by Sally James Farnham unveiled in Central Park, New York, NY 1923 Pan-American Highway proposed at the Fifth International Conference of American States 1925 First Pan-American Highway Conference, Buenos Aires, Argentina *International Trade Exhibition, New Orleans, LA 1926–1927 Pan-American Goodwill Flight initiated in San Antonio, TX 1927 *Pan-American Hospital established, New York, NY 1927–1928 Pan-American Airways, Inc. formed; headquarters later built in Miami 1928–1931 *Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition for a monument in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 1929 *Columbus Memorial Lighthouse stage-one jury takes place in Madrid, Spain U.S. Congress approves $800,000 to build Columbus Memorial Lighthouse 1930 “Pan-American Day” declared by President Herbert Hoover *Pan-American high-rise in New York, NY, proposed by Francisco Mujica 1931 *Columbus Memorial Lighthouse stage-two jury takes place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil First Pan-American Day observed on April 14 Tentative route of the Pan-American Highway drawn 1932 *Pan-American Exposition Building, Miami, FL, proposed by H. Hastings Mundy Pan-American Sports Organization formed (Pan-American Games) 1933 *Columbus Memorial Lighthouse replica displayed at the Century of Progress International Exposition, Chicago, IL Flying Down to Rio (film)

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The Good Neighbor policy announced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1934 Columbus Day, October 12, declared a national holiday 1935 League of North American Indians formed, later called the League of Nations—Pan-American Indians *Pan-American Plaza, originally the Plaza of the Americas, created for the California Pacific International Exposition, San Diego, CA *Pan-American Trade Mart proposed for Miami, FL 1936 China Clipper filmed, with scene in the Pan American Union Building League of American Nations proposed by Rafael Leonidas Trujillo 1937 *Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, Dallas, TX El Vuelo Panamericano Pro Faro de Colón 1939 *Pan-American Hernando de Soto Exposition, Tampa, FL 1939–1940 *Columbus Memorial Lighthouse display at the New York World’s Fair *Pan-American Union and Inter-America House at the New York World’s Fair *Pan-American Unity mural by Diego Rivera, Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, CA 1940 *Inter-America House founded in New York, NY 1941 Maya’s Pan-American Orchestra, “Havana-Madrid Show: Paran-Pan-Pan,” New York, NY 1941–1942 Orson Welles works on film It’s All True 1941–1946 *Avenue of the Americas name change and skyscraper proposals, New York, NY *Inter-America House founded in San Francisco, CA 1942 Saludos Amigos, animated film by Walt Disney *United Nations of America proposed at the University of Texas at Austin 1944 Cornerstone of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse laid, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 1945 Pan-Americana (Overview Turner Classic Movie) *Pan-American Fiesta, Lakewood, CA 1946 *Inter-American Trade Exposition proposed for Fort Worth, TX 1946–1949 U.S. Army Caribbean Training Center (School of the Americas) established in Panama

1948 *Pan-American Park, Long Beach, CA Pan-American Union reorganized as the Organization of American States 1949 *Pan-American Administrative Building inaugurated, Washington, D.C. Pan-American Health Organization formed 1950 *Pan-American Building proposed for Sesquicentennial Freedom Fair, Washington, D.C. 1950–1954 La Carrera Panamericana (The Pan-American Car Race) held in Mexico 1950–1956 El Faro de Colón magazine published (25 volumes), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic *Interama proposals, the Ferriss Phase 1951 *Avenue of the Americas inaugurated, New York, NY First Pan-American Games, Buenos Aires, Argentina Inter-American Center Authority established by State of Florida to oversee Interama 1952 *Pan-American University (formerly Edinburg College) founded, Edinburg, TX 1953 *International Trade Fair and Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center proposed, New Orleans, LA 1954–present Panamericana Texana newsletter published by the Pan American Round Tables of Texas 1959 *“Pan-American Architecture” Exhibition, Chicago, IL 1960 *Pan-American monument, Washington, D.C. (no site), proposed by Francisco Mujica *Plaza of the Americas dedicated, Washington, D.C. 1961 Alliance for Progress established by President John F. Kennedy Pan-American Health Organization Building architectural competition 1963 *Pan-American Building, New York, NY *Pan-American Hospital, Miami, FL School of the Americas moved to Fort Benning, GA 1963–1977 *Pan-American Center and Hispanic Garden, St. Augustine, FL 1964 *Pan-American Highway Gardens (Avis Exhibition) at the New York World’s Fair of 1964–1965 1965 *Amigos de Las Américas, Houston, TX *Festival of the Cities of the New World Pavilion, designed by Philip Johnson, Washington, D.C. *Pan-American Health Organization Building, Washington, D.C.

*Plaza of the Americas dedicated, Chicago, IL 1965–1968 *Interama proposals, the Star Architects Phase 1967 Inter-American Planning Society founded 1968 *HemisFair ’68 opens, San Antonio, TX *Pan American Center, Las Cruces, NM 1970 *Mall de Las Américas, Miami, FL 1981 President Ronald Reagan proclaims Pan-American Week in April 1988 La Carrera Panamericana (The Pan-American Car Race) reinstated in Mexico 1989 *Galería Las Américas, Los Angeles, CA *Pan-American Park, Paterson, NJ 1990 First Intercontinental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas, Quito, Ecuador 1991 *Museo de Las Américas, Denver, CO Pan-American World Airways ceases to exist 1992 *Avenida de las Américas, Houston, TX *Columbus Memorial Lighthouse inaugurated, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 1993–1997 *Museum of the Americas, Dallas, TX 1997 Miami Dade InterAmerica Campus (established 1973) 1998 *The Museum of the Americas founded, Washington, D.C. 1999 *El Centro Cultural de Las Américas, Tucson, AZ 2001 *Las Américas Premium Outlet, San Diego, CA (originally The Shops at Las Americas) 2001 The Center for the Study of Western Hemisphere Trade, Laredo, TX 2005 *Cine Las Américas, Austin, TX *Free Trade Areas of the Americas proposal for Miami, Florida 2006 The School of Panamerican Unrest, Pablo Helguera 2007 The Great Wall designs commissioned by the New York Times *Pan-American International High School, Elmhurst, NY 2008 *Pan-American International High School at Monroe, Bronx, NY 2011 *The New World Symphony Campus, designed by Frank Gehry, Miami Beach, Florida

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DESIGNING PAN-AMERICA

INTRODUCTION ENTERING PAN-AMERICA

A  

N ENGRAVING TITLED GENERAL GRANT

on a Banana Plantation, in William Eleroy Curtis’ Capitals of Spanish America (1888), brings together the many images that consumed one of PanAmerica’s earliest and most impassioned promoters (Fig. I.1). Reminiscent of an exploring Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant on horseback takes in a “tropical” world framed by banana leaves and barefoot natives. Using similar images throughout the book, Curtis hoped to incite in late-nineteenth-century U.S. Americans a curiosity about foreign lands, which were increasingly seen not as independent republics with national capitals but as plantations, farms, and mines to be exploited by the United States with new shipping lines and railroads. Curtis knew that these alluring glimpses of Latin America would fuel U.S. desires to dominate commerce and trade in the Western Hemisphere and invigorate the commercial transactions already taking place across the Americas.1 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, U.S. architects were called on to help set the stage for this burgeoning relationship. In expositions held in New Orleans, Chicago, and Buffalo between 1884 and 1901, architects gave form to spatial constructs materializing the bond between the American republics as the fate of the Western Hemisphere. Like Curtis, they deployed an amalgam of historical imagery and mythological themes to represent this newly envisioned Pan-America in physical form. They helped identify a Pan-American heritage to support the Western Hemisphere’s evolution as part of a common history. The eclectic collection of world’s fairs, monuments, and design proposals that architects developed, however, remain to this day unexamined as a group. A comprehensive review of these projects

Fig. I.1. “General Grant on a Banana Plantation,” published in The Capitals of Spanish America by William Eleroy Curtis, 1888.

reveals the extent to which architectural expressions helped shape the ideological construct of an imaginary Pan-America. Along with designs meant to inspire future hemispheric enthusiasts, architects also projected the notion of a model Pan-American subject, an imagined personification of the history, cultural practices, and attitudes that Pan-American enthusiasts had deduced were “essential” characteristics of the nations of Latin America. Cities were cast as gateways to the Americas, initially with respect to a city’s port and proximity to Latin America—where Pan-American enthusiasts could gain access to “the far south” and draw in its goods—and eventually in connection to a city’s populace and “Latin” heritage, where actual Pan-American subjects could be found. The tension inherent in the asymmetrical U.S.-Latin American relationship that was developing animates this architectural history. Along with the historical themes and multiple styles of architecture used to create this imaginary heritage came hierarchical designations and stereotypes. In their effort to induce loyalty, U.S. architects and their clients inadvertently, and intentionally, presented the United States as a powerful, dominant, modern leader and the Latin American nations as picturesque, exotic, and requiring guidance. This tendency reached its apex in 1910 in Paul Philippe Cret and Albert Kelsey’s design of the classical PanAmerican Union Building. This was the headquarters that housed the organization Curtis directed from 1890 to 1893. As subsequent “explorations” of Pan-America were embarked upon, this asymmetrical trajectory began to shift, revealing new visions of Pan-America and its model subjects. This became evident when the PanAmerican Union held an architectural competition in 1928 for a Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Reflecting increased intercontinental travel, the beacon was to serve ships

and airplanes while providing a crypt for Christopher Columbus’ remains. Pan-American Airways (also called Pan-American World Airways and Pan-Am) had been established in 1927. Out of the hundreds of designs submitted to this competition, a number of modernist entries broke from the clichés that had been used to represent Pan-America. This was especially true of the European, Latin American, and Russian design submissions. The competition program encouraged an internationalist approach based on the continued development of commerce, trade, and travel within the Americas. These designs also reflected the anti-historicist aims of the Modern movement of the 1920s. By the end of the 1930s, the Pan-American Union showcased itself with a modern “white box” pavilion

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Fig. I.2. Brazil Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

at the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940. The organization also appropriated the modern-style Argentina Pavilion at the fair when it decided to establish what it called the Inter-America House in the Argentine structure to aid and welcome visiting Latin Americans at the exposition.2 The United States’ gaze had already turned to a Modern movement that was flourishing in Latin America. Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa’s Brazil Pavilion seized the architectural community’s attention. The New York fair reported the largest representation of Latin American national pavilions and exhibitions seen on U.S. territory at the time, and their structures

reflected this Modern style (Fig. I.2).3 The press made much of Brazil’s “tropical pavilion,” where coffee and rare birds were showcased. Yet it also noted how the pavilion presented a stark architectural contrast to the conventional views people had developed of Latin America.4 Brazil’s tropical world was framed not by banana leaves and barefoot natives but by a sweeping ramp and a screened and fluid modernist structure on concrete pilotis. Modern representations of Pan-America were explored again in the 1950s and 1960s in the context of two fairs: Interama in Miami and HemisFair ’68 in San Antonio. These designs represent the last major projects of this history. Although Interama was never built, a set of fully developed design proposals reveals the extent to which the midcentury modern architects who designed it vigorously explored Pan-America’s form and expanded upon the notion of a model subject. The two fairs not only proposed expressions of a modern Pan-America as an innovative enterprise of cultural exchange, but the contrasting approaches taken by each set of architects also reflect how diverging responses to rapidly changing U.S. cities led to each fair’s successes or failures. When a team composed of some of the nation’s most famous architects designed Interama, it carefully wove regional references into modern designs. The unprecedented utopic landscape the architects created was disconnected from developments in Miami, especially changing urban conditions resulting from an immense influx of Cuban American refugees. Conversely, local interests intent on ensuring Mexican American representation at HemisFair ’68 played a critical part in that fair’s development. The fair’s downtown location led its architects to respond to the city’s historical fabric. Although ethnic tensions affected its history, HemisFair ’68 was the first U.S. fair in which Latinos were involved throughout its development. A reevaluation of previously defined notions of the Pan-American subject took place in Miami and San Antonio. Both sets of exposition architects had hoped to address the urban design issues of their day, even as they failed to fully locate immigrant and long-standing Latino communities in their hemispheric expressions.

As the history of Pan-American architecture comes to an end, this alternative notion of the Pan-American subject, specifically one who was locally based, emerges as one of the movement’s most important legacies. Interama’s international approach proved to be too disconnected from the realities of Miami. At HemisFair ’68, Pan-America was not seen through the international lenses of commerce, trade, and travel that framed the Miami episode. Instead, the motivation for the fair was to celebrate an already-achieved unity of Latins and Anglos. In retrospect, it is no coincidence that these fairs emanated from cities eventually known for their distinctive ethnic composition. Since the late nineteenth century, architects and hemispheric enthusiasts had advanced projects to promote Pan-America’s grand and elevating message of hemispheric unity, commonality, and mutual assistance. This Pan-America was tied to epic narratives of an indigenous past, to the discovery of the New World and its independence from the Old World, and to the establishment of new cities and mission sites throughout a perceived tropical, virgin land.5 U.S. citizens motivated by the desire to foment commerce and trade emerged as the movement’s most committed supporters and shapers. They helped construct an image of Pan-America as a shining beacon of hope, as an opportunity to guide the Western Hemisphere’s development along a prosperous and safe path. This led to the formation of a long list of associations, professional societies, social organizations, and educational clubs and congresses (Fig. I.3). It may be surprising to see the number of celebrated architects who participated in these attempts to give Pan-America architectural form. Although one project might represent a single moment in an architect’s career in which he or she only briefly engaged the concept, several architects and artists worked on numerous Pan-American-themed projects over the course of their careers, including John Merven Carrère, O’Neil Ford, Henry Hornbostel, Albert Kelsey, Hugh Ferris, Edward Durell Stone, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. The goal of this book is not to identify the most dedicated, passionate, or successful Pan-American architects or

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pressions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain.6 This neglected chapter of American architecture also sheds light on an evolving Pan-American built environment that still exists today, with each new project extending this century-long interest in giving a physical form to Pan-America.

Mapping the Sources of the Pan-American Idea

Fig. I.3. “Opportunity knocks,” published in the Rochester Herald, August 8, 1915; illustration by John Scott Clubb. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

enthusiasts but to reveal how individual and collaborative interpretations contributed to shaping this evolving ideological construct. The projects examined here do not constitute a complete list. This study has been limited to selected landmarks. I hope this study will inspire a parallel examination of related conceptual ex-

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Although U.S.-defined Pan-Americanism emerged in the late nineteenth century as a broad desire to forge hemispheric connections, with commercial interests at the core, a more subtle Pan-American discourse evolved alongside it, which the U.S. government articulated as an ideological tool for defining a rhetoric of common purpose and regional identity based on understanding South, Central, and North America as a hemisphere. These developments were based on what historian Arthur P. Whitaker identified as the Western Hemisphere idea, a belief “that the peoples of this Hemisphere stand in a special relation to one another which sets them apart from the rest of the world.”7 Although the PanAmerican concept’s definition continuously shifted, reflecting historical circumstances and its many framers, the U.S. government’s appropriation of the concept sits firmly at the center of this history. The origin of the Pan-American is attributed to Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan liberator, who introduced the notion in his famous Jamaica Letter of 1815 in conjunction with a proposal for a unified state of Latin American nations— a vision that precedes Whitaker’s notion of commonality, since Bolívar’s vision was rooted in pan–Latin American solidarity. Bolívar explored the concept in his early-nineteenth-century writings, and it inspired an unprecedented meeting of nations he organized in Panama in 1826, to which the United States and Spain were invited as guests.8 The United States’ appropriation of the concept did not occur until the late 1800s, when officials embraced it as an ideological instrument to facilitate the nation’s political and commercial ambitions. They did so while taking advantage of the fact that Pan-Americanism had already been appropriated

in a series of earlier projects, often reflecting similar motivations. When the concept was formally embraced in Washington at the First International Conference of American States of 1889–1890, the United States assumed a leadership role in this movement, even though subsequent conferences took place throughout Latin America (see Table I.1).9 This conference led to the founding in 1890 of the Commercial Bureau of American Republics, an organization constantly restructured and renamed through the mid-1940s. From the outset, the United States established that the U.S. secretary of state would serve as permanent director of the organization’s governing board.10 This led to expressions of distrust. Latin American participants at the first conference voiced their belief that the Pan-American mission could exist only by abandoning elements of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which called for U.S. dominance of the Western Hemisphere. This internal tension eventually affected how U.S.-government-defined Pan-Americanism evolved and why the organization was restructured. Latin Americans again voiced concern when Secretary of State Elihu Root helped give the movement a home in Washington, D.C., with the establishment of a secretariat in 1906 for the organization, by then renamed the International Bureau of American Republics. When the bureau (once again renamed the Pan-American Union) erected its new headquarters building in 1910, prominently located on the Washington Mall, Latin American representatives again grew concerned that hemispheric hegemony was being institutionalized in the capital city of the dominant member nation. The Pan-American Union finally established a democratic representation of the American republics in the early 1920s, when Colombia demanded a representative format for choosing the governing board’s director and the organization’s director-general. Not long after that, Latin American representatives controlled the most important seats of power within the organization. This was an important moment in the history of U.S. imperialism, as the path to a neutral and balanced union of the American republics was being paved. By 1948, when the organization changed its name to the

Table I.1. International Conferences of American States. In addition to the conferences, another general assembly that brings the heads of state of the Americas together is the Summit of the Americas, which has taken place in Miami, December 9–11, 1994; Santiago de Chile, April 18–19, 1996; Quebec City, April 20–22, 2001; Mar del Plata, Argentina, November 4–5, 2005; and Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, April 17–19, 2009.

First

Washington, D.C.

October 2, 1889– April 19, 1890

Second

Mexico City

October 22, 1901– January 31, 1902

Third

Rio de Janeiro

July 23, 1906– August 27, 1906

Fourth

Buenos Aires

July 12, 1910– August 30, 1910

Fifth

Santiago

March 25, 1923– May 3, 1923

Sixth

Havana

January 16, 1928– February 20, 1928

Seventh

Montevideo

December 3, 1933– December 26, 1933

Eighth

Lima

December 9, 1938– December 27, 1938

Ninth

Bogotá

March 30, 1948– May 2, 1948

Tenth

Caracas

March 1, 1954– March 28, 1954

Organization of American States, it occupied an expanded complex of buildings, with Cret and Kelsey’s original classical structure sitting at the center as a remnant of an important but past phase of the organization’s beginnings. Alongside the organization’s history, other U.S.defined conceptions of Pan-Americanism emerged as various U.S. cities throughout the U.S. South also appropriated the Pan-American concept. Cities began to claim the title of Gateway to (or of ) the Americas, initially with respect to port activity, as was the case with New Orleans and Miami. Other conditions also inspired the title, as seen when El Heraldo de Brownsville noted in 1939, “The extreme southern position of the Brownsville airport weather station, located here

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at the ‘gateway of the Americas,’ puts it in an advantageous position for the collection of aerological and surface reports.”11 The report noted how the station’s reach extended as far south as the Panama Canal. Early PanAmerican Airways postcards claimed Miami as the “Aerial Gateway between the Americas.” By the 1960s, cities with Latino populations and with strong ties or proximity to Latin America also asserted hemispheric centrality. Growing out of this tendency, Latinos have more recently appropriated the concept with numerous projects, often identified with the term “las Américas.” An outline of the long history of constructing PanAmerica in the built environment illustrates that this development occurred sporadically (see Map FM.1 and chronology). This history extends from a time when Pan-America was shaped by desires to promote the United States’ economic and political prominence in Latin America to a time when ethnic communities in the United States engaged and appropriated the PanAmerican concept on their own terms. In an effort to impose a disciplined framework on this mapping process, I consider only projects that were initiated by and for U.S. interests with the intention of representing the Western Hemisphere in the built environment. Although Laredo’s bridge and border sit like crosshairs at a border crossing, registering a unique and multilayered Pan-American cultural landscape, that example does not figure into this architectural study. At the same time, the Columbus Lighthouse is included in this study even though it is located in Santo Domingo. This is because the competition that led to the construction of this monument was sponsored by the Pan-American Union and organized by Albert Kelsey, who served as the competition’s technical advisor. Other projects such as Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893, which began with a strong hemispherically themed objective, are identifiable by their multinational claims or by their references to Christopher Columbus. Still others remain curious and remote expressions connected by name alone today, some long regarded as idiosyncratic remnants of a bygone era. Ask a New Yorker what motivated the transformation of Sixth Avenue into the Avenue of the Americas in the 1940s. The answer may

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reflect a hint of uncertainty and nostalgia. The institutions, monuments, and place-names considered in this study, built or unbuilt, are as diverse as the various constituencies that created them, be they the United States, city officials, associations of people, or passionate hemispheric enthusiasts.12 Like Luigi Pirandello’s six characters in search of an author, my book attempts to situate these landmarks in their historical location with respect to one another. The resulting history must also be located, given its interdisciplinary nature. As the first book to present a comprehensive history of Pan-American architecture, this work sits at the intersection of American and Latin American studies, the study of American architecture, the nascent field of hemispheric cultural studies, and political and diplomatic histories. The projects present a form of political and diplomatic architecture that used thematic strategies conceived to forward PanAmericanism’s multinational message. More specifically, this history resides in the growing field of “world’s fair and exposition studies.” Both terms are used in this book, with “hemispheric fair” also used to refer to those fairs that focused on the Western Hemisphere. The fairs examined here highlight architecture’s historical function as a medium of propaganda, and this study builds upon the works of Zeynep Çelik, Pat Morton, and Robert Rydell. This history also intersects the studies of U.S. embassies conducted by Ron Robin and Jane C. Loeffler, although as representations on domestic soil, the projects I examine may be seen as reciprocal cases of diplomatic architecture.13 Numerous studies resonate with Pan-America’s history of architectural expression articulated to affirm a political and cultural stance, including the architecture of cultural centers, museums, and national pavilions and monuments. Pan-American architecture’s focus on multinational representations brings to mind world monuments, peace unions, and other intergovernmental architectural forms, not to mention theoretical global projects that were never constructed, such as Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum. Finally, with the focus on Pan-Americanism and the explicit ordering of space that was meant to simultaneously promote (often su-

perficial) representations of unification and a LatinAnglo division, this history intersects the architecture of colonization, bringing to mind the architectural culture of British India and French Africa. An example of this is seen in two flanking statues at the entrance to the Pan-American Union, where North and South America are represented as simultaneously resonant and distant entities (Fig. 2.3). The continents take the form of depictions of two mothers, each protecting her young son, alluding to shared maternal instincts and the possibility of a friendship (given their shared experiences). The variety of projects examined here serves to call into question repeated attempts to clarify a vision of a U.S.defined (new) world with repeating themes providing a vision of a common heritage.

The Pan-American Citizen From coast to coast, the notion of the Pan-American citizen gained popularity throughout the 1930s and 1940s, giving further credence to a common Pan-American heritage. In 1939, Wilma Arline Sallade donned an inter-American dress made of 8,000 postage stamps from the Americas at Tampa’s Pan-American Hernando de Soto Exposition (Fig. I.4). In 1941, the Los Angeles Mexican American Chamber of Commerce presented actress Mona Maris with a Pan-American Citizen Award.14 Although these occasions were associated with civic rituals and were isolated gestures, such cultural performances of notions of subject identity played a critical role in the conceptualization and shaping of the buildings and urban landscapes examined in this architectural history (Fig. I.5). This study shows how the imagined Pan-American subject was tied directly to each project through its development, design, and promotion phases. This imagined citizen symbolically Fig. I.4. Wilma Arline Sallade and her Inter-American Stamp Dress appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, July 2, 1938. (Courtesy of James Rubottom) Fig. I.5. Anita Reyes, College of Women, crowned Miss Pan-America during Pan-American Week, 1945. (Courtesy of the Philadelphia Inquirer)

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stood at the center of each structure as the embodiment of the Pan-American mission. The identified—and often, self-identified—“Pan-American” was at times the progenitor of a project and at times the benefactor. This history begins with the Pan-American promoters, the Anglo-American experts such as Curtis who had traveled “down South” and mastered all things “Latin,” and it ends with supposedly enlightened U.S. citizens living in harmony within an environment that was seemingly shaped by a strong Latin American heritage. The presence of this imagined hemispheric subject throughout this history, an imagined figure identified as a “PanAmerican” in many instances, helps outline the hemispheric motives that preceded, followed, and overlapped the period of heightened U.S. imperialism. This history purposefully raises the question of the Pan-American subject—the imagined Latin American—and my analytical approach benefits from postcolonial theories. Yet this study seeks to move beyond the colonizer and colonized framework by focusing on the imagined subject. As an architectural history, this study is an opportunity to examine the spatial definitions of a fictional or imaginary occupant of architecture. I have undertaken this study in the hope that it will contribute to the field of critical Orientalist studies as applied to architecture because theories identified with Edward Said’s Orientalism are applicable to the theories of resistance that he also explored.15 The study of Pan-American architecture examines not only the way U.S. interests spatially imagined the Other but also the oppositional activity that ensued as architectural developments unfolded. Furthermore, as an analysis of the construction of an artificial, ideological identity associated with a fictional Pan-America, this study presents an opportunity to explore the architectural strategies used to create and take apart this imaginary place. Other regionally based intergovernmental organizations—the European Union, the African Union, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—have projected the concept of subject types. Yet none has yielded this amount of architectural production. This study not only presents some of the earliest examples of the construction of a multinational subject; it reveals how this

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occurred through diplomatic discourse, the news media, and architectural designs. As architects navigated these complex cultural formations, they translated what they understood as “cultural imperatives” into built form with the careful selection of architectural styles, iconography, symbols, and theatrical devices. The multiple ways in which the Pan-American subject was imagined and represented reflect the breadth of U.S.-defined Pan-Americanism, whether it engaged cultural constructions tied to a city’s local population or a Latino community. This is an important case where architectural evidence helps inform a much larger and complex diplomatic phenomenon. Examinations of the Pan-American subject are beginning to be pursued in the field of hemispheric cultural studies, but this has not been the case with U.S. imperialist studies, which continue to focus on the colonized Pan-American subject, the Latin American.16 Such scholarship typically focuses on international policies and economic and trade relations. Criticism of U.S. imperialism often centers on the Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the history of the United Fruit Company, and the interventionist policies of the United States in Latin America. These studies tend to come from the fields of history, diplomacy history, and Latin American and international studies. A few scholars have also examined U.S. imperialism in the context of Pan-Americanism’s cultural and artistic dimensions, but fewer still have considered its built environment. Studies that examine the intersections of the Pan-American concept and U.S. Latino cultural production are few and far between, and this area in particular benefits from this Pan-American architectural history. A brief examination of how U.S. imperialist studies often intersect with the built environment helps clarify the difficulty that exists when defining Pan-America outside the imperialist framework, specifically with regard to the Pan-American subject. Historian Ricardo Salvatore’s examination of the Pan-American Union’s inner workings illustrates the way the organization’s numerous propagandist projects exemplified overt cultural hegemony. He examines how this “representational machine’s” ideological dis-

semination of a U.S.-government-defined Pan-America was facilitated by educational films, printed literature, various societies and clubs, and planned excursions to Latin America. Salvatore observes how the movement harbored a relationship based on unilateral power, even when it appeared well intentioned.17 In this context, the Pan-American loyalist appears, both as a part of this machine and as the recipient of the propaganda. In other studies, Salvatore examines such infrastructural projects as the Pan-American Highway, which he regards in the same vein, calling it an example of “imperial mechanics.”18 His analysis of the Pan-American Union would differ substantially, however, if he had taken the organization’s later developments into consideration, specifically the moment when Latin American members challenged these tactics and took control of the organization. Furthermore, in some parts of the U.S. Southwest, Latinos embraced the organization’s propagandist projects and clubs to edify their own communities and their collective sense of identity, further complicating the notion of a Pan-American subject. Salvatore’s study is an important contribution because it sheds light on the dynamics of this period of increased U.S. activity, and the role the newly constructed Pan-American Union Building played during this time of U.S. imperialism. At the centennial of the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, historian Sara Castro-Klarén wrote an essay on Pan-Americanism in which she also presents the PanAmerican Union through the lens of imperialism. She does this by projecting the headquarters building as the capstone of the United States’ appropriation of Bolivarian Pan-Americanism, which she carefully unravels. Referring to the United States as the “empire,” she writes: “Thus, Bolívar’s idea was finally harnessed and, like an Egyptian obelisk or the Parthenon, transported to the center of the empire to be inversely deployed.”19 To describe how this took place, she begins with the original meaning of Pan-Americanism, or americanismo, as Bolívar stated it.20 She outlines a historical account of the concept’s formation, reconstructing the steps that led to his proposal. Castro-Klarén discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the concept and

elucidates them in terms of the Liberator’s elite education and his travels throughout Europe. She also attributes formation of the concept to Bolívar’s dislocating experiences, which occurred during the throes of revolution. She writes: In moving out of the place where they had been born, the home of their forefathers and mothers, Bolívar’s troops discovered new agencies and unforeseen subjective and material landscapes. This general movement of the known world inaugurated the possibility of the idea of a Pan-American identity: that is to say, a sense of a shared and restricted life experience lived on a commonly possessed territory and within a set of trans-temporal and trans-individual cultural parameters. Despite the fact that Bolívar ended in political defeat, his invention of a historically sui generis American subject remains.21

When she discusses the manner in which the United States appropriated the “Pan-American” concept. Castro-Klarén points out that the redefining and liberating elements of the concept were lost and that the United States deployed the Liberator’s call for unity to serve its economic interests. As she depicts this historic transition from Bolivarian Pan-Americanism to U.S. Pan-Americanism, Castro-Klarén felt compelled to ask if history repeats itself. She raised the question in the context of the U.S. annexation of northern Mexico in 1848, the Chicano movement of the 1960s, and massive immigration throughout the Americas.22 Recent scholarly developments suggest that paralleling Bolívar’s dislocated “sui generis American subject” are the dislocated subjects who found themselves in a mid-nineteenth-century United States in the throes of their own cultural revolutions. “Revisionist” literature has helped identify these early forms of U.S. Latino hemispheric consciousness. Arte Público Press, founded in 1979 by Nicolás Kanellos, has worked in conjunction with the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project to identify and publish many works of recovery literature, some dating from the American colonial period. Writers who addressed a hemispheric

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Fig. I.6. “New Orleans: Eje del Hemisferio Occidental,” advertising for

The Merchant’s and Manufacturer’s Bureau, published in El Mercurio magazine, February 1915, New Orleans. (Courtesy of the Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University)

consciousness produced many of these U.S.-based Spanish-language texts. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, in Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, focuses on the emergence of Spanish-language print culture in the United States in order to identify this type of hemispheric consciousness. In examining how writers contributed to a Pan-Latino identity with broadsheets, newsletters, and Spanish-language newspapers, Gruesz points out that they constructed

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a distinctive consciousness with the understanding that readers like themselves existed across the United States and Latin America.23 They maintained their connections across the rapidly changing American topography by identifying with each other through the subjects they chose to write about. It is difficult to prove to what extent this genre of writing influenced U.S. Latino appropriations of the Pan-American organizations and student forums that took root in their communities in the twentieth century. Numerous Spanish-language and bilingual magazines, the New Orleans–based El Mercurio (1911–1927) and Pan-American Magazine (1910–1916), for example, often dealt with the PanAmerican concept while addressing U.S. Latinos (Fig. I.6). These were filled with iconic images of the Western Hemisphere, as seen in El Mercurio’s illustrations. U.S. Latinos were erecting independent frameworks of empowerment, however, rather than formulating critiques of the Pan-American Union’s propagandist material and the hemispheric discourse that resulted. Latinos took advantage of these locally based organizations to edify their own communities. In the first decade of the twentieth century, newly conceptualized U.S. institutions and the buildings that housed them also demonstrate the way the Pan-American concept was used to identify Latin American immigrants, another indication that a Pan-American identity was associated with Mexican Americans and Latin American immigrants in the United States. One of the earliest examples was a proposal in 1916 to establish a series of Pan-American universities in the nation’s southern states and one in Panama City. Upon moving to Coconut Grove in Miami, the recently resigned Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan hoped these universities would form a network of intellectual and cultural centers in the Western Hemisphere. Bryan had served as the ex officio chairman of the PanAmerican Union’s governing board, and he imagined a

hemispheric population being indoctrinated at these schools. Although Bryan’s vision led to the founding of the University of Miami in 1925, Pan-American College (today, the University of Texas–Pan American), founded in Edinburg, Texas, in 1952, contributed to his vision with its goal of casting a wide net to Latinos and Latin Americans, although in the 1950s, this was an Anglo-controlled institution. Two U.S. hospitals, in which recent Latin American immigrants were the primary clients, present similar cases of hemispheric identification. In 1927, the PanAmerican Medical Association and Hispanic Medical Center founded the Pan-American Hospital in New York City to serve 200,000 Latin American immigrants. Their goal was to provide medical services to Spanishand Portuguese-speaking New Yorkers.24 This effort lasted only a few years. In 1963 a Pan-American Hospital (today, Miami Metropolitan Hospital) was founded in Miami by Cuban doctors in exile wanting to provide medical services to the immigrant Cuban community. Cultural centers across the southern states also adopted the hemispheric identification throughout the 1960s, targeting Latino populations or a city’s heritage. This occurred with the Pan-American Center of St. Augustine, Florida, built in 1965, and the one in Las Cruces, New Mexico, built in 1968. There is a fine line between these types of U.S. Latino institutions and other examples that maintain a focus on the equal representation of all the American republics. Another popular term, “Americas” (in English), also introduces ambiguity, as seen with such institutions as the Americas Society in New York City, founded by David Rockefeller in 1965, and the Organization of American States’ own Art Museum of the Americas, which opened in 1976.25 Latino communities nationwide have embraced the Pan-American concept, but an imagined Pan-America has resonated with people from all walks of life. The concept’s diverse interpretations have invited many to participate, broadening the notion of a Pan-American identity. The poet Muna Lee is a perfect example, given her desire to identify a Pan-American character in her writings and lifestyle. Pan-Americanism is not solely the purview of the diplomats and architects who have

attempted to represent this complex ideology. It has appealed and continues to appeal to travelers, writers, artists, and social groups interested in exploring cross-cultural connections.26 In geographic terms, PanAmerican identity is rooted in an imagined state of coexistence with all the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The free-floating image of linked continents that geography textbooks in the United States have popularized served as the mental picture. In Orientalism’s terms, it is rooted in one’s curiosity-driven desire to gain access to the Other within these territories. It is thus associated with U.S. Americans projecting a Pan-American identity as a result of their excursions “down South” (as opposed to travels to Canada or in the United States). Border dwellers living between and at the juncture of the United States and Mexico (or symbolically, the U.S.–Latin America border) may also have engaged the concept as they examined cultural categories. Finally, others embraced a Pan-American identity as a result of travel in Latin America, or because of connections made or felt with all of the Americas, often the result of educational pursuits, civic projects, or festivities. Popular culture and institutions throughout the United States have liberally used the term “Pan-American” to characterize recreational journeys and trade and business ventures. Accounts of the Pan-American subject’s triumphs and travails were captured in film and print, often to amuse and entice curious consumers (Figs. I.7 and I.8). In the popular press, as early as the late nineteenth century, there were accounts of Latin Americans visiting the United States in diplomatic or economic missions who were simply referred to as “Pan-Americans.” In the same pages, U.S. citizens trekking through South America’s jungles for an adventure in “America’s backyard” or investing in coffee plantations as part of an exotic business venture were similarly identified.27 The media and travel industry invited people to partake in these hemispheric encounters, with Pan-American World Airways leading the way (Fig. I.9). Carmen Miranda contributed with her lyrical flirtations that promised adventure down “South American Way” (Fig. I.10). Films of this period familiarized U.S. Americans with this new identity, includ-

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Fig. I.7. The Sullivan C. Richardson Pan-American Highway Expedi-

tion, 1940–1941. Mules are used to cross rivers and streams. (Richardson Expedition Photos courtesy Jim Benjaminson Collection)

Fig. I.8. ¡Viva El Panamericanismo! Richardson Pan-American Highway Expedition, Detroit to Cape Horn. C. Allen Brady, photographer. Note the twenty-one flags painted on the car door. (Richardson Expedition Photos courtesy Jim Benjaminson Collection)

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ing Flying Down to Rio (1933) and Orson Welles’ unfinished film It’s All True (1941–1942), but apparently not the box-office flop Pan-Americana (1945; Fig. I.11). In New York City, the spirit of Pan-America was captured in the energetic big-band sounds of Maya’s Pan-American Orchestra, especially with its popular soundie The Havana-Madrid Show: Paran-Pan-Pan (1941). References to these musicians as Maya and His Rhumba Ambassadors or Los Diplomáticos cast the entire affair in multinational terms. In the academy, educational pursuits helped develop future Pan-Americans. Latin American studies programs were established in universities and colleges across the United States beginning in the 1920s. Originally modeled on the Orientalist area studies programs, they increased in number in the 1930s during the Roosevelt administration and in 1940 with the founding of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller. They got another significant boost with the passing of the Title VI National Defense Education Act of 1958. Leisure travel and recreational programs emerged around the same time, taking the form of road races along the Pan-American Highway, the Carrera Panamericana, founded in 1949, and the Pan-American Sporting Games scheduled to be held in 1942, but not inaugurated in Buenos Aires, Argentina, until 1951 (Fig. I.12).28 Confirmation that the Pan-American was in me, in you, and in the couple next door was dramatized in I Love Lucy, which was introduced to U.S. television audiences in 1951. In this depiction of an ethnically mixed marriage, the Latin (Desi Arnaz) was presented as the stable and controlling partner and the Anglo (Lucille Ball) as the immature and erratic one, a reflection of gender stereotypes of the time and an attempt to capitalize on Ball’s comedic talent. The Pan-American spirit resided in Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Public interest in all things Pan-American seemed to reach an apex in the early 1950s. The same year that Desi Arnaz entered U.S. American homes, Miamians flew down a talented New York visionary to help them design the tropical world’s fair that would be known as Interama. They, too, hoped to capitalize on the dizzying spirit that emanated from Pan-America.

Fig. I.9. Pan-American World Airways Poster. (Courtesy of the

Wolfsonian-FIU Archives)

Fig. I.10. Carmen Miranda, cover for South American Way, Original

Recordings 1939–1945. (Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc.)

Fig. I.11. Pan-Americana poster (1945). Other posters carried the tag line “That Happy-Go-Latin Musical.” (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and the B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library)

Fig. I.12. Poster for the unrealized first Pan-American Sporting Games, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1942. Falier Totaro, artist. (Courtesy of the Pan American Sports Organization and the LA84 Foundation of Los Angeles)

Equal Representation for All Americans With the emergence of the imagined Pan-American citizen, the movement’s reach may have seemed pervasive, but this did not mean that the Latin-Anglo division at the core of the concept had disappeared. Pan-America would continue to be characterized by a model of multinational unity and simultaneously by a model of unrelenting divisions—all the American republics would be viewed through the bifurcated lenses of the Latin and the Anglo. Representations of the whole seemed to only strengthen stereotypes of “the far South.” Often, the Pan-American heritage theme served as a synecdoche for a generic Latin American, who was treated as a legitimate stand-in for any and all things Latin American. As the Pan-American concept was continuously used to represent this asymmetrical relationship, the United States assumed a position of elevated importance. The goal of equality between nations that the concept asserted with “Pan” was compromised by cultural contrasts that continuously singled out the United States from the rest: English versus Spanish/Portuguese, Protestant versus Catholic, Anglo versus Latin. A number of U.S. architects employed design strategies to represent this asymmetrical relationship, though they represented the two entities side by side with structures that were most often commissioned by, designed by, and built by and for U.S. interests. In some projects, a minimal representation of Latin America (in design as well as participation) was enough to earn the Pan-American designation. This occurred even though the Pan-American Union’s official membership asserted the promise of equal unity among the twenty-one member republics. These countries were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.29 This list seemed to allow creators of numerous independent projects to sidestep accountability and equality required for the member nations: a reference to the Washington organization was a reference to all the Americas. Though Canada was excluded as a member (as the list indi-

Fig. I.13. One of the Pan-American Union logos, a map of the Western

Hemisphere, appeared with no shading on Canada, showing its exclusion. This logo appeared in the book The Pan-American Union: Peace, Friendship, Commerce (1911).

cates), it was often present in the ubiquitous silhouette of the Americas, although the Pan-American Union’s logo explicitly pointed out Canada’s nonmembership in its logo (Fig. I.13). Was the organization half-empty or half-full? The evolution of the organization eventually led to the current list of thirty-five member states, with Canada joining in 1990. The question of equal representation among the American republics would remain a complicated issue because it was difficult to attain, especially in the organization of a world’s fair. The development of an architectural project and its national representation depended on many and various uncontrollable elements (origin of the idea; the sources of funding; the civic, state, national, and international interests at stake). At its best, a Pan-American project suggested that all the American republics would come together in unity and equality. Projects branded with the name, however, could rarely deliver on such a promise because it would have required the commitment of so many nations, and architects did not always feel compelled to rectify the situation with their designs. Why would they if the Spanish Renaissance style was enough to indicate a Latin presence, as assumed at Buffalo’s Pan-

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American Exposition of 1901? Furthermore, architects did not see projects that emphasized regional identity as being equal to those that emphasized neutrality, as was the case with the designs submitted to the League of Nations Competition of 1927 and the United Nations Competition of 1964.30 Pan-American projects were conceived not simply as assemblies of nations but as celebrations of the emergence of ever-changing hemispheric relationships, and they were deeply entrenched in cultural associations. That Pan-American architecture perpetuated divisive constructs because of its aim of bringing entities together suggests a contradictory ideology from the outset. Historian Lawrence E. Harrison examines the incongruity that many felt was inherent in the Pan-American project in his book The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin American Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership with the United States and Canada? (1998). Harrison points out that even today many still regard the projection of unity as an illogical assump-

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Fig. I.14. Pan-American Games opening ceremonies, Maracana, Rio de Janeiro, 2007. (Courtesy of Brian Wilby)

tion. In the late-nineteenth-century fairs, however, Pan-American expressions did not hide the fact that these projects were no more than economically and politically driven instruments imbued with calls for unity and exchange. U.S. Pan-Americanism firmly located all citizens of the New World on either side of a geopolitical line that separated the United States from Latin America. It encouraged Pan-American acts of kindness and adventure, and hemispheric subjects were defined by the intentions behind their desire to cross that line—to travel down south or north. Arguments were seldom made for cultural unification or acculturation and certainly never for political unity, as these were not the original purposes of the organization. The PanAmerican Union maintained a safe distance from ever appearing to operate like an actual peace union, and in the 1930s, the United States repeatedly rejected pro-

posals for a League of American Nations. It rebuffed plans forwarded by the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo for an organization with greater powers than the Pan-American Union, although a stronger organization eventually was realized in 1948 with the Union’s transformation into the Organization of American States. The spiraling gesture of all Americans coming together as one, seen in the opening ceremonies of the Pan-American Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, worked for the world of sports but not for a nation wanting to maintain its sovereignty and leadership position (Fig. I.14). Networks of exchange were conceived in nonpolitical, unifying terms, unless circumstances required otherwise. For example, although the Pan-American Highway was mostly used as a conduit of exchange and travel, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to collaborate on its construction with “Military Road” extensions of the highway in the 1940s. They did this when the war emergency caused the United States to turn its attention to Central America, a region that was considered vulnerable.31 This occurred, however, while the highway continued to function as a popular mode of travel, especially for those wanting to motor down to Mexico. With Pan-American Airways flying people to any number of destinations “down South” with greater frequency, the subjects of leisure and unity remained at the center of a perceived Pan-American lifestyle (Fig. I.15). The ever-growing promise of modes of travel available to anyone who could afford to partake in the trans-American encounter remained a favorite topic of interest in the press. The enticement started with latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world’s fairs, with their exhibits featuring commerce and trade and any number of ambitious infrastructural projects promising even more connections throughout the Americas. Curtis’ depictions of Latin America’s raw materials had planted the tropical seed. The hemispheric notion was such a grand idea that it took on a life of its own. Fig. I.15. Pan-American Queen pageant winners (Courtesy of the

Special Collections Division, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida)

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THE BIRTH OF PAN-AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Hemispheric Fairs, 1884–1901

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ISITORS ENTERING NEW ORLEANS’

newly opened World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition from the Mississippi River in 1884 via steamboat found themselves in a park accentuated by Latin America’s presence (Fig. 1.1). New Orleans oversaw the disposition of nearly one-third of the United States’ cotton, so the city’s position of prominence in cotton trade figured into the fair’s advertisements. Yet, in moving from the wharf to the fairgrounds, either on foot, by horse, or by electric railroad, visitors found themselves amid the Mexican and Central American Gardens, which were balanced by the California and Florida Gardens and numerous collections of Louisiana’s native plants. The circuitous paths surrounding this PanAmerican landscape connected to a circular path that encircled an impressive towered conservatory (Fig. 1.2). The New York steel manufacturer Arthur E. Rendle designed the glass and iron Horticultural Hall, advertised as the largest conservatory in the world.1 Inside, visitors came in contact with rare plants, a hothouse built for exotic species, and lush overgrown paths leading into an imagined tropical dreamland. Two pavilions representing Mexico had the same effect of pointing to New Orleans and, more specifically, the Mississippi River’s easy connection to the Gulf of Mexico and the

Facing page: Detail of Aerial view of the World’s Columbian Exposition (See Figure 1.22) Fig. 1.1. Bird’s-eye view of the New Orleans World’s Industrial and

Cotton Centennial Exposition buildings and grounds, from the southeast. From a sketch by C. Upham, published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 13, 1884, 265. (Courtesy The Historic New Orleans Collection)

Fig. 1.2. Horticultural Hall, World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial

Exposition, New Orleans, 1884–1885. Thomas Hunter, lithograph. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Caribbean. Exhibits in the fairgrounds demonstrated how the cotton plant was indigenous to the tropical and semitropical regions of the world. Visitors learned that part of the exposition’s discovery narrative included Christopher Columbus finding “the shrub growing wild in the islands of the West Indies, and on the South American mainland, where the natives had manufactured its fibres into garments and fishing nets.”2 The large circular path carried more symbolic weight than the fair’s organizers might have anticipated. It marked a Pan-American landscape that was an extension of New Orleans’ position as maritime gateway to the Americas, a title other U.S. cities would soon claim. With a park cistern incorporated into the conservatory’s luminous center, the building was rendered sacred, the effect enhanced by a cross-shaped skylight that mirrored the building’s plan.3 The hemispheric themes incorporated in this structure and in the Pan-American gardens indicated that the fair’s organizers understood that they represented the city’s and the nation’s commercial aspirations. New Orleans enjoyed the conservatory until it was destroyed during the hurricane of 1915. In 1885, when the Cotton—as the fair was also known—closed, locals took it upon themselves to organize a second fair on the same grounds. The North, Central, and South American Exposition of 1885–1886 was meant to bring even greater attention to the Latin American commercial prospects featured at the Cotton. The hemispheric theme appeared in the fair’s new name and in some proposed rituals, but because no new structures were built, this extension fair did not produce a distinct architecture that one might call “PanAmerican.” By 1890, however, U.S. architects began to explore how Pan-America might be expressed with architectural designs, which they proposed for a celebratory exposition anticipated for the commemoration of the quadricentennial of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery of America” in 1892. These efforts culminated in the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. A set of design proposals from various cities that preceded this exposition reveal how Pan-American architecture was envisioned in the 1890s. Architects returned to the question of what Pan-American archi-

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tecture might look like during the development of a third exposition, the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo. Earlier design proposals for the Buffalo fair’s original location on Cayuga Island near Niagara Falls shed light on how Pan-Americanism was expressed in architectural form in Buffalo. These expositions mark key moments in an early phase of U.S.–Latin American relations. Grand schemes promising trade opportunities were introduced as anticipated infrastructural projects linking the United States with all of Latin America were gaining attention. This included canals under consideration in Nicaragua and Mexico, expanded shipping routes crisscrossing the Caribbean, and a proposed railroad system that would stretch across the continents. Although these feats were often the work of multiple nations, they demonstrated a U.S. vision of hemispheric integration meant to affirm U.S. economic and political dominance. The most impressive of these proposals, the Panama Canal (1904–1914), would be praised as a “monument to hemispheric unity and cooperation,” even though one of its key purposes was to ensure U.S. naval control of the Caribbean Sea with its passage from the Pacific Ocean.4 The Pan-American concept was nevertheless used to portray this promising network internally linking the Western Hemisphere as an autonomous, selfcontained market. These expositions parallel proposals that began to emerge for a new model of multinational relations. The fairs presented an opportunity to test this idea and they contributed to the evolution of such a model, leading to the creation of the Commercial Bureau of American Republics in 1890. The hemispheric fair was conceived as a variant of the world’s fair genre. Each fair presented new ways of defining the Western Hemisphere in built form. Architects in the United States were called on to bring cultural significance to these multipurpose expositions. In so doing, they faced difficult, unprecedented questions. How should “Latins and Anglos,” as the pairing was often referred to, share the fairgrounds, and what architectural style or form best represented the Americas? The architectural presumptions and projections evident in their designs reveal the extent to which build-

ings and spaces were created to convey implicit cultural messages. Their designs demonstrate how, as they addressed this question, architects encoded cultural binaries that reflected their own conceptions—their own projections favoring the United States—which often took the form of clichéd dualities. This would be the case throughout the history of Pan-American architecture, although architectural binary representations of the United States and Latin America lessened as modern interpretations of their union were explored. At these expositions, architects projected divisions both intentionally and inadvertently by choosing architectural styles and incorporating iconographic references to what they believed was a shared Pan-American heritage. In attempting to show commonalities, architects accentuated differences. Popular themes encompassing this imagined heritage highlighted the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Columbian discovery myth, the Spanish colonial legacy, the New World’s independence from the Old World, and the tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. They incorporated many combinations of these imagined Pan-American heritage themes, giving their versions of Pan-Americanism a distinct visual language. The strategies they employed did not stop with architectural expressions; they also relied on the exposition genre’s effective and vast communicative language to deliver the full effect. Each fairground experience incorporated urban and garden designs, light and water shows, public events, and educational and diplomatic lectures. Through these spectacles, every attempt was made to locate the United States at the center of a Pan-American movement that was rapidly gaining popularity and interest. Architects would eventually invent building types as they perfected their Pan-American architectural expressions. Yet, in this initial period, the extent of their work was limited to superimposing elements reinforcing their cultural assumptions onto nineteenth-century world’s fair spatial formulas. One of the principal challenges architects faced was to design fairgrounds to carry out this new hemispheric message while maintaining a recognizable world’s fair identity, for expositions were supposed to present the entire world and

not just part of the world. In New Orleans, an implicit division in the fairgrounds positioned Mexico and the United States on opposite sides of the fairgrounds, with all other national displays represented in a central structure. Subsequent fairs were not as consistent. In Chicago, the New World theme was addressed with re-creations of the Columbian narrative, which were presented near the exposition’s Court of Honor. Latin America was marginally represented amid other national representations, far from the center. Similarly, the architects of the Buffalo exposition attempted to address the theme with a Spanish Renaissance architectural style, but they relegated Latin America to the margins. In all three cases, Canada was also marginalized, even though the complete Western Hemisphere was always represented graphically in exposition literature. The world’s fair format proved most useful when it supported the promotion of the basic goals of commerce, for the exposition’s raison d’être was to bring nations and their fungible products together. Expositions served as ideal vehicles for conveying modernity’s message championing industrialization and progress and defining international relations. The introduction of a hemispheric theme was a logical move at the New Orleans fair. Exposition titles typically designated groupings (universal, international, intercolonial), both regional and far-reaching, that reflected the changing world order and its shifting cultural and commercial relations. The New Orleans fair helped express this new multinational relationship as a modern project that could redefine the Western Hemisphere as an independent, cohesive, and productive entity, all for the benefit of New Orleans’ business interests. The organizers of the North, Central, and South American Exposition came closest to constructing a stage where the benefits of commercial exchange could be formally introduced to the public realm, even though the focus was on U.S.–Latin American relations. The Pan-American concept was given a distinct form at each fair, at the southern port city of New Orleans; at Chicago, the commercial and industrial heartland of the country; and at the northern border city of Buffalo. As U.S. testing grounds representing distinct vantage points, the

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three fairs elucidate the role the United States assumed when the hemispheric concept was formalized and institutionalized in Washington with the building of the Pan-American Union.

Logical Pan-Americanism at Two New Orleans Expositions Inspired by London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, many of the world’s largest cities staged expositions during the second half of the nineteenth century and into the next, each fair hoping to outdo the last. These world’s fairs were variations of that initial fair, and each provided the host cities and nations a stage on which to promote their civic and regional offerings and attractions, to list the advantages of local commerce, and to showcase the day’s most ambitious and innovative technological and engineering advances. When the Cotton opened in December 1884, visitors were invited into a minicity of gardens, impressively sized structures, and open-air agricultural and mechanical exhibits (Fig. 1.3). Typically, fair organizers sought out a setting of natural beauty, often a civic park, and in New Orleans, they took it upon themselves to transform a swampy wilderness into an idyllic Upper City Park, subsequently named Audubon Park when John C. Olmsted redesigned it. Occupying prime real estate near the city’s most affluent neighborhood, the fairground was bordered on the north side by St. Charles Avenue. The fair was advertised as the first fully electrified exposition, and it was meant to commemorate the first shipment of cotton from the United States to England. Just over a million visitors attended the Cotton. However, the numbers were consistently unimpressive, even on Mardi Gras day.5 The city proudly promoted the fair even as it faced major challenges. The fair left a debt of five million dollars that the U.S. government and New Orleans would never recover.6 Historian Leonard V. Huber notes that although the city’s economy “still bore the scars of war and Reconstruction,” this did not prevent the fair’s organizers from attempting to produce an event that would compete with other U.S. fairs and that showcased the New South. The Cotton’s architectural offerings did not elevate it to the

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ranks of other famous expositions, but its Latin American focus makes it an important exposition in the context of the U.S.-defined Pan-American movement.7 The organizers of the subsequent North, Central, and South American Exposition were the real visionaries here. Yet as they shifted emphasis, it became apparent that the appropriation of the world’s fair genre would present significant challenges. World expositions typically allowed all participating nations to manage their own displays, each one choosing to “exhibit” itself as it saw fit. Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace initiated this format at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. In this technologically innovative structure, which housed the entire exposition, national exhibits were organized in four categories: Raw Materials, Machinery and Mechanical Inventions, Manufactures, and Sculpture and the Plastic Arts. Displayed in that order, a nation could present its own narrative of material progress. The Crystal Palace also introduced the comparative format of ordering cultural representations and artifacts within a single exhibition space, organized according to colonial affiliations. This arrangement emphasized not only a nation’s material wealth but also the access it had to the resources of its colonies and the extent of its national power as reflected by these overseas holdings. Subsequent European fairs introduced a fairground type that was composed of multiple structures, often symbolically arranged in an urban or park setting, and this was the model for the New Orleans fair. In this alternate form, the narrative of material progress was expressed with multiple structures representing collections of raw materials, mechanical devices, merchandise, and art. Other pavilions were introduced to represent the participating nations and to allow fair organizers to customize the fairs to showcase specific cultural and educational interests, from women’s pavilions to science halls to (eventually) automobile showrooms. More important, host nations always reserved a prominent spot for themselves, usually at the center of the fairgrounds. It was accepted protocol that the exposition was an occasion to learn about the host city and nation. At the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris, where the format was a single structure,

France displayed its works of art at the center court of the central elliptical building, directing all eyes to itself.8 This accepted display of national prominence did not, however, fit the Pan-American framework because it conflicted with the stated concept of unity and equality among the American republics. In the United States, local, state, and federal support was typically used to finance an exposition, and there was a history of federal legislative bills being signed with the expectation that the nation would be prominently presented to the world. The notion of displaying all the nations of the Americas equally at the center of the fair clashed with the aim of showcasing the city, state, and nation that funded the exposition. Organizers of the Cotton took full advantage of the exposition model as they promoted the mutual benefits of U.S.–Latin American mercantile engagement. The open fairground layout allowed them to reflect what they noted in the fair’s literature and propaganda with the careful placement of pavilions, as diagrams of the fair in Figures 1.4a and 1.4b illustrate. Upon closer inspection, one sees the peculiar variation on the world’s fair model that resulted as they projected this goal. Only one foreign nation, Mexico, was singled out in the fairgrounds. It was showcased with two independent buildings in addition to appearing in other collective displays throughout the grounds. This was a highly unusual sight, for fairgrounds were sites of multinational representation with a broad array of national pavilions coloring the overall experience. The Cotton did offer the exhibits of other nations of the world but in the interior spaces of the massive Main Building and in the other pavilions. The Mexican pavilions were located among the constellation of gardens and paths that surrounded Horticultural Hall. Mexico’s emphasis in this layout sent a distinct message. The two Mexican pavilions were located on the river side of the site, and they were balanced by a U.S.themed section that dominated the opposite side of Fig. 1.3. “View of the Exposition, Taken Half a Mile Above Ground.”

Bird’s-eye view of Cotton Exposition, B. A. Wikström. (Courtesy The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession number 1950.42 i-vii)

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Fig. 1.4a. Site Plan of the World’s

Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition of New Orleans, LA, Situation Plan, no. 1. (Courtesy The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession number 1957.52)

Fig. 1.4b. Diagram of the fair-

grounds for “the Cotton.” Representation at the fair is shown with the colors red (Latin America), blue (United States), and yellow (multinational representation). Note the circular path and general proximity of the gardens and Mexican pavilion to the Horticultural Hall. Drawing by author.

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1 Central American and Mexican Gardens 2 California and Florida Gardens 3 Horticultural Hall 4 Mexican Commissioners and Headquarters Building 5 Mexican Mining Pavilion 6 Main Building 7 Agricultural Displays 8 U.S. Government Building

the fairgrounds bordering St. Charles Avenue. This included the United States, the State Exhibits Building, and the Agricultural section where U.S. products were displayed, including a model cotton field. The organization not only reflected a strong interest in Mexico, but in Latin America in general and, more specifically, in Latin America’s potential to supply raw materials to U.S. industries. It underscored the fair’s main objectives: balancing the goal of importing raw materials with the goal of exporting the United States’ oversupply of domestic manufactured goods. The smaller of the two Mexican pavilions drove the point home with its display of minerals (Fig. 1.5). By balancing this ornamental structure with the building and grounds that showcased the United States, the fair read like one of the imperialist exhibits in the Crystal Palace. Placed near the lush, tropical setting of the Mexican Garden, with a path leading to the Horticultural Hall’s main entrance, Mexico was depicted as an exotic fruit ripe for the picking. The Mexican Mining Pavilion was one of the most memorable sights of the fair. Octagonal in shape, it was built in the Moorish style and was popularly referred to as the Mexican Alhambra (Fig. 1.6). The pavilion design was the work of the Mexican architect Ramón Ibarrola, who with this design referenced a pavilion he had visited at another U.S. fair. Mexico was a willing participant in staging this alluring display.9 Ibarrola designed this domed iron and glass structure with a perimeter wall of arched openings and an entrance portico that led to “two rows of cases exhibiting very instructively the minerals and products of the mines and smelting works and quarries of the Republic,” as one observer noted. The large pyramid of silver arranged beneath the pavilion’s rotunda became one of the fair’s principal attractions.10 The Mexican Alhambra would have piqued the interest of locals, who had seen many “exotic and foreign” goods reach their city’s bustling port. The Cotton’s subtext was unmistakable, and the riverside location was the ultimate working display. In fact, the Mexican Commissioners and Headquarters Building, the second building, was sited on the banks of the Mississippi and could have functioned as a customhouse. New Orleans played a critical role in importing and exporting numer-

Fig. 1.5. “The New Orleans Exposition: Mexican Pavilion and Main

Building,” from Scribner’s Magazine 18 (July–December 1895)

Fig. 1.6. “A man sweeps at dawn in the shady Alameda de Santa María Park in Mexico City’s Santa María de la Ribera neighborhood.” Published in the New York Times, February 21, 2010. (Photograph by Janet Jarman/The New York Times/Redux)

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Fig. 1.7. The Logical Point magazine, August 1910. (Louisiana Division/City Archives, New Orleans Public Library)

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ous products throughout the Americas. The city’s port at the nexus of the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf of Mexico, what some called the American Mediterranean, had long been promoted as the logical location for carrying out the nation’s trade. The city’s prime location was again emphasized, as the publication The Logical Point illustrates, when New Orleans tried to compete with San Diego and San Francisco to host an exposition to celebrate the Panama Canal’s completion (Fig. 1.7).11 Mexico’s second building also gained attention because it showcased Mexico as a modern culture and society. In the promotional engraving depicting the distorted aerial view of the fairgrounds, Mexico’s importance was indicated by its central placement above the star (see Fig. 1.3). Historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo notes that “Sebastián B. de Mier, the Mexican commissioner for the 1900 Paris world’s fair, [later] argued that it was at [the New Orleans] fair that Mexico’s progress began to be ‘internationally appreciated.’”12 This large building, a 300-by-190-foot structure, was erected for the display of products and manufactures, and it demonstrated that Mexicans had more to offer than raw materials. One journalist reported that this quadrangular courtyard building resembled a “Mexican señor’s residence, allegedly capturing the entirety of Mexico [in a single structure]. In one building the social and official forms, the military organizations, the architectural methods and the light and delicate arts of our next door neighbors will be most exquisitely and elaborately illustrated.”13 Equally impressed, the journalist Eugene Smalley wrote that “after spending an hour in the Mexican [courtyards], one marvels that a people who can produce all these things should make so small a figure in the sum-total of the world’s civilizing forces.”14 This period of economic interest in Latin America was encouraged by hemispheric enthusiasts who played critical roles in promoting “the far South” to U.S. Americans, and who intersected with other fairs during this period. Many of these agents maintained personal interests in Pan-American projects, and they can be viewed as the glue binding these expositions. One of the key hemispheric enthusiasts in New Orleans was the lawyer Alexander D. Anderson, the Commissioner of Daily

Events, who organized lectures at the fair on topics like the Mississippi River, the Tehuantepec Ship Railway, the Nicaraguan Ship Canal, and the Panama Ship Canal.15 From the New Orleans fairgrounds, Anderson was already promoting a quadricentennial fair proposal for Washington, D.C., later called the Three Americas Exposition. With promoters such as Anderson, it was no surprise that the level of Latin American participation in New Orleans surpassed that of the six previous U.S. expositions.16 The fair organizers went to great lengths to ensure Latin American participation. Along with Mexico, Belize (British Honduras), Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, and Venezuela also appeared in other sections of the fairgrounds.17 “Nothing was left undone to secure the cooperation of these southern races,” wrote the fair’s secretary, Richard Nixon. “Commissioners were sent to interest the governments and the peoples; desirable locations were reserved in the buildings and grounds; premiums were offered to suit the demands of the exhibitors.”18 Louisiana’s state treasurer, E. A. Burke, another hemispheric enthusiast, used his position as editor of New Orleans’ Times-Democrat to “stimulate the industrial and commercial life of the Gulf States, and to foster trade-relations with the natives and colonies of the tropical regions of America.” Many gave Burke the credit for transforming this Southern fair into an international event. “In his active mind,” wrote Smalley, “the plan of a show of cotton and its manufactures soon broadened into the conception of a universal exhibition in which the Southern States and their foreign neighbors should play the most prominent part.”19 The European countries made it a point to attend, but the nine European and three Asian countries barely outnumbered the ten Caribbean and Latin American countries on the fairgrounds. Local and national newspapers highlighted the southern displays, especially when they were connected to U.S. interest in infrastructural developments. Historian Gene Yeager notes how a working model of the Tehuantepec Ship Railway was presented in the Mexican section.20 A congressional proposal for the Three Americas Railway also painted a prosperous picture for many who felt New Orleans was

geographically poised to take advantage of these new lines of development. These infrastructural projects and policies sought to benefit from New Orleans’ location at the entrance to a natural system of navigable rivers, which gave the city its strategic location. Mexico’s representation at the fair also reflected the U.S. House of Representatives’ consideration of a commercial treaty with Mexico, with negotiations for supplementary treaties with Mexico already underway.21 Understandably, Latin America had been given nearly onethird of the floor display space in the Main Building and within this display, Mexico was also emphasized.22 Numerous anecdotes of the Cotton give the sense of a fairground packed with curiosities. Surviving photographs of the exhibits in the Main Building confirm this. Historical prints and plans suggest that the scattered buildings were somewhat disjointed in their layout, with nothing more than pathways and a few treelined promenades providing the connections. Retracing the fairground’s layout today confirms that the grounds would have struck visitors as expansive but lacking in cohesion. The enormous Main Building at the center spatially divided the fairgrounds. Although the exhibitions were informative, a thematic narrative tying the fairgrounds together was missing. Subsequent fairs were often designed by teams of architects working with a strong thematic direction, often encapsulated in a fair’s name or subtitle, but the architectural resolution in New Orleans did not reflect this level of conceptual integration. The garden section was the only location where Latin America and the United States were brought together, but the ensemble was not identified as a Pan-American space. In future fairs, Latin American nations and the U.S. states would also be presented as parallel entities. Before the Cotton closed, the local newspapers’ focus on Latin America and the perceived inevitability of the grand infrastructural projects inspired New Orleans’ hemispheric enthusiasts to plan the extension fair. If the Cotton had failed as a financial proposition, perhaps it could serve another purpose. They formed the American Exposition Company and purchased the exposition’s mechanical buildings and equipment at

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public auction for $175,000 two months after the fair closed.23 Refilling the empty Main Building posed a challenge. But fine-tuning the hemispheric sentiment that dominated the Cotton was an even greater one.24 Led by the company’s president, S. B. McConnico, this group of hemispheric enthusiasts began by naming the new exposition the North, Central, and South American Exposition. The term “Pan-American” was not used in the fair’s title, since it was just coming into popular use in the press in the late 1880s.25 To live up to its name, the company began planning a diplomatic encounter involving the American republics on the fairgrounds in the hope of recasting the site as something more than an extension of the Cotton. When the North, Central, and South American Exposition opened on November 10, 1885, military and civic bodies led ceremonial parades on the well-worn fairground.26 Good weather and the closure of all businesses and schools for opening day brought some 50,000 New Orleanians to the fair, with few tourists attending.27 The next day the Daily Picayune published an extensive account of the inaugural-day parades and fanfare and included a full-page collage of past exposition buildings: “Showing Relative Size and Importance of the North, Central & South American Exposition as Compared with Other International Exhibits.”28 This time the square footage of seven other international exposition buildings was listed along with the New Orleans exposition’s Main Building to emphasize the point that this was the largest structure ever seen at a U.S. fair. Fairground plans published in brochures for the second fair confirm that the fairgrounds had hardly been altered.29 McConnico also began to promote an informal hemispheric policy, for which the fair would serve as the staging ground. His goal was to establish a commercial agreement between the participating nations and to initiate long-term economic relationships on the grounds themselves.30 The introduction of this policy is important in locating New Orleans as one of the initiation points for these efforts. In the publication The North, Central and South American Exposition, Promotive of the Commercial and Industrial Unity of the Three Americas, Samuel H. Buck, director-general of the exposition,

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spelled out the underlying policy as he mentioned an effort to “stimulate an exchange of our surplus manufactures for their surplus raw materials.”31 He continued: “To deflect this great and rapidly increasing trade to our own ports is one of the fundamental objects of the Exposition. Situated, as New Orleans is, in the geographical and transportation centre of the Western Hemisphere, and near its centre of population, it is the place above all others to inaugurate a hemispherical commercial policy.”32 U.S. visitors to the Buenos Aires exposition of 1882 had already seen the competitive threat that European markets posed for potential U.S. markets.33 A map titled “North, Central and South America, Showing Lines of Communication with New Orleans,” was also circulated to illustrate the logic behind this New Orleans–based policy.34 New Orleans’ exclusive claim and strategy for overpowering southern markets with the introduction of the term “policy” may be interpreted as an economic corollary of the Monroe Doctrine with the fair an opportunity to reinforce it. The policy idea continued to inspire future projects that tried to formalize U.S.–Latin American relations, including exhibitions, trade fairs, merchandise marts, traveling and “floating” expositions, skyscrapers, and, ultimately, the PanAmerican Union in Washington, D.C.35 In Buck’s language, an implicit reciprocal relationship was suggested when he mentioned the products to be exchanged. “Under one roof will be collected the tropical products and raw material with which Spanish and Portuguese America are so profusely endowed,” Buck stated, “and the manufactures which the United States produces in over abundance and now desires to introduce to new foreign markets.”36 Buck’s framing of contrasts resurfaces in future hemispheric projects as a repeated reference to the tropical/primitive versus the technological/modern, and it extended to racial classifications, which are reduced to the shorthand reference of “Latins and Anglos.” There is a shift, however, between this type of binary reciprocity and the proposition of imagining the Americas as an assembly of separate nations all relating independently with one another. Buck also expressed a desire to bestow symbolism on this site of exchange with a ritual that celebrated

the identity of each participating nation. “To appropriately inaugurate this American hemispherical policy,” he promised, “the President of the United States, the Governor-General of Canada, the Presidents of all the Spanish American Republics and the Emperor of Brazil will be invited to the opening of the Exposition in November.”37 The themes of the tropics and a strengthened New World (independent of Old World involvement) that surfaced here indicate their centrality, even if Pan-American architectural forms did not yet emerge from Buck’s proposal. This ambitious encounter never took place, and the “grand consummation of mutually desired goods” Buck and others spoke of did not provide the cultural capital to attract such important figures together in New Orleans. This event might perhaps have secured New Orleans a more prominent place in the history of Pan-American diplomacy. The fair organizers were nevertheless aware of the weight of their creation, and as one of them noted, this was “the first Exposition ever held in the history of the World especially devoted to the whole of the American Continent.”38 The fair organizers further refined their proposed assembly of nations when they announced a hierarchical hemispheric model for organizing the “American” exhibits. It presented an imagined Pan-America with carefully partitioned blocs of nations. At the center of this model one would find the Brazilian and Mexico exhibitions, with the latter featuring the railway lines that Boston and New York capitalists had constructed in Mexico. The two would then be balanced by two other groupings: one exhibit featuring six Central American countries, and another featuring nine South American countries and three colonies. Two additional exhibits were mentioned, one featuring the “principal” West Indies islands and one featuring Canada.39 In total, the six components would form a semihemispheric model, the nineteen nations together being balanced by the other half of the model, the United States. This type of asymmetrical hemispheric representation appeared time and again in future hemispheric projects, with the United States often presented as balancing the rest. Although a precursor to what the Pan-American Union would subsequently establish as the representa-

tive model of twenty-one nations, it was still a more inclusive reading of the Western Hemisphere because it included British Guiana (Guyana), Dutch Guiana (Suriname), French Guiana, and Canada. The North, Central, and South American Exposition did not live up to its promise. Only seven Latin American countries participated, two fewer than had been present at the Cotton. There was much mention of Bolivia and Ecuador, but their displays never arrived. Newcomers Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Chile joined Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Honduras. Surprisingly, Mexico was rarely mentioned in the press during the second fair, and its smaller pavilion was dismantled and transported home. Brazil’s displays never arrived, although Prince Leopoldo did arrive on one of the last days of the fair, which was hastily declared “Brazil Day.” Upon arriving after a six-week journey, the prince was asked to adjudicate a mule race among the city’s most prominent citizens, not the ritualization of the hemispheric nexus that Buck had envisioned. Halfway into the extension exposition, significant debts accumulated and the Main Building still remained half empty.40 One week prior to closing, exhibition items were already up for auction. The governments of Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela chose to donate their exhibits to Tulane University. The exposition failed principally because of poor attendance, yet its failure was alternately blamed on poor weather, too many disruptive administrative changes, and the fear of a yellow fever outbreak.41 During Mardi Gras, the fairgrounds were nearly empty. The New York Times dramatized the exposition’s slow death when the old exposition company sued the new one.42 Historian John Smith Kendall wrote that “the collapse of the American signed the death warrant of any other such enterprise thereafter forever in New Orleans.”43 Interest in the South continued, and Latin American countries hosted their own world’s fairs to solicit interest in their markets.44 In 1895, another New Orleans newspaper editor, Dixie’s T.  H. Martin, “proposed that American manufacturers join together and, with the consent of Latin American governments, sponsor several expositions in South America and Mexico.”45

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The North, Central, and South American Exposition organizers posited the Pan-American commercial enterprise not only as a win-win situation; it was to be a liberating and elevating experience for Latin America in particular. This would carry through other developmentalist themes visible in future fairs. As historian Robert Rydell has observed, an appropriated version of Bolívar’s legacy of liberation was referenced at Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895 when the president and director-general of the exposition, C. A. Collier, donned his “busto del Libertador” pin. According to Rydell, Collier believed “the exposition he presided over would have a liberating effect on Latin America,” specifically from European mercantile influence.46 The same sentiment was evident in McConnico’s speech on the fair’s inaugural day, when he Fig. 1.8. Horticultural Hall, interior view, published by C. B. Mason Fig. 1.9. Horticultural Hall, Harper’s Weekly, January 3, 1885

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stated that the United States held “between its Florida thumb and Texas hand the cup of the Mexican Gulf to suffice from these valley tides the commercial thirst of Latin America!”47 McConnico’s vision of a great commercial congress, a “nucleus and promoting power” to lift (and drain) Latin America, would remain lodged in the Southerner’s new American dream.48 Although the back-to-back fairs did not present architectural explorations of the themes of Pan-American heritage, the policies introduced by McConnico and Buck and the tropical focus of the gardens and Horticultural Hall anticipated the thematic heritage elements that surfaced in later expositions (Figs. 1.8 and 1.9). The New Orleans scene of businessmen at the Cotton Exchange (Fig. 1.10), painted by Edgar Degas in 1873, could as well have been of men discussing the proposed interoceanic

canal and railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico and the profits they asserted it would bring to all. The notion of New Orleans as the pinnacle of a distended economic triangle within which Pan-America could flourish emerged as real and imagined webs of interconnected infrastructural projects were woven through the turn of the twentieth century. These anticipated connections, however, did little to alter the North-South dichotomy that was firmly set in place. Latin Americans were incorporated into the U.S. sphere of influence when it seemed convenient and logical, but within a framework that maintained, at best, an asymmetrical balance. Fig. 1.10. Portraits in an Office: The Cotton Exchange, New Orleans,

painting by Edgar Degas, 1873. (Art Resource, New York)

Image unavailable for electronic edition.

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Before the White City: Quadricentennial Visions for 1892 Visions of what Pan-American architecture might look like appeared around 1890 when architectural designs were proposed in the Americas and Europe for the anticipated Columbian quadricentennial, and when early designs were proposed for the Chicago exposition, shortly after the city’s selection was announced in 1890. Two sets of unsolicited designs offered distinct models of the Western Hemisphere. They have received scant attention, however, as studies of the World’s Columbian Exposition—or the White City, as it came to be called— have concentrated on the influence that the imperial design of the fairgrounds had on future expositions, civic buildings, and U.S. urban design. The fair marked an important juncture for architect and urban planner Daniel H. Burnham and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, two figures who had a profound impact on U.S. cities. However, the late-nineteenth-century depiction of an imaginary New World city that they presented with the fairgrounds can also be seen as a moment when U.S. Americans stood captivated by the promises of the future (Fig. 1.11). But the desire to look inward and eastward to the Old World clashed with the Columbian theme, which many anticipated would have a distinct New World focus. In fact, the early quadricentennial fair proposals did not exhibit such disregard for the lands that Columbus had visited. The diverse models of the Western Hemisphere they presented give an indication of how Pan-American architecture would be explored in the future. Although the fair elevated one of the Pan-American heritage themes, the homage to Columbus, the pre–White City proposals demonstrate how architects appropriated other themes to code their designs. The U.S. press had reported on the much-anticipated quadricentennial, inviting debates over which city best Fig. 1.11. World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL, 1891–1893.

C. D. Arnold photographer, 1893. (World’s Columbian Exposition Photographs by C. D. Arnold, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #198902.E20807 © The Art Institute of Chicago.)

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deserved to host the commemorative exposition, and by extension, which city best represented the United States. This sentiment was captured by New York City real estate developer William Earl Dodge Stokes when he stated: “Were Columbus himself once more alive and permitted to-day, after four hundred years, to visit only one of the great cities of the Western Hemisphere, which one would he be most desirous of seeing?”49 At the New Orleans Cotton Exposition, Anderson was already promoting a quadricentenary in Washington, D.C., a city that seemed to be a logical node for U.S.– Latin American diplomatic encounters.50 Proposals also surfaced in New York, St. Louis, Atlanta, and other cities. Stokes’ presumptuous question took into consideration all of the Americas. But the city of choice would eventually point to the nation’s heartland. Across the Atlantic, interested parties in Madrid and some Italian cities also forwarded grandiose plans that underscored their historical claims. Madrid’s Exposición HistóricoAmericana was the only fair to mark the anniversary year of 1892. At this fair, a self-congratulatory nationalist tone presented the New World in terms of Spanish and Portuguese achievements. This exposition invoked a Pan-Hispanic discourse that had been developing since the 1840s, which emphasized an Old World– New World partnership that deliberately excluded the United States, a strategic and interesting counterpoint to the Pan-American theme.51 The earliest design proposals, although never committed to paper, emerged in the early 1880s with ambitious efforts by two hemispheric enthusiasts, Hinton Rowan Helper of St. Louis and Dr. Charles William Zaremba of Chicago. Their visionary celebrations illustrate how anticipated infrastructural developments continued to inspire. Helper’s celebration was tied to the development of his proposed Three Americas Railway, which he envisioned as the impetus for a quadricentenary exposition in St. Louis.52 He had been working on the railway proposal since 1881. A controversial figure, Helper had served a ministerial post in Argentina and called himself a “modern-day Columbus.” His fair was not simply an isolated event but one component of an infrastructural system that moved people and artifacts

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across continents. The fair would have demonstrated the effectiveness of the railway, providing the opportunity for the products and people of the Americas to coalesce. William Walton suggests in Art and Architecture that Zaremba conceived his idea for a quadricentennial exposition at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, and he has been credited with raising interest in Chicago as early as 1885. Walton suggests that Zaremba planted these seeds as he traveled from city to city.53 The Chicago Tribune gave him credit for overseeing Chicago’s fair and the plans for a colossal statue of Columbus, described as sitting “on a vaulted pedestal, in which will be deposited a history of each country participating.”54 Other descriptions mention the statue’s foundation as a mound of stones given by “all the civilized nations of the earth,” and “a subterranean, air-tight compartment, in which would be deposited a history of all nations represented at the dedication of the monument.”55 His efforts were eventually overshadowed by a competing proposal and there was no further mention of him in connection with the Chicago fair.56 Two subsequent design proposals envisioned for Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., and Central Park in New York City introduced actual designs, each imagined as integrally connected to the specific park. The Washington, D.C., proposal presented a scheme with a connection to the Capitol building, presenting PanAmericanism as part of a nationalist discourse. The New York proposal would highlight U.S. technological advances with a reference to Niagara Falls. The Washington quadricentennial that Anderson had proposed at the Cotton appeared in a legislative bill submitted to the U.S. Congress in 1888 and illustrated with an exposition proposal presented as a plan diagram.57 Formal relationships and relative size were diagrammed, but the rest was left for future development. The Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, as this fair was called, would bring only “relevant parts” of the world together for an unveiling of a statue of Columbus. This included Italy, Spain, the United States, and seventeen American republics.58 Originally planned as a dual 1889/1892 event (the first date marked the centennial of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution), the prolonged

celebration would consist of permanent and temporary structures on the one thousand acres of reclaimed flats on the banks of the Potomac River. This public parkland was then being developed as an extension of the Capitol grounds.59 A more evocative drawing was produced to promote the fair. Although it presented the same plan, the bird’s-eye view conveys the design’s enormity (Fig. 1.12). The 1888 lithograph by E. Kurtz Johnson, treasurer of the Board of Promotions for the Three Americas Exposition, illustrates the massive

size of the proposed structures.60 The three permanent cruciform buildings proposed for the north-south axis, established by the Capitol building, looked like they encompassed three city blocks in length. Public concerns about the permanent structures, the Columbus theme, and the commercial tone began to Fig. 1.12. World Exposition of 1892 and Permanent Exposition of the

Three Americas Exposition, by E. Kurtz Johnson, lithograph, ca. 1888. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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cast doubt on the project.61 With national expectations for this prime piece of property, it is understandable why some had a problem with the issue of permanence, given the fair’s content. The federal appropriation of $5 million for U.S. participation that the bill requested also raised the question of equality of contributions. The United States would be paying for a permanent structure that featured all of the Americas. Was a multinational structure appropriate for national grounds? Their symbolic placement is visible in the lithograph, suggesting an extension of the West Mall past the Washington Monument. Objection arose even though the first and second buildings were dedicated to the United States: the State and Territorial and the Important American Inventions buildings. The building closest to the Potomac River was the problem. It was supposed to house the “eighteen American sister republics, the Dominion of Canada, and the West India islands.” Canada was originally excluded from the bill and later added, a reminder that U.S.–Latin American relations were at the core of the project. The tendency for this and other projects to randomly include or exclude Canada stemmed from the fact that Canada was seen as different from the “real” American republics because it was neither a republic nor fully independent nor Latin.62 The fairgrounds were described in relation to a statue of Columbus, seen in the lithograph at the center of four adjacent lakes, today the Tidal Basin. Had the statue been installed, Columbus would have been the second figure memorialized in Potomac Park after Washington. The cloverleaf configuration was the focal point of the quadricentennial celebration, with a pedestrian concourse leading from the Columbus statue to a Temporary Building for the 1892 exposition. Farther east, an area was designated for the National Zoological Gardens, proposed for the other side of Long Bridge near the Washington Harbor. The bill also indicated a square crenellated structure proposed as an extension of the Smithsonian Institution, and a “Three Americas Museum.”63 The museum was to permanently commemorate the quadricentennial, and it was to be a repository of the antiquities and history of the Western Hemisphere.

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Critics concerned with the commercial tone and Columbus theme made their viewpoints known in the press, presenting the two themes as mutually exclusive. It seemed inconceivable to some that a fair with a commercial agenda had anything to do with a commemoration of Columbus’ discovery. The idea of erecting a permanent exposition, or “shop show,” as one editorial referred to it, was “the most unsuitable that could be devised. . . . Nothing would more surely belittle and vulgarize the occasion, and give foreigners warrant for doubting the extent of the benefit conferred upon mankind by Columbus’s discovery.”64 It was too crass to combine commercialism with a homage to Columbus. The bill’s author, Belmont, had been explicit about the objective of the exposition: “to stimulate more intimate commercial and social relations.” Belmont invoked Monroe’s doctrine when he reminded readers that “it is astonishing and disgraceful that the commerce of the various American nations and colonies south of the U.S. is mainly with Europe.”65 He also made reference to the “American hemispherical policy.” The interest in seeing Washington pursue the fair was also linked to plans underway to hold the First International Conference of the American Republics in the city. Others felt that the Washington exposition proposal was not justifiable, especially because it celebrated Columbus. “But whether Congress will feel disposed to make so large an expenditure in honor of the achievement of COLUMBUS is a matter of doubt,” one journalist reported.66 Proponents of other cities criticized the choice of Washington, noting that the capital city was not a “common ground” or “a city upon which all others can unite,” as the text of the bill claimed.67 The PanAmerican Union Building’s placement near the exposition’s proposed location carried out some of the original intentions of the Three Americas Museum, but the permanent building was not sited on the Capitol grounds. Literature accompanying this proposal provided the first mention of one of the other themes of commonality: incorporation of representations of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. This strategy for evoking a shared Pan-American heritage may be called a pannative theme. Yet at the core of the indigenous refer-

ences were problematic ethnic assumptions considered acceptable at the time. The principal motive was the perception that indigenous communities were a single, homogeneous entity nearing extinction. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner explored this “vanishing Indian” theory in the 1890s as the inevitable conclusion to “the frontier’s dynamism.”68 John Wesley Powell, the founder of the Bureau of American Ethnology, which focused on the Indians of North America, argued that the Washington, D.C., exposition would make a great contribution with this type of exhibition. He believed it would “collect and put on record for future generations the priceless records that constitute the history of all the Native American records.” He called it “a monument to these native peoples, erected by the invading and conquering and civilizing nations, worthy of Aryan power, and worthy of Aryan culture.”69 Such an exhibition was eventually organized at Madrid’s exposition in 1892 and transported to the White City in 1893. The New York City quadricentennial celebration completed this set of proposals. The New York festival proposal included a full-fledged architectural design. Moreover, it introduced a peculiar interweaving of the themes of Pan-American heritage that had not emerged thus far. When New Yorkers proposed their fair in January 1890 in Washington, which they called The Great Fair, they unveiled the design of a local electrical engineer, Adolphus Alvord Knudson.70 Knudson had been in charge of the Summer Carnival and Electrical Exhibition at St. John, New Brunswick, the previous year, and many of his design ideas came from exhibits he prepared there. This included “a cascade of water falling over electric lights of various colors” and “a revolving tropical garden.”71 By 1892, he had already proposed a single building, used for electrical generation, powering a reproduction of the “Horseshoe Falls at Niagara,” a distinct North American representation for the commemorative event. Like a proposal that General James Grant Wilson presented at the American Historical Association meeting in 1886, Knudson’s design underscored the United States’ Anglo-American heritage with a reference to the original thirteen colonies. Wilson had proposed a triple-figure statue that brought to-

gether Columbus, John Cabot (born Giovanni Caboto), and William Shakespeare.72 In Knudson’s design a compilation of North and South American references collided, resulting in an eclectic design that harkened back to New Orleans and forward to Buffalo’s exposition. Sited at the upper end of Central Park, Knudson’s design for the proposed six-story tower looked like an elongated version of the Mexican Alhambra pavilion, although there is no record that he visited the New Orleans fairs (Fig. 1.13). The tower displayed an immense waterfall, which would have been supplied by the waters of Harlem Lake, designed as a scale model of Niagara Falls. Anticipating the Buffalo exposition’s central tower, Knudson’s waterfall measured 60 feet high and was shaped like a horseshoe. As a professional who had contributed to developments in electrical energy and who published and patented widely in his field, Knudson incorporated into the monument the site that pushed the field of electrical power to new levels. Each floor of Knudson’s tower, which was built of structural ornamental ironwork, provided a distinct experience that evoked multiple hemispheric themes.73 Served by elevators and stairs, visitors would have encountered a Botanical Hall on the second floor possibly through the fourth. These spaces united tropical gardens and the thirteen colonies, which Knudson referenced with the thirteen-pointed-star plan. This was emphasized on the fourth floor by open balconies decorated with the flags of the colonies. The fifth floor allowed visitors to view the water’s cascade from a bridge framed by a Moorish arch. Here the reference to Niagara was supported by Knudson’s choice of the Byzantine style. Finally, the top floor was devoted to Columbus and the world, with an image of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres painted on the dome’s exterior. A flag mast locating the North Pole capped the roof at the exact location where visitors could look out onto the world map. The tower’s pinnacle memorialized the discovery with a model of Columbus’ ship sailing the globe.74 New York newspapers covered the debates that ensued over the appropriateness of Central Park as an exposition site. Many considered it the obvious place for the fair, but few wanted to see the park reconfigured

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or disrupted in any permanent way.75 Multiple sites were proposed, with a northern section of Central Park eventually gaining much attention.76 Ultimately, New Yorkers were reluctant to propose an exposition that included any portion of the park. They would not allow their park to be “perverted,” as one journalist put it.77 Arguments were still made for a New York City fair, with attorney Chauncey M. Depew stating at the first hearing in Washington in 1889 that “no one will dispute that New York is the metropolis of this continent. . . . New York simply records as the barometer the conditions of trade and production all over the country.”78 Representatives from St. Louis and Chicago countered with arguments that claimed “circles of population” in the vicinity of these cities made them the largest metropolitan concentration of U.S. population.79 Widely published satirical cartoons captured the competition. On February 24, 1890, the House of Representatives entertained a seven-hour debate that produced the determining vote: Chicago, 115; New York, 71; St. Louis, 61; Washington, 56; and Cumberland Gap, 1.80 Chicago’s efforts paid off. A few days later, journalist Thomas Donaldson of Philadelphia warned that there wasn’t enough time to prepare the fair by 1892, and he suggested 1893. “Columbus,” he said, “is too much of a back number to stir anybody.”81 In the proposals that followed, the Columbian theme maintained centrality, but as the fair was now envisioned in relation to Chicago and not Pan-America, thematic interpretations began to suggest cultural imperatives of another order. Zaremba and Helper cast the widest net, and indigenous and tropical themes emerged in Washington and New York. Some of the same themes would resurface in Chicago, Madrid, and Buffalo, although in each the hemispheric theme would be viewed through the lens of national identity. At the same time, delegates in Washington were also discussing plans for a Columbus Library, undoubtedly a result of the publicity the forthcoming quadricentennial had generated. This occurred when the First International Conference of American Republics met in the city in 1889–1890 in anticipation of forming an intergovernmental organization. On March 29, 1890,

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Fig. 1.13. Knudson’s Tower, elevation and section. (Knudson, “The

National Botanical Gardens—A Suggestion for the World’s Fair of 1892,” 2–3)

Fig. 1.14. Whitcomb L. Judson, project for a monumental tower at the Columbian Exposition, 1889. (Le Génie Civil, November 1889) Fig. 1.15. Edward Spencer Jenison, Chicago World’s Fair proposal. (Chicago Tribune, March 9, 1890)

following Chicago’s victory, the organization formed as the International Union of American Republics, with the Commercial Bureau of American Republics serving as the representative body. Among the bureau’s many orders of business were improving commerce and trade in the Americas and erecting a library where information about the Americas would be collected. This building proposal evolved into a structure to house the organization. The heated competition for the world’s fair propelled a number of independent design proposals, resulting in a second set of designs. These architecturally innovative structures introduced abstracted representations of the Columbian and New World themes, and the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times published them. As architectural historian Robert Jay noted, one of the earliest designs to surface in late 1889 set a high mark, which subsequent proposals followed. Whitcomb L. Judson proposed a 1,600-foot-tall iron structure that resembled a lighthouse (Fig. 1.14).82 He designed it with two internal spiraling roadways that could transport street vehicles and tramcars to the top using pneumatic car propulsion technology he had invented. This spiraling form would appear in numerous hemispherically themed projects. Equaling Judson’s tower in height, architect Edward Spencer Jenison’s proposal almost doubled it in width (Fig. 1.15). Spencer was known locally for helping to rebuild Chicago after the great fire of 1871. His building was described as a 3,000-foot-wide exposition hall built of stone, brick, glass, and iron. A 1,600-foot-high, 30-foot-diameter central tower contained elevators. Rods of varying thicknesses ran to the outer wall, carrying the massive roof.83 “A plan to put all the World’s Fair Exposition exhibits under one roof,”

Fig. 1.14.

Fig. 1.13.

Fig. 1.15.

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Fig. 1.16. Charles Kinkel and George R. Pohl, design for the Chicago Columbian Tower, 1890. (Chicago Tribune, May 24, 1890) Fig. 1.17. David Proctor, design for the Chicago Columbian Tower, 1890. (H. G. Cutler, The World’s Fair, 618)

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the Chicago Tribune reported, “would cover 193-2/3 acres and would be something like an immense circular iron and glass tent.” Jenison’s tent was unlike the other proposals, but his intentions were the same. The article mentioned “out-Eiffeling Eiffel” by an eighth of a mile.84 The cue here was not Columbus, nor the American republics. It was the Eiffel Tower, built for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. Other schemes indicate the same preoccupation. Washington, D.C., architects Charles Kinkel and George R. Pohl promised that their tower would put the Eiffel Tower “in the shade” (Fig. 1.16).85 In April 1890, Gustave Eiffel even offered to out-Eiffel himself with an enormous tower.86 David R. Proctor and the Columbian Tower Company produced a six-sided tower that was also described as an effort to “out-Eiffel the Eiffel.”87 It rose 1,050 feet high and tapered to a point (Fig. 1.17). Visionaries in Madrid and Genoa also promoted grandiose schemes along the same line, but Columbus figured prominently in their schemes. Architect-engineer Alberto de Palacio Elissagne of Bilbao, Spain, who had collaborated on a train station with Eiffel in 1889–1891, proposed an impressive homage to Columbus (Fig. 1.18).88 The memorial was a 1,000-foot-diameter iron sphere equaling the height of the Eiffel Tower and mounted on a 262-foot-high base. The entire structure was crowned on the North Pole by Columbus’ ship, reminiscent of Knudson’s tower. The sphere was to be encircled at the equator by a half-mile-long platform, and an interior track for a passenger train would spiral around the Southern Hemisphere, starting at the South Pole and ending at the Equator. This feature was presumably a visual tour of South America. The rotunda contained a statue of Columbus and allegorical statues representing all the Latin American nations. The base contained a large Columbus library, a naval museum, a museum dedicated to the Americas, and space allocated for the Spanish Geographical Society. The orientation was Pan-Hispanic and the theme of commonality was to be Spain’s colonial legacy. This “astonishing monument,” wrote one journalist, “can serve as a perennial remembrance of the first Spanish-American and Colonial Exposition.”89

Fig. 1.18. Alberto de Palacio Elissagne, proposal for the Chicago

Quadricentennial Fair, published in Scientific American, cover, October 25, 1890

When the Chicago Tribune later published a feature story titled “Towers of the Fair,” an equally inventive scheme was unveiled, but here the United States figured prominently and the designer’s wit was a bit over the top. This proposal notably left out the Pan-American theme or any reference to Latin America, and the motivation was obviously an attempt to out-clever the others. This was a curious variant of the original four exhibition categories, with nine categories now taking the form of separate buildings literally spelling “Columbian” in plan. Will H. Coleman of Philadelphia was the designer, and he described the letter buildings in the following manner:

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C O L U M B I A N

Cosmopolitan Building (with a viewing tower) Oratorio Building (with an organ in the court) Livestock Building United States and Other Nations Machinery and Mechanical Exhibits Botanical Gardens (with garden courts) Industrial Exhibits Agricultural Exhibits National Exhibits

Coleman was a publisher and author of Historical Sketchbook and Guide to New Orleans and Environs, produced in 1885 for the Cotton exposition. Another Columbus-themed project to appear in the press, by a Charles Burton, proposed a globe-and-tower assemblage that was 1,893 feet high, commemorating the incorrect year. Although U.S. Americans carried on with their ambitious schemes, Madrid was not deterred from commemorating the quadricentennial in 1892 and planned a series of international celebrations centered on two simultaneous expositions, the Exposición HistóricoAmericana and the Exposición Histórico-Europea.90 The celebration took place in adjacent buildings, the Palacios de Bibliotecas y Museos, which were inaugurated in 1892.91 The Spanish government had discussed the quadricentenary with the Duke of Veragua, the heir of Columbus. Eyebrows were raised when the New York Times reported in August 1887 that the United States would not be invited because Spanish officials thought the discovery did not concern that country.92 “To exclude the U.S. and British America is like doing a reenactment of ‘Hamlet’ with Hamlet left out,” the Times reported.93 The U.S. exhibits would later be praised for their breadth and subject matter. In Harper’s Weekly, the journalist Charles Dudley Warner wrote: “Spain joins the United States in a friendly rivalry.” He considered the exhibition “the most important ever made of the prehistoric period in the Americas, of the arts and resources at the date of the discovery, and of the effect of the introduction of a foreign civilization for the first two hundred and fifty years.”94 In The Nation, the architectural critic Barr Ferree assured that “because

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the Spaniards have chosen the prehistoric and early historic eras, the exposition will not be in competition with the Chicago Exhibition.”95 The goal of the exposition was to display the pre-Columbian, Columbian, and post-Columbian periods in the New World. The exposition accentuated the themes of cultural syncretism. This included a vast exhibition of the New World’s indigenous peoples, realizing the pan-native theme proposed for the Washington fair. The Exposición Histórico-Americana presented an extensive and memorable collection of Americana. It was organized into five categories that offered an alternative presentation of the narrative of material progress: Prehistoric America, Historic Period, Indian Industrial Arts, Cartography, and Fine Arts.96 The indigenous populations appeared at one end of the spectrum, where the category of Raw Materials was typically found. In this context, the indigenous people were the “raw material” that the colonizers had attempted to refine. The category of Manufactures and Mechanical was replaced by Indian Industrial Arts and Cartography, drawing a comparison between Indian crafts and the science and technology that made the “discovery” possible. This was a celebration of the mechanics of transoceanic colonization. The highlight of the exposition was the Fine Arts section, where Spain’s cultural heritage was showcased. Progress in the Western Hemisphere was framed in an implicit binary comparison between America in the period before and America in the period after contact with Columbus and Spain’s advanced civilization. The “cave” art, monuments, weapons, and utensils of prehistoric times were displayed to contrast with the reliquary exhibition of Spain’s Golden Age.97 After a two-month postponement, the exposition opened on November 11, 1892, nearly missing the quadricentennial year. The inaugural ceremony began with the arrival of the Portuguese court. One U.S. journalist observed: It may well be to state that the designation of “Americans” is, in Spain, at the present time, reserved for persons coming from the South American Repub-

lics. You come under the denomination of English, Yankees, or people from the United States. .  .  . To do the Spanish Americans justice, they look upon Spain as a country behind the age. The republican simplicity, which distinguishes your Government, if not your people, has perforce been cast aside in the decoration of the various rooms or courts. The Spaniards insisted upon this.98

The festivities were a performance of “imperialist nostalgia,” to use anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s term.99 Thrones had been erected for the Spanish Queen Regent Cristina and her two guests in the grand Reading Hall. “The approach to the hall,” reported the London Times, “was paved with American minerals—a device the object of which was to represent the monarch of the two countries so much concerned in the early history of America as treading on American soil.”100 The National Museum’s upper story was occupied entirely by the Spanish section. The lower floor was assigned to nine Latin American nations, five European nations, and the United States.101 With the exception of the United States’ displays, the exhibitions were devoted to representations of artifacts and archaeological collections illustrating the “native races, which occupied the American continent at the time of discovery.”102 William Eleroy Curtis, while serving as the director-general of the International Bureau of American Republics, was also attaché to the United States Commission at this exposition and he prepared the U.S. section’s six large rooms. A hemispheric enthusiast, Curtis had amassed expertise from his governmentfunded travels, his work as a journalist and writer, and now as the leader of this organization.103 He organized what many considered the most extensive displays after Spain’s. In two rooms, he displayed “portraits of Columbus, enlarged photographic views of places in America visited by him on his several voyages, and scenes identified with his career, and photographs and medals of all of the monuments that have been erected in his honor.”104 He also gave the Europeans the Native American show they had wanted to see, complete with models of Indians canoeing across the room (Fig. 1.19).

As Chicagoans began planning their exposition, Curtis turned his attention to South America, where he traveled to “work up a boom” for that fair. He was named chief of the Latin American Bureau for the Columbian Exposition, although his involvement in the fair was increasingly looked upon with suspicion.105 The criticism was leveled at James G. Blaine’s Pan-American reciprocity arrangement, which some commissioners felt was “sprung on the commission” planning the fair. As U.S. secretary of state, Blaine had proposed a bill to form a permanent commercial exhibit where American manufacturers could show products suitable for foreign trade. The State Department offered monetary aid for the foreign exhibitions, and many objected. “To hold a World’s Fair under a McKinley tariff is a ghastly farce,” one editorial commented. “It is ludicrous to remark that the Foreign Exhibits Committee of the Fair has been instructed to turn its attention to ‘Mexico and Fig. 1.19. View of Main Hall, United States Section, looking south; Plate III. (In the Report of the United States Commission to the Columbian Historical Exposition at Madrid, 1895)

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4 3

5 6

1 2

1 Court of Honor 2 La Rabida, Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria 3 Indian Exhibitions (Midway Plaisance) 4 States section 5 Latin American pavilions 6 Canada Building

Fig. 1.20a. Map of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. (Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design) Fig. 1.20b. Diagram of the fairgrounds for the World’s Columbian Ex-

position, Chicago, 1893. Representation at the fair is shown with the colors red (Latin America), blue (United States), and yellow (multinational representation). Drawing by author.

Central and South America.’ Inasmuch as these countries have no trade with us that is of much account, they do not feel themselves injured or insulted by the McKinley bill.”106 Because the Blaine-Curtis reciprocity scheme, as it was called, was seen as a mechanism for advancing Blaine’s political fortune, the fair’s organizers effectively discouraged Latin America from promi-

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nent participation. Curtis remained convinced that strong U.S.–Latin American relations were essential to the nation’s future. When the American Press Association commissioned fourteen notable Americans to predict life in the 1990s, he wrote an essay titled, “United States to Dominate the Hemisphere.” In his essay, he predicted that the Americas would be fully united by trade, stating that, in his view, “in 1993, American commerce, to a very large degree, will be confined to American waters.”107 In the end, Latin America figured marginally at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which is especially evident in a figure-ground reading of the fairgrounds (Figs. 1.20a and 1.20b). Although the larger buildings contained exhibits from around the world, they col-

lectively served to emphasize the United States, particularly in the central Court of Honor. Latin American representation was found in the buildings that filled in the spaces. Burnham and Olmsted helped with the site selection process, leading to the choice of Jackson Park on the south side of Chicago.108 Their design was organized around two major spaces, one formal and ordered, the Court of Honor, and one informal, with an island at the center. The awesome plaza and Grand Basin that composed the Court of Honor were rich in classical architectural references (Figs. 1.21 and 1.22).

This grand gesture was extended by a pier reaching out into Lake Michigan. Prominent buildings were used to shape an imperial urbanity that Burnham hoped would be an inspiration for other U.S. cities. The rest of the fairgrounds, reflecting Olmsted’s attitudes, presented more of a gardenlike arrangement. Another prominent feature was the Midway Plaisance, a pedestrian bouFig. 1.21. The Court of Honor, perspective, World’s Columbian Exposi-

tion, Chicago, 1893. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

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Fig. 1.22. Aerial view of the World’s Columbian Exposition, replica

of La Rábida located in the lower left-hand corner. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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levard where the Ferris Wheel was first introduced (Fig. 1.23). The Midway Plaisance extended from the informal, secondary space toward the city. Picturesque representations of Latin America and its indigenous peoples were found in the Midway amid other exotic cultures, human displays, and fantastic dioramas that gave this heterotopic space its distinct character. Latin American national representation was also found in a smaller and unordered zone loosely organized around the North Pond, which was located beyond the Midway axis. The Women’s Building nearby terminated the Midway Plaisance axis while the Fisheries Building terminated a cross axis extending all the way to the Court of Honor. The Art Galleries building with its long arms brought order to the U.S. state pavilions. The Illinois building stood across the pond from the foreign nations section, and it was larger. Eight of the eleven Latin American nations that joined the fair were represented with pavilions. This included Brazil’s ornate French Renaissance–style structure, which was surmounted by a dome. Historians Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing note in The World’s Columbian Exposition that this building displayed a pyramid representing the forty-one tons of gold that had been extracted from Brazil’s mines between 1720 and 1810, a throwback to the Mexican Alhambra. Colombia presented a small Italian Renaissance–style building that contained preColumbian antiquities, including graves and mummies. The Canada Building was also found in this section. The other Latin American countries to erect buildings were Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Cuba, Mexico, and Spain’s Caribbean colony Puerto Rico displayed manufactured goods, plants, and animals in the exposition’s main halls.109 Curtis assisted with the Midway exhibitions. The Chicago Daily Tribune informed the public of the “savage tribes” of the Amazon jungles of South America who would be showcased at the fair.110 The New York Times also reported that the “last of the Caribs” would be exhibited, the supposed “last survivors of the natives discovered by Columbus.”111 In response to these announcements, some Latin American officials and heads of state began to suggest a more humane portrayal of na-

Fig. 1.23. Midway Plaisance, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago,

1893. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

tive cultures.112 Nevertheless, raw materials and “exotic” indigenous cultures formed the primary lenses through which many viewed Latin America, in stark contrast to how Latin Americans wished to portray themselves. Latin American representations were also found in the reproductions of Yucatán ruins built by U.S. Consul E. H. Thompson in the Archaeology section. At the opposite end of the fairgrounds, Curtis prepared and classified the extensive collections of the Madrid exposition and showcased them in a replica of La Rábida monastery, the building where Columbus sought refuge, planned his trip to India, and attended mass on the day of his departure. The replica was built on a peninsula overlooking Lake Michigan and included a display of replicas of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María. The structure was

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surrounded with water and protected by military guards to secure the contents’ safety.113 The entire area was dwarfed by the Court of Honor nearby, which conveyed the proposition that the New World, symbolized by the idealized White City, was led by its most prosperous nation, which had placed itself in a leadership position. As director of works, Burnham hoped the exposition’s buildings would offer an enticing glimpse of the modern possibilities of antiquity. Classical references abounded in the Court of Honor’s obelisk, statues, the Peristyle looking across the lake, and the ornamented façades that distracted visitors from the utilitarian and practical spaces they faced. Progress and prowess were advanced in the White City with Columbian trappings that presented the navigator as part of a family of U.S.-American heroes. Historian Reid Badger notes that “for the United States, which had been prone to view the Western Hemisphere as its special province, Columbus could be seen as the original prototype of the American adventurer/ hero who, like Boone or Crockett or Carson, blazed trails into an unknown wilderness so that others might follow and begin building the American Empire.”114 The Columbian discovery narrative coalesced with the United States’ history of manifest destiny and its identification of a pantheon of American heroes. Burnham’s impressive design, with its monumental classicism and monochromatic purity, transformed the White City sobriquet into a mythical and heroic urban space in the collective consciousness of U.S. Americans. By positioning Chicago’s world’s fair as a grand model city, Burnham, his professional collaborators, and his entrepreneurial clients implied that the New World, led by the United States, was a model worthy of imitation. This certainly was the attitude embodied in the architecture of the City Beautiful movement, which flourished in the United States in the 1890s and first decade of the 1900s following the White City’s lead. The diminution of Latin American representation at this fair buttressed the message of U.S. primacy. The Columbian’s architects and designers went to great lengths to secure the controlled visual effects that elevated the United States. Thomas S. Hines writes in Burnham of Chicago that Burnham controlled the design guidelines

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for the buildings of the foreign governments, including those from Latin America. Regional and cultural references were carefully regulated, and he did not allow the U.S. states to build pavilions in the “oriental” style, for example, since this style would “naturally be employed by the oriental nations.” He asked that use of the architecture of the Spanish missions be restricted to the western and southwestern states only, and with this, limited the common American heritage theme of Spanish colonization to its perceived appropriate place.115 Because the exposition failed to deliver any support for a hemispheric commercial policy, Curtis and others decided to form the Pan-American Company the year the fair closed to pursue this goal elsewhere. They hoped to transfer exhibits from the World’s Columbian to a New York City building and establish a permanent Pan-American Commercial Exhibit.116 After resigning his post as director-general in Washington, Curtis formed a company with William I. Buchanan, the chief of the Department of Agriculture at the Columbian. Their permanent exhibit would reside in the six-story Goelet Building in New York City as a three-part exhibition presenting foreign governments, American manufacturers, and the United States government. It should have come as no surprise when the press called this a sequel to Blaine’s reciprocity scheme. Although this commercial exhibition never materialized, Buchanan went on to serve as the director-general of Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition in 1901.117 Through Buchanan, the organizers of the last hemispheric fair of this period attempted to accomplish the unfulfilled mission set out at the earlier fairs. The move from Chicago to New York, and the numerous hemispheric projects later proposed for Manhattan, confirms claims like those forwarded by Depew, which stated that New York was the logical center for the continent’s commercial affairs. Plans to erect a Pan-American Building as the tallest structure in the city were a case in point. Originally conceived as a twenty-fivestory building and commissioned by the Pan-American States Association, the structure was designed by architect Francis H. Kimball in 1913.118 Contrasting with Curtis and Buchanan’s exhibit, its purpose was

to represent the manufacturing and industrial activities of South and Central America.119 By the time the high-rise was redesigned as a fifty-one-story structure, three schemes later, it was promoted as the city’s tallest building.120 A popular 1917 postcard called “Future New York” features an image of the proposed high-rise. The city did not see hemispherically themed structures until the 1920s, but the occasional ritual did take place, such as the dedication of a statue of Simón Bolívar in Central Park in 1921.121 None of these schemes was as forceful, however, as the Buffalo exposition that the State of New York hosted at the turn of the twentieth century, when the hemispheric concept inspired a grander celebration than the one seen in Chicago.

The Pan-American Exposition in an American Power City, 1895–1901 Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition of 1901 thoroughly explored the hemispheric theme, and it is the exposition that most deserves the title of hemispheric fair. Conceived as a response to the Chicago fair, the Buffalo fair returned to many of the architectural strategies seen in Chicago. The imperialist tone cast over the fairground posed a challenge to the Pan-American formula, as the event was affected by recent U.S. interventions in the Caribbean and the Philippines. In addition to downplaying Latin American representations, organizers of the Buffalo fair proudly showcased the newly acquired U.S. possessions of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, taken in the Spanish-American War of 1898. With this act, any hope of advancing a Pan-American identity was dashed. Designs for an early version of the fair, planned for Cayuga Island close to Niagara Falls, were the only attempts to explore representations of Pan-Americanism as a democratic model of unity. As in Chicago, early schemes helped contextualize the design that was built. Five years after Knudson alluded to the power and beauty of Niagara Falls with his waterfall tower, the planners of a proposed New York State Centennial and All-American Exposition chose a more direct association with the falls by locating the fair near the

cascade. The American Exhibitors’ Association met at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, and businessman John M. Brinker proposed that because the Niagara frontier was the geographical center of the largest populated area on the North American continent, it was the most suitable place to host the state’s centennial in 1899.122 Niagara Falls had been celebrated the world over as a wonder of nature since Europeans first encountered it in 1604. This admiration was widely expressed, as in the poem “Ode to Niagara,” written in 1824 by one of Cuba’s Romantic poets, José María Heredia. Late in the nineteenth century, Niagara Falls continued to inspire awe and it was described as the most famous place in the Western Hemisphere “if not the whole world.” Its popularity was also due to an increase in commercial interest in the falls because of the electrical energy they generated. Historian William Irwin points out that in the popular press, the falls’ aesthetic appeal was broadened in the late nineteenth century by admiration for Niagara’s capacity to generate electricity. The development of electrical power at the falls transformed the Niagara vicinity into “the most remarkable industrial centre on the American Continent,” and the nation’s and state’s industrialists had an understandable interest in showcasing that power.123 The falls were seen as a reflection of, and consequently equated with, the United States’ own increasing global power.124 Although the Pan-American exposition was held in Buffalo, the natural wonder’s charisma led architects to incorporate a central tower to represent the falls, just as Knudson had proposed earlier. It was in the context of such magnetism, combined with the United States’ emergence as a continental power after the Spanish-American War, that this model of the Western Hemisphere was conceptualized and materialized, bringing almost two decades of hemispheric fair production to an end. The earliest promotional poster for the exposition, titled “The New World in Unity,” depicted the globe among palm trees and cacti (Fig. 1.24). Reminiscent of the woman who had called attention to New Orleans’ “logical point,” a minimally clad Mercury pointed to Niagara Falls with his staff. As the fair organization ex-

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plored the historical development of the U.S. northern border, an all–U.S. American theme was proposed. A site for the exposition was suggested in the vicinity of La Salle, a historic village and suburb of the city of Niagara Falls, New York. The site was the 175-acre Cayuga Island, located a few miles above the falls and opposite La Salle (Fig. 1.25). Cayuga Island offered a waterfront on the Niagara River at the precise location where the Griffon, the first vessel to sail North America’s inland waters, was launched by the seventeenth-century French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle. With this reference, the exposition would offer a northern European discovery narrative as a counterpart to the Chicago fair’s Columbian theme.

In April 1897, the Pan-American Exposition Company began to plan an exposition described as being, “first of all, American in character.”125 The corporation later stated that its goal was to “illustrate the material progress of the New World during the Nineteenth Century.”126 This reflected developments taking place in Washington. In 1897, the International Bureau of American Republics had devoted much of its time to preparing a Commercial Directory of the American Republics. The organization had undergone a transformation. In June 1896, it had been reconfigured to allow citizens of the member countries to apply for all positions in the bureau. It was no longer seen as an organization that simply collected and disseminated commercial information but as one that would address the Latin American countries’ economic growth. Reflecting the same sentiment, a collective representation of the republics of the Americas was explored in the early plan of the fairgrounds and exposition buildings. A number of sketch designs were featured in the newspapers throughout the country. One of the earliest layouts presented an octagonal Main Building with eight distinct rotundas and a central pavilion organized in a radial pattern, with the Pan-American theme expressed at the core of the structure (Fig. 1.26). According to August C. Esenwein, the Buffalo architect who oversaw the efforts, the aim of this design was “to secure the greatest compactness and the utmost convenience.” This was to contrast with the Columbian exposition’s dispersed buildings, which had yielded complaints from some fairgoers.127 The Cayuga Island site invited a straightforward use of space, given the island’s defined parameters. On axis with the site’s entrance, a dock on the Niagara River allowed fairgoers to traverse the entire island’s short dimension and approach the lookout, maintaining a relationship with the river and the nearby falls.128 Within the Main Building, which faced the entry

Fig. 1.24. “The New World in Unity. Pan-American Exposition of 1899” poster, shown here with the year replaced. Published in The PanAmerican, Souvenir Edition, October 1899, vol. 1, no. 5, p. 4 (Buffalo, NY: Pan-American Publishing Company). (Collection of Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, used by permission)

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Fig. 1.25. Map showing location of the proposed exposition grounds on

Cayuga Island and its proximity to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, dated December 28, 1898. (Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site Foundation)

Fig. 1.26. August C. Esenwein, site plan, Pan-American Exposition of

1899. (Published in Buffalo Morning Express, June 28, 1897)

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plaza, a carefully defined hemispheric order was introduced, one that hinged on the United States’ position at the center of the entire ensemble but brought Latin America directly to the center. This design introduced a quasi-democratic structure that assembled the nations of the Americas. In it, the tension between the world’s fair tendency to want to celebrate the host nation at the center of the fairgrounds and the idealized hemispheric fair that would bring all nations together in unity and equality was evident. A description presents the distinct hemispheric model that Esenwein and the exposition organizers envisioned:

There will be entrances and exits at each of the rotundas and visitors will be able to pass without inconvenience either under cover or al fresco from building to building of the eight outer structures. The cross halls, to be devoted to the exhibits of Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, will afford passage-ways to the eight inner divisions set apart for the various States of the Union and the central space will be devoted to the various departments of the United States government. The outer range of buildings, the rotundas, the cross halls and the departments for the States of the Union will all be freely accessible from eight inner open air courts. It is suggested that the outer buildings shall be two stories high, the cross halls a single story, the state department spaces higher than the outer buildings and that the United States government space be surmounted by a tall spire or dome.129

The nations were relegated to the eight cross halls, to spaces of circulation that one would pass through to get to the center. By reserving the two cross halls that faced the main entry for Canada and the British Provinces, the arrangement favored an Anglo–North American dominance. The remaining halls, which faced the sides and the back area, were reserved for Central America; Colombia and Ecuador; Brazil; Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay; the Argentine Republic and Chile; and Mexico (the Caribbean republics and Uruguay were missing). Marginality was inherent in this scheme of spatial organization, since the paths of developing nations led to the United States. This design located the states on a long, thin peninsula to the west of a Convention Hall. The architectural appearance of the Cayuga Island building complex was not discussed as much as the spatial organization and the hierarchical arrangement. “The matter[s] of external appearance, general details and technical points,” Greater Buffalo reported, were “to be left for determination to the result of a competition among architects all over the country.”130 Thus, the Fig. 1.27. Pan-American Exposition of 1899, Main Building. (Published

in the Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1897, B1)

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Fig. 1.28. Pan-American Exposition of 1899, perspective, Cayuga

Island. (Published in the American Journal of Progress [1899], 31)

Fig. 1.29. Pan-American Exposition of 1899, Electrified Tower with a Spiral Railway, Cayuga Island. (Appeared in the Evening Republican, March 8, 1898, and the Fort Wayne Evening Sentinel, May 10, 1899)

Pan-American Exposition’s design was forwarded as the purview of U.S. architects. The plan continued to evolve as Cayuga Island and the exposition grounds were surveyed. Perspective drawings of the main building show a complex that had been expanded, with the octagonal structure at the center (Fig. 1.27).131 The Buffalo Express published local merchant Richmond C. Hill’s account of the proposed main building, which he described as “an enormous building, with steps leading up out of the water onto an esplanade, ornamented by statuary . . .”132 It was going to be roofed with a dome, on which a tower with a 50-foot electrified globe would be located. Traversing the esplanade alongside the Niagara River was another axis marked by a gateway structure and another electric tower. A number of architectural strategies seen before reemerged with this design, giving a sense that a type of Pan-American architectural style was in the process of being formulated and was heavily influenced by the architecture of world’s fairs. This included towers, globes, spiraling and moving systems, and electricity. The electric tower appeared in subsequent perspectives of the fair as a separate element (Figs. 1.28 and 1.29). One illustrated the perimeter structure, the multiple rotundas and spires, and a central government building—a 180-foot-high dome bearing a 350-foot flagstaff.133 The report indicated that European exhibits would not be excluded but that no

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formal invitation would be sent to foreign governments. It was expected that Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and the West Indian colonies would be represented with large displays.134 Initially, there was concern that Canada should be amply represented, especially considering its proximity.135 The proposal’s main feature was the electric tower. Visitors would be able to ascend this Cayuga tower in an electric car, spiraling up to reach the globe at the top. Lights and water seemed intrinsically a part of the world’s fair language. The Cotton had been advertised as the first electrical fair. Buffalo’s fair would incorporate an enormous spotlight that pointed toward Niagara Falls. The representational logic in combining these architectural elements to symbolize the Western Hemisphere pointed to the themes of unity (with the intertwining spirals) and discovery (with the globe). The Cayuga fairground proposal recalled other Pan-American heritage themes that emerged with the quadricentennials. There was mention of a theme area on the island where reproductions of ancient structures of the Americas would be juxtaposed with reproductions of the birthplaces of U.S. American historical figures. This was reminiscent of Madrid’s combination of indigenous artifacts and those associated with the monarchy. This representation of ancient versus modern structures was to be complemented by an equally problematic second theme area consisting of North and South American ethnographic illustrations of the “various phases of ‘Indian and Negro life in the past.’” Combining the two ethnic groups asserted an entirely different and problematic hierarchy. The last theme area in this section shifted focus to the Western Hemisphere’s changing geopolitical structure. It was noted that “should Cuba gain her independence and Hawaii be annexed to the United States prominent places will be given to those countries.”136 The Western Hemisphere was understood as a politically and culturally evolving place whose key features included its early and modern civilizations. Accordingly, the fair’s organizers hoped to fit what they considered developmentally parallel ethnic groups into the larger picture. Plans for the fairgrounds were so well received that President

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McKinley visited the site on August 24, 1897, putting his “stamp of official approval upon the enterprise by driving a memorial stake on the site designated for the Main Building.”137 The exposition’s organizers hoped that McKinley’s visit meant that Congress would provide a generous appropriation for the event. The laying of the foundation was set to begin the following month, and the main buildings were supposed to be completed by August of 1898, with an opening date of May 1, 1899. All anticipated a millennial celebration at the end of the fair’s life.138 On February 15, 1898, the United States battleship USS Maine mysteriously exploded while anchored in Havana Harbor. The United States intervened in what became known as the Spanish-American War, resulting in the occupation of Cuba by U.S. forces. Along with the Philippine Islands and Puerto Rico, Cuba was declared a protectorate of the United States. The directors of the exposition company met and decided that the Pan-American Exposition would have to be postponed until the summer of 1901, owing to the expected outbreak of a Spanish-Cuban War.139 If the exposition was postponed, however, there was a likelihood that the exhibits of the South American governments could without difficulty be secured from the Paris Exposition of 1900.140 Plans for the Pan-American Exposition remained in effect, but it was moved to Buffalo when that city decided to compete for the event and won. William I. Buchanan was chosen as director-general of the Pan-American Exposition, and he would prove to be the ideal Pan-American promoter as he oversaw the fair’s construction and operation from beginning to end. Buchanan had served as U.S. minister plenipotentiary to Argentina in 1890 and as chief of agriculture and three other departments at the Columbian exposition.141 This “Diplomat of the Americas” was also known for his work under the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. It did not take long for Buchanan and the board of directors to agree on a new site. Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., along with landscape architect Warren H. Manning, were asked to help select the site and they chose Rumsey Farm.142 Its meadows, fine trees, and proximity to Delaware Park, which the elder Frederick

Law Olmsted had designed, made the site an attractive choice for the Pan-American exposition.143 Burnham did not oversee this architectural feat. Instead, under John M. Carrère’s supervision, a newly formed Pan-American Board of Architects began to design the exposition buildings. The group consisted of George Cary, Walter Cook, August C. Esenwein, Edward B. Green, John Galen Howard, Robert S. Peabody, George F. Sheply, and James Knox Taylor. Carrère seemed the appropriate candidate because of the work he had completed in St. Augustine, Florida, with his partner, Thomas Hastings, and because he was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Between Buchanan and Carrère, the perfect team had been formed to construct a PanAmerican architectural monument. The team began to design a complex of structures organized along an esplanade with a bridge and tower at either end, reminiscent of the second scheme produced for Cayuga Island (Fig. 1.30). Each of the main structures played an important part in the overall narrative that was suggested as one moved from the park’s entrance gate to the main tower. During the eight months the fair was open, the ex-

position’s monumental fairgrounds were visited by eight million people. At the center of the fairground, an expansive layout of U.S.-themed buildings were organized along the Esplanade with a central cross-shaped plaza, the Court of Fountains, at the main cross axial intersection (Figs. 1.31a and 1.31b). This space was bordered on the north by Howard’s Electric Tower, and on the south by Carrère and Hastings’ Triumphal Bridge, a masonry span noted for its four great pylons (Fig. 1.32). Photographs of the fair show a U.S. flag hanging from the pylons, welcoming foreign visitors (Fig. 1.33). This ensemble located the United States at the center. The scale was more impressive than Chicago’s and included a dramatic approach. The fairgrounds were entered through the Lincoln Parkway Gate, alongside Delaware Park, after passing a landscaped area organized around a grand lagoon and meandering pathways. The Fig. 1.30. Planning Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition: “Bird’s-eye

view of the forthcoming Pan-America Exposition at Buffalo, as seen in the studio of Mr. Turner.” (From “The March of Events” in The World’s Work, 1901)

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7 8

9

10

6

1

5 4

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U.S. Government buildings U.S. State pavilions Latin American pavilions Triumphal Bridge Indian Congress 42 Tribes

6 Chiquita, the Cuban-born Doll Lady 7 The Streets of Mexico 8 Electric Tower 9 Canada Building 10 The Esplanade

Fig. 1.31a. Plan of the Pan-American Exposition grounds, May 1 to

November 1, 1901 (Plan Revised to April 15, 1901). Drawn by C. E. Pelz; Buffalo, N.Y.: Pan-American Exposition Company, 1901. Insert in Official Catalogue and Guide Book to the American Exposition with Maps of Expositions and Illustrations, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.A. May 1st to Nov. 1st 1901. Buffalo, NY: Charles Ahrhart, 1901. (Courtesy of the University Archives, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York)

Fig. 1.31b. Diagram of the fairgrounds, Pan-American Exposition.

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Representation at the fair is shown with the colors red (Latin America), blue (United States), and yellow (multinational representation). Drawing by author.

Fig. 1.32. Aerial view of Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901. (Published by Davis and Smith) Fig. 1.33. The Triumphal Bridge at the Pan-American Exposition linked the main entrance to the Court of Fountains and served as a space for U.S. pageantry. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

procession led to the imperialist Triumphal Bridge. Originally called a “victory bridge” in honor of Admiral George Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay in the SpanishAmerican War, it was renamed because some believed this was distasteful and possibly offensive.144 Ironically, the Cuban pavilion was located precisely adjacent to and overlooking the bridge on the east side. The entire Latin American sector was included in a section where the U.S. states were also included, in line with an insignificant forecourt that preceded the Triumphal Bridge. Following the Court of Fountains, two grand fountains emphasized a cross axis, and visitors passed this larger formal axis as they approached the tower along two side promenades (Fig. 1.34). The Electric Tower stood as the main beacon at the end of the journey, although the entire fairgrounds were illuminated at night, causing an unforgettable spectacle that future fairs would imitate (Fig. 1.35). Latin America did not figure in any prominent way in these central spaces or in the larger, prominent view of the fairgrounds. References to Niagara Falls abounded in the foamy green colors chosen for the central buildings and the

70-foot cascade that fell from the Electric Tower (Fig. 1.36).145 With its gushing water feature and light show, it embodied the magical combination of water and electricity that brought so much renown to the falls. It was brightly illuminated with thousands of electric bulbs and could be seen from twelve miles away. But to make sure that the reference was not overlooked, the tower was showcased as an immense searchlight supposedly strong enough to illuminate Niagara Falls.146 Despite these multiple allusions to the falls, some people were not convinced that this “modest hemispherical fair” had anything to do with Niagara Falls. One observer warned future fairgoers in the New York Times that Niagara Falls “is not visible from the ground level and makes no figure in the scene.”147 The entire procession provided the fairgoer with a view of the tower from the Triumphal Bridge, the likes of which had not been seen before. Previous fairs, including Chicago’s, had not provided this type of broad view of the grounds.148 The effectiveness of this vista was also due to the exposition’s impressive size, which surpassed Chicago’s Court of Honor and the Paris Exposition of 1900.149 The landscaped area at the perimeter also gave the fairgrounds a distinctive urban-versusnatural aesthetic. This duality was brought together in the Electric Tower’s naturalistic cascade. Journalist Eugene Richard White characterized the plan as “the strife of Man with Nature,” the central Electric Tower, in his opinion, representing man’s victory in the conflict. White perceptively described the other buildings, with their sculptures and gardens, as “symbols leading up to this effect.”150 A palette of colors that progressed from darker to lighter (at the center) also emphasized this effect. This and the combination of lighting features led to the fair’s popular name, the Rainbow City. Repeating the pattern seen in Chicago, the Latin American pavilions were marginally located. In Buffalo they were sited in one of the garden areas and along Buffalo’s version of the Midway. The same asymmetrical relaFig. 1.34. Approaching the Electric Tower at the Pan-American Expo-

sition of 1901, Buffalo, NY. C. D. Arnold, photographer. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Fig. 1.35. Pan-American Exposition of 1901, night view, Buffalo, NY Fig. 1.36. Illustration of the Electric Tower, produced by the Niagara Envelope Manufactory, Gies & Co. Litho. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

tionship between the United States and Latin America persisted despite the promising theme. These outlying areas contrasted with the regularity and unity of the main structures, established with a 45-foot-high cornice line, a 30-degree roof pitch, and an architectural style that was supposed to allow for minimal variation. To reflect the Pan-American theme, the exposition directors chose the Spanish Renaissance style as the exposition aesthetic, inserting a new theme of commonality that had not been seen in the Chicago fair. The Spanish Colonial reference was relegated at the Chicago fair to limited use, as were the Spanish Mission and Southwestern styles. The notion of using this style for the central U.S. buildings suggested a polite and distant engagement with Latin America (via Europe).151 Even so, the claim may have been overstated. In White’s opinion, there was less unity in the final Buffalo design than was originally proposed, a condition he attributed to the flexibility the style invited. “It was given out generally that the predominant architectural note would be Spanish,” he wrote, “if not the Spanish of Mexico, at least a free Spanish Renaissance. But if any note of style is insistent, it is French, largely of the modern school.”152 White went on to point out that while many buildings were Spanish, others were Italian or French in style, including the base of the Electrical Tower. One reporter who actually enjoyed this eclecticism confessed: “It is a

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refreshment to come upon something which is not ‘PanAmerican,’ nor yet ‘Parisian,’ but just architectural.”153 The exposition’s message was perhaps best stated in the color scheme, which many interpreted as a reflection of urban life in the real city, the White City having served as the model for how a world’s fair might represent an ideal city. The public’s reception to color at the Rainbow City reflected the cultural and evolutionary discourses of the time. “Advancing toward the Tower,” wrote White, “the tones are gradually subdued; there is less glare and flash, and the Tower, which is a gray ivory, forms again the culminating point. The director of color has cunningly suggested as the predominate note the light emerald green which he took from the hue of the water at the crest of the Niagara Falls, and has carried it into every building.”154 White identified the imposed teleological narrative, from a primitive to an advanced culture. Another writer, in an article titled “Pan-American Color,” was blatant in his criticism of the color scheme designed by Charles Y. Turner, the exposition’s director of color. The observer had no qualms about revealing his own colors: The scheme itself is a clever one, reaching southward as it does to Mexico and thence over sea to Spain, and through Spain to North Africa, and through North Africa to Persia. .  .  . There is a good deal of the Beaux Arts here, which means the French pull toward classicism. And in the color scheme one notes the same fear to grasp the occasion with both hands and launch into color like Orientals. But perhaps it is too much to expect from the staid white of North America that he should dare to be a Moor— some one might mistake him for a “nigger,” and that, bless his heart! would cut him to the quick. So perhaps it was wise for Mr. Turner not to let himself go, even if he felt the impulse.155

Discussions of the color strategy recall Esenwein’s hier­archical Cayuga diagram, which spatially presented the United States’ dominance in evolutionary terms. As much as these observations suggest that there was a developmentalist message in the use of color at the

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fair, for urban historian Charles Zueblin, evolutionary meaning was not the issue as much as what the color spectrum and architectural order implied about the urban condition. For him, the Rainbow City reflected the new American city because the multicolor palette reflected diverse building types and people. For Zueblin, the White City represented unity whereas the Rainbow City represented variety in unity.156 The significance of expositions as models of city making interested Zueblin and others, like the Philadelphia architect Albert Kelsey, who had promoted a model city exhibit at the Pan-American. Although his effort did not meet with success, Kelsey oversaw the construction of the model city exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis, where he was able to finally demonstrate his ideas for an ideal working city. The Buffalo fairground’s problematic treatment of Latin America underscored the imperialist sentiments that emerged after the Spanish-American War and pervaded the fairgrounds. The United States’ power was overplayed in the exposition’s choreographed events. When McKinley visited the Buffalo fairgrounds, each of the U.S. “possessions” received equal billing in a carefully staged event. His visit inspired a heightened moment of imperialist fervor, prompting Henry J. Pain to prepare a grand fireworks display called “The American Empire.” Historian Mark Goldman describes this event in great detail: At one thousand feet, four large bombs exploded together. The first formed the outline of the United States, the second and third the outlines of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the fourth splattered into a series of small shells representing the Philippine Islands. But the best was saved for last. For the finale, thousands of tiny fire balls exploded at once, creating a gigantic, sparkling likeness of William McKinley. The sky filled with shining letters: “Welcome President McKinley, Chief of our Nation and our Empire.”157

McKinley was the leading spokesman for the new national strength that resulted from victory in the recent war. As Goldman points out, Buffalo’s exposition was

taken as an opportunity to embody and promote the goals of the president’s expansionist foreign policy. Through the exposition, “the city became the national symbol of the country’s pride and braggadocio,” even if it was for a short period.158 The following day, a stunning tragedy upstaged this show of U.S. imperialism. An immigrant anarchist assassinated McKinley in front of Esenwein’s Music Hall, providing a different and sobering message. The president was shot at this symbolic celebration, revealing the paternalistic discourse of “protection of the new appropriations” for the sham that it was. Reflected in the imperialism and anti-imperialism that were played out with fireworks and firearms, the representational hemispheric model presented at the Buffalo fair would have clashed with the Pan-American movement then evolving in Washington, D.C. A nearcomplete model of equality had already been realized at the First International Conference of the American Republics in 1889–1890 in Washington, where every American delegate had been given a seat at the table.159 The Pan-American concept formulated at the fair had been too easily absorbed into the imperialist theme because it was expressed so abstractly and because the exposition gave U.S. Americans the license to grandstand. The Board of Architects failed to follow Esenwein’s lead, which had presented a promising beginning, albeit with the United States at the center. A more democratic hemispheric order, one where every nation was treated equally, would have clashed with such imperialist performances.160 Other exposition trappings used to stage celebratory events located the United States’ rising power in a larger global framework. One of the most revealing events occurred during the Opening Day ceremonies. Aerial bombs were fired for each of the United States, followed by the unfurling of the Pan-American, Latin American, and U.S. state flags, with the highest towers of the Agricultural Building displaying the U.S. flag. The Electric Tower, which was the highest point in the fairgrounds, displayed the flags of the European colonial powers—England, France, Holland, and Denmark—each in a grouping with the flags of their depen-

dencies.161 It was telling that the Latin American flags had been included with the U.S. state flags. The Latin American nations were seen not as equal to the United States but as equal to each one of its many states. This was also emphasized in the Foreign and State section, where Latin American nation and the U.S. state pavilions were interspersed. Posters produced for the fair also showed this odd state and national pairing, one poster grouping and mixing the pavilions indiscriminately. Such asymmetry reinforced the United States’ dominance at the center of the fairgrounds.162 Implied ownership of the foreign pavilions was perhaps due to the fact that U.S. architects had designed the seven Latin American structures in the remote Foreign and State section. These housed Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Twelve additional Caribbean and Latin American countries also set up exhibitions in the main buildings.163 In the most complete site plan that exists, only six U.S. states and three Latin American nations are shown in the locations where they were eventually built.164 The Canadian pavilion was also located on a remote site, behind the stadium, near the dairy and agricultural buildings on the opposite side of the fairgrounds. This again confirmed Canada’s exclusion from the Pan-American formula. Along the Midway, other nations and dependencies of the Americas were introduced, those that were considered appropriate for an area where cultural stereotypes were displayed. These included the Philippine and Eskimo Villages, Hawaii, and Mexico. Like Chicago’s avenue of curiosities, this Midway was also filled with freak shows, erotic displays, and ethnic-based spectacles. As in New Orleans, Mexico was given the opportunity to represent itself, but with two structures. One was in the Foreign and States section, the other in the Midway, consisting of a complex of buildings forming an open-air patio called “Streets of Mexico.” In New Orleans, Mexico’s courtyard building had presented a view of its military, businessmen, and cultural attachés, and the Mexican Alhambra had displayed the nation’s raw materials. At the Buffalo exposition, the Midway building complex presented a plaza, a restaurant, and a bull-

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fighting ring. It was filled with “folk” scenes presenting stereotypical views of Mexico. President Porfirio Díaz had given the United States permission to display Mexicans in the “Streets of Mexico” exhibit only if it presented a “realistic reproduction of the architecture of a Mexican village” and the general entertainment was a “display of the racial customs and characteristic street scenes of the Mexican people.”165 Harry  F. McGarvie, the creator of the Mexican exhibition, had traveled to Mexico to import “peons, lace-makers, silver workers, cooks . . .”166 However, as historian Robert Rydell points out, “McGarvie’s concession romanticized the Spanish influence in Mexico, emphasized the potential for American investment in the Mexican economy, and stressed the inferiority of the Mexican people.”167 Ironically, the stereotypes of inferiority were displayed despite President Díaz’ attempt to control Mexico’s representation.168 The exposition’s timing, two years after the Spanish-American War, offered an unexpected opportunity to overcome mistrust that had arisen with the United States’ recent foreign policy objectives.169 Whether the exposition had such an effect is hard to say, but the United States did not take long to impose its presence in the Caribbean and Central America. As in Chicago, commercial interests also figured marginally in the fair, despite the fact that this was the greatest participation of the American republics in any U.S. fair to date, totaling twenty-three.170 White wrote: “It may well be said that the original generic scheme for the Exposition, that of joining the three Americas in a unified attempt to show one another their trade resources, seems to be in result far less prominent than was hoped at first . . . the great trade idea upon which the Pan-American was originally based gradually faded and gave place to the idea of an electrical beautification.”171 Other observers believed the fair fell short of its mission of inclusion and equality, one fair visitor noting: As one continues along the straight avenue, the major axis of the fair, there are at his right a number of subordinate buildings irregularly designed and disposed, the round bungalow with yellow walls and conical roof in crimson tiles that denotes Honduras,

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the red and yellow of Cuba, and beyond, the log walls of the Forestry Building. But these are side shows. The exposition proper is in front of us, down the broad vista that is closed by the Electric Tower, and that is opened, we may say, by the four great piers that form the true Propylaea.172

This did not seem to bother White. His opinion, perhaps shared by many, was that the half-hearted inclusion of a few Latin American nations was sufficient to paint a Pan-American picture. “The United States occupies industrially foreground, background, and middle distance,” he wrote. “The other countries fill in the odd corners. The ardent patriot will see no lack of proportion in this; and as there is a hint of Mexico and the Argentine, and very creditable exhibits by Chile and Honduras, we have enough of the sister continent to justify the name. Most of the southern republics are represented in one way or another.”173 It comes as no surprise that the dichotomies that set the “Latins and Anglos” apart were not dissolved at the fair. In fact, they were celebrated. Gendered representations that made reference to North and South America reinforced ethnic differences, as seen in a publication that featured a statue of the Greek god Pan, which was erected in the fairground’s central fountain ensemble (Fig. 1.37). A Latin American and a U.S. American woman are shown adorning the statue on the publication’s cover. Another cartoon depicting Latin America as a woman flirting with Uncle Sam reinforced the paternalistic theme. The two continents were also depicted as racially different, classical women on the cover of Harper’s Weekly, in some cases with strong sexual overtones. An image that highlighted opposing races was chosen as the exposition’s official seal, another example of Beck’s designs, and it depicted two women, a blonde and a brunette, shaped like the continents, each reaching for the other’s hand (Fig. 1.38). This image was mocked on the cover of Thomas Fleming’s popular book Around the “Pan” with Uncle Hank, where the women were replaced with jovial monkeys. The rest of the book was full of racial and ethnic stereotypes. A more pervasive, non–Latin American–specific,

Fig. 1.37. “Pan and the Pan-American,” cover image, produced for the

Pan-American Exposition of 1901, Buffalo, NY. (Collection of Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, used by permission)

Fig. 1.38. Pan-American females, by Raphael Beck. (Collection of Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, used by permission)

free-style Pan-Americanism seemed to have consumed the fair’s propaganda. The still unanswered question, “What is Pan-Americanism?” was best captured in graphic designer Raphael Beck’s painting, A Phantasy of Pan-America, which conveyed a feminized, dreamlike, mystical state. The Singer Sewing Machine Company portrayed the concept with a Greek goddess sewing the continents together, and other images further sexualized the depiction of two women coming together (Figs. 1.39 and 1.40). This query led some to use the term “Pan-American” as a catch-all term that could mean almost anything. The fair’s nickname, “The Pan,” with the elimination of the word America, reinforced this while canceling all references to Latin America. Euro-

pean associations were also made, as with the statue of Pan. Loose associations appeared in playful references to pots and pans, pancake advertisements, and the Midway’s Panopticon. In one unforgettable case, Vice President Roosevelt, while visiting the Midway, named a newborn Indian girl Pan America Roosevelt, or PanAnna-Ettseedo, as one account also reported (Fig. 1.41).174 This was the ultimate case of the hemispheric concept being appropriated and interpreted, and in this case it was a disturbing return to the pan-native theme, the Native-American infant now representing the subject of Pan-American heritage, and Roosevelt, the paternalistic, dominant figure at the fair. Everyone was so distracted by exploring new ways of marketing “the Pan” that any consideration of what the term might mean was submerged, deflected, and diluted. The New Orleans, Chicago, and Buffalo fairs and their design proposals provide views into three distinct city histories in which narratives of regional development and local authenticity played a central part in building a case for holding a hemispheric fair. Although

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Fig. 1.39. Cover illustration, Coral Harp, by Alice Russell Glenny,

for the guide Music at the Pan-American Exposition, Organists, Orchestras, Bands (Buffalo, NY: Pan-American Exposition Co., 1901). (Courtesy of University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, Music Library Collection)

Fig. 1.40. “The Singer Seam Unites Two Continents,” Singer sew-

ing machine advertisement. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

many major U.S. cities proposed world’s fairs, not all could justify the integration of the hemispheric concept into its city’s history. These three cities offered significant trade and transportation nodes or established cultural or political centers that could influence the socalled hemispheric policy then under consideration. Post-Reconstruction New Orleans tried, in the face of competition from Chicago, to position itself as the New South’s principal commercial center and trade hub. The city flaunted its advantageous transportation links with the Caribbean and Latin America and its enviable location at the mouth of the Mississippi River. As competing cities were imagined, and they defended their claims as the hemisphere’s most appropriate and legitimate mythical, cultural, and demographic gateways,

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the dimensions of the hemispheric fair broadened. At the Buffalo exposition, the appropriation of a natural wonder that physically conjoined two nations served as a symbol of North America’s center of gravity, even though Niagara Falls’ natural beauty and power were ultimately associated with the United States rather than shared with Canada. In these two cases, the host city claimed the symbolic value of the hemisphere’s “legitimate center” in order to serve a larger national goal. Chicago was the exception, the exposition to veer furthest from the New Orleans fair. The methods employed to maintain hemispheric specificity at these fairs grew out of still-developing world’s fair conventions. The clever manipulations that took place at the scale of each fairground’s plan and architecture indicate the emergence of a distinct spatial language. Hemisphericism was denoted in three ways: through the selective participation of nations; through the careful selection of the contents displayed at each fair; and with the invocation of hemispheric themes of a common Pan-American heritage explored in the fairs’ architecture, propaganda, and events. The fairs’ organizers could rely on the first two methods to promote the benefits of improved commercial relations. This re-

Fig. 1.41. “Vice President Roosevelt Stands Sponsor for Pan America Roosevelt.” (Published in Around the “Pan” with Uncle Hank, by Thomas Fleming, 1901)

quired the simplest interpretation of commerce, that is, the establishment of a place where desired goods could be exchanged and selected participants could do this. The regularization of this type of activity, it was hoped, would lead to formulation of a lasting hemispheric commercial policy. Yet when new themes of common PanAmerican heritage were introduced or promoted, as in the cases of the Columbian and Buffalo expositions, the outcome was to unravel the U.S.–Latin American commercial bond that was being formed. By 1901, Pan-American architectural interpretations had varied so drastically from city to city that no one theme or style could be isolated as the most appropriate expression of the concept. Mention of the Cotton, the Columbian, or the Pan today do not immediately bring visions of hemispheric unity to mind. At the turn of the twentieth century, the concept was changing from a raw desire to establish U.S. dominance of Latin American markets to an effort to understand how the plurality inherent in the notion of hemispheric unity affected these relations. More importantly, there was an interest in seeing every American republic participate. Toward the final weeks of the Pan-American Exposition, when the Second International Conference of American States

took place in Mexico City (Oct. 22, 1901–Jan. 31, 1902), it was decided that the plan to build a Columbus Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., would require a payment quota system based on population. This attitude contrasted strongly with the brash cultural representations seen at the fairs, where depictions of the Americas reflected the awareness of fair organizers, city officials, and U.S. architects more than the nations involved. The Chicago and Buffalo fairs revealed that their organizers and architects were not interested in expressing U.S.–Latin American relations outside the scope of commerce and trade. In Chicago, they concentrated on elevating the United States as the model nation of the Americas. In Buffalo, they explored the Pan-American theme with architectural strategies that abstracted the concept to the point of dilution. Their inability to entertain the idea of democratic Pan-Americanism, with all nations of the Americas presented equally in a new partnership, challenged the rhetorical concept of PanAmericanism. These early hemispheric fairs introduced a number of self-appointed “Pan-Americans” who worked independently to explore the meaning of Pan-Americanism. The architects examined here were not especially devoted to the concept, even if some seemed ideal candidates. Such figures as Anderson, Buchanan, and Curtis, who were tied to various national projects and worked directly with the U.S. government, passed the baton from one to the next. Through them, the fairs overlapped. Meanwhile, the evolution in 1901 of the Commercial Bureau of American Republics into the International Bureau of the American Republics was taking place. The next development occurred when this organization was transformed into the Pan-American Union upon the inauguration of its new building in 1910. By leaving the world’s fair model behind and turning to an organization and structure dedicated specifically to Pan-Americanism, it became possible for an architect to emerge as a coherent hemispheric advocate.

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2

A RUBBER-FIG TREE FOR THE PATIO America’s Peace Temple, 1907–1913

The visitor seems translated to some strange foreign scene, quaint and remote. Here the eternal tropic summer is maintained throughout the year.1 —JOHN BARRETT

A

T THE INAUGURATION OF THE

Pan-American Union’s new headquarters on April 26, 1910, President William Howard Taft, surrounded by dignitaries from all of the Americas, stood in the building’s interior patio and planted a hybrid fig-andrubber tree to symbolize Pan-American unity (Fig. 2.2). His Eminence, James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore, entered in his flowing cape and blessed the building. Andrew Carnegie proudly looked on, admiring the product of his philanthropy. He compared the building’s beauty to the Taj Mahal, although the loggias that surrounded the patio gave the space a distinctly Spanish appearance, and the pre-Columbian iconography and ornamentation, an exotic flair.2 Large stone slabs on the floor were embedded in the shape of indigenous figures, and gray and red terracotta wainscoting with an Aztec design surrounded the room. Perhaps this and the “abundance of rare varieties of tropical flora” with which the superintendent of the Botanical Garden had supplied the patio prompted Carnegie to make the comparison.3 With sunlight streaming into the patio that day, this momentary theater-in-the-round could not have been better illuminated. The staged rites of diplomacy were performed in full regalia, and they were meant to make an impression not only on the onlookers perched on the balconies and stairwells but also on the people of the Western Hemisphere. Like Curtis’ image of Grant and the Cotton’s tropical gardens, the Pan-American Union’s lush, central patio was designed to frame a picture of a world of adventure and opportunity in the far South. It, too, was framed with tropical plants and barefooted indigenous figures. But this time George Washington’s bust was looming over the space, confirming the centrality of the United States. Architects Albert Kelsey and Paul Philippe Cret designed the structure in which Taft and the others stood.

Fig. 2.1. (facing page) Pan-American Union Building patio, Washing-

ton, D.C., 1910. Albert Kelsey and Paul Philippe Cret (architects), Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (sculptor). (HALIC, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #30615 © The Art Institute of Chicago.)

Fig. 2.2. Andrew Carnegie, William Howard Taft, Elihu Root, and

Cardinal Gibbons, with others posed in Pan American Union Building, Washington, D.C. President Taft plants the rubber-fig tree, April 26, 1910. (Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

The architects had not explored the Pan-American theme before nor had they distinguished themselves as hemispheric enthusiasts. But they won the competition that the organization staged for a new building situated at the corner of 17th Street and Constitution Avenue N.W. in Washington, D.C. Competing architects were asked to express spatially the union of the twentyone member republics identified, at the time, as composing the Western Hemisphere. Kelsey and Cret’s Pan-American architectural design was the product of two phases of development, beginning with a twomonth period in which the competition directive was outlined, design entries were proposed, and the winning scheme selected. This was followed by a threeyear period of design development and construction, in which the building’s principal architectural qualities emerged.4 This line of development continued when the building’s grounds were extended to include a rear Garden Apartment, and later, when other hemispherically themed structures and public spaces were developed on nearby city blocks. Although Cret’s BeauxArts architectural training was most influential in the earlier phase of the competition, the formation of this Pan-American architectural identity was the product of collaboration between the organization’s directorgeneral, John Barrett, and Kelsey, who played the key roles in crafting the United States’ official interpretation of Pan-Americanism. Kelsey would emerge as a dedicated Pan-American architect. Washington’s role at the center of the Pan-American movement was locked in place after it hosted the first International Conference of American States in 1889–1890.5 At the second conference in Mexico City, delegates decided to build a Columbus Library, and U.S. delegates strongly encouraged the choice of Washington as the best site. At the third conference, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1906, the library proposal was expanded to include a “permanent center of information and of interchange of ideas.”6 The delegates hoped to see the Pan-American mission institutionalized and formalized with a representative building. The United States’ leadership in undertaking these efforts was confirmed when U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root solicited funds

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for a new building from Carnegie, who had been the patron of the Peace Palace at The Hague as well as the Central American Court of Justice in Cartago, Costa Rica.7 Although framed as a Pan-American project, this new enterprise was, at its core, a developing U.S.–Latin American relationship, as evident from the manner in which the building was funded. Carnegie offered to pay three-quarters of the one million dollars needed for the building, and additional funds were raised from the Latin American republics in the form of populationbased quotas.8 Hoping for a winning entry from a U.S. architect, Carnegie and Barrett limited the competition submissions to “architects of the American Republics residing in the United States.”9 The goal of awarding the commission to a U.S. architect underlined the proprietary feelings among the competition organizers. As the project had been paid for by one of the most prominent philanthropists in the United States, they may have felt it should be a building by, for, and of the United States. Even though the word “union” was located front and center in the institution’s name, a constant struggle continued between the projection of a democratic partnership, with each nation equally represented, and the divisive cultural oppositions that continued to set the United States and Latin America apart. As had occurred with the hemispheric fairs, Kelsey and Cret began with a familiar architectural model: the Beaux-Arts civic building type with a symmetrical façade and plan (Fig. 2.3). At the time of the competition, this led the architects to reinforce the perceived cultural differences of North and South on the building’s façade. More inventive interventions would come later in the building’s interior and rear spaces when they explored multiple representations of the Western Hemisphere in rooms that conveyed the process of individual nations coming together to fulfill the Pan-American agenda with a tropical aesthetic. These depictions are found in all the building’s public spaces, in its central patio, library reading room, conference rooms, hallways, and grand assembly hall. Because the building’s design was fixed with the winning design entry, Pan-American architectural expression could only be explored with building finishes, furnishings, lighting effects, and hemispheric

Fig. 2.3. Pan-American Union, illustration of the winning entry. (Pub-

lished in American Competitions, No. 745, Plate 95–96 [Philadelphia, PA: T Square Club, 1907])

iconography. When they exhausted these possibilities, the architects extended outdoors with the design of the Blue Aztec Garden and Pool and the Garden Apartment. They faced the challenge of maintaining a prominent civic external presence on the street while introducing an invented Pan-American architecture in the Union’s interior and rear spaces. Kelsey and Cret expanded upon the visual language and cultural iconography that had been explored with the hemispheric fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They used the same type of iconography and aesthetic effects to represent the PanAmerican themes. These referenced the indigenous past, the Columbian discovery myth, the Spanish colonial legacy, the independence of the New World, and the imagined landscape of the tropics. The tropical theme was an extension of the central patio that the

competition rules had recommended. The tropical aesthetic the architects introduced was an Orientalizing tactic. It was meant to insert the element of exoticism into the building. In Kelsey and Barrett’s communications, references to the tropics were used not only as a synecdoche to represent all things Latin American but also to suggest a cultural essence, or even that the “far South” was a static cultural landscape. As John Barrett would have it, “The eternal tropic summer is maintained throughout the year.” There is a suggestion here of homogeneity among the southern races as well as a reference to a negative stereotype of the concept of time in Latin cultures that implicitly treats it as the opposite of the progressive concept of time associated with the United States. Although the theme of commonality was also loaded, the tropics were a contested regional reference and have been the subject of postcolonial studies. Defined by imaginary lines that wrap around the circumference of the globe, and growing out of a colonialist discourse, Pan-America’s tropical valence aligned the United

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States with empires that had colonized the tropical lands of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Northern Australia. The very classification of the “tropics” was problematic, as the term carried strong cultural and racial associations. Furthermore, the imaginary lines that define the tropics are shifting, albeit at a very slow rate. Scholars have pointed out that it is the term’s historic connection to colonialism and the racial and cultural characterizations often associated with the “tropics” that give the term its ideological resonance. As the historian Chee Kien Lai stated, “The visceral imaginations of the tropics . . . [have been] cast in terms of resource and abundance. . . . The idea of abundant, non-Western nature is thus embedded with all of its symbolic, material and political constructs, over those of gender and race for the colonial regions in the tropics.”10 The link between the enervating tropics and empires persisted, along with racial ideologies that located inhabitants of the tropics low on the developmental ladder. In these terms, Latins would translate to warm-blooded, impulsive peoples from hot climates and Anglos to cool, rational northern peoples. The installation of a tropical stage at the center of the Pan-American Union Building was an ideological provocation. Barrett, Kelsey, and Cret did not hide their presumptions and projections about U.S.–Latin American relations and how they felt the ideals of Pan-Americanism could best be expressed in spatial form. Kelsey emerged as the “Pan-American” leader, working to steer the project in the right direction in response to the organization’s need for creative participation as it was formulating its public identity. At an early stage before the design competition, there was a campaign to award the commission to architect John Merven Carrère because of his Brazilian birth and because he had served as the chief architect for Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition of 1901. The competition organizers believed Carrère would be a leader in guiding this “Pan-American” architectural exercise. It did not take long, however, for Kelsey to transform himself into a hemispheric enthusiast. This occurred during the competition and construction phases, and it continued into the late 1920s, when he oversaw a second architectural competition

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sponsored by the Pan-American Union for a Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in the Dominican Republic. Kelsey spent more than two decades addressing the question of how “Latins and Anglos” could be collectively represented by Pan-American architectural forms. His self-guided learning process had its roots in his exploration of how the tropical design theme could give architectural form to a Pan-American identity. Kelsey took many cues from Barrett, who also played a significant role in the building’s post-competition transformation. Originally a journalist, Barrett had worked as a war correspondent during the SpanishAmerican War. He was the seventh director of the International Bureau of American Republics (1907–1920), having served before that as U.S. diplomat to Argentina, Colombia, and Panama. Upon his arrival at the Union, he had founded the Pan-American Society.11 Barrett followed a long line of directors, dating back to William Eleroy Curtis.12 The architectural transformation process that took place after the competition was won can be viewed as an effort to imbue the building with special meaning that reflected current and past efforts of all the Union’s supporters. The hemispheric fairs brought to light the desire for a lasting formalized entity to represent the PanAmerican movement. The Pan-American Union Building could express this shared mission, in support of both the institution and its permanent edifice. Earlier U.S. attempts to provide information to Latin American and U.S. commercial interests, with the goal of encouraging, easing, and thereby increasing and controlling trade, were now expanded into a wide-ranging and far-reaching enterprise. In contrast to the hemispheric fairs, whose organizers depended on the selection, invitation, and voluntary participation of a variable number of nations, the Pan-American Union, as a state enterprise, positioned itself as the appropriate institution to represent the republics of the Western Hemisphere with equality implied among member nations. The dignitaries attending the inaugural rituals in 1910 must have believed that this organization was well prepared to carry out its expanded mission. But was the rubber-fig tree they were planting meant to symbolize

a newly envisioned Pan-American relationship, a strategic yet accurate formalization of the successful union of the North’s industry and the South’s resources? Or did it represent a forced hybridization between Latin America and the United States that had little chance of bearing fruit? This symbolic tree was emblematic of the Union building, which materialized this unresolved tension between representing an idealized relationship among all the nations of the Western Hemisphere and an expedient, opportunistic relationship between the United States and Latin America.

The Competition Andrew Carnegie favored architectural-design competitions as a process for selecting a building’s design because he felt it gave “young men a chance.” Yet he had second thoughts about the competition process when the outcome did not suit his intentions.13 This occurred with the competition for the Peace Palace at The Hague when a French entry was favored over a U.S. entry. After some deliberation, the decision was made to hold a “mixed” competition for the Pan-American Union, which would combine invited and solicited submissions. It was at this time that restrictions were placed on who could enter the competition. Latin Americans would not be allowed to submit designs unless they lived and practiced in the United States. Complaints from the southern delegates may have led to a letter dated March 30, 1907, to the Brazilian delegate Felipe Pardo, probably from Barrett, explaining that there were two reasons for this decision.14 The first was that Latin American participation could delay the project by a year; the bureau’s pressing need to relocate was mentioned. As for the second, it was assumed that very few Latin American architects had any connections with U.S. contractors and builders and that Latin Americans were unfamiliar with “all varieties of North American climate and construction which must be understood to make any plans submitted practicable.”15 In April 1907, the competition program was published in the bureau’s Monthly Bulletin, in American Architect, and in a few other architectural publications. The program was also

sent that month to various U.S. senators, representing principally northwestern and southern states, to encourage them to contact architects to participate in the competition.16 There is no indication that there was a special effort made to attract Latin American architects who were practicing in the United States, which could possibly have occurred through the delegates with whom the bureau was already in close contact. In early April, Kelsey and Cret began discussing a professional partnership in response to the competition and other projects. Kelsey told Cret, “with my influential friends and you [sic] talent we might make a successful combination that would be mutually advantageous for years to come.”17 This partnership was helpful, as Kelsey was an architect practicing in Philadelphia, whereas Cret had only immigrated in 1903 and this would be his first major commission. He had graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and came to the United States to become a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. The competition program identified three kinds of spaces required for the new building: administrative offices, an assembly hall, and a Columbus Library.18 The bureau stated that the library was to be the largest single resource for information about the Americas. The bureau had been working on creating such a library, and by 1907, with its general operations rapidly growing and the diplomatic functions of its representatives, along with its staff of editors, translators, librarians, and specialists, the organization’s work had expanded to such an extent that it required a larger headquarters. With the design of its new headquarters, the Pan-American Union had the opportunity to present an architectural expression of this expanded mission and craft a carefully articulated public image. The term “bureau” in the old name had referenced its role as an administrative unit of the U.S. government. The inclusion of the word “union” in the new name suggested an entirely different direction. Two references in the competition rules are noteworthy in pointing to the evolution of this new hemispheric relationship. One was a reference to the new building as the organization’s “home.” Kelsey and Cret’s winning solution responded to this suggestion.

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They presented their building as a comfortable meeting place for delegates, rather than a typical Washington public office building. This proved instrumental in the design’s success. The second reference was to suggest the inclusion of the patio. The brief stated: “If the Spanish or Latin feature of a patio is included, it should have a sliding or rolling glass roof, in part, for protection against inclement weather or cold, but capable of being opened in summer, while the ground surface of the patio should permit of the placing of trees, flowers, and fountains.”19 Copies of the letters exchanged by Root and Carnegie were appended to the published competition brief to expose readers to the spirit of philanthropic exchange behind the project and to elevate the building’s importance as part of a larger unifying enterprise. Submissions were due on June 15, 1907, giving architects a little over two months to prepare a design. The competition was lauded as the largest in U.S. history at that time.20 It yielded some 130 entries, of which 78 were “seriously” considered.21 Among these were the submissions of

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Fig. 2.4. The McMillan Commission Plan for Washington, D.C., 1901. (Courtesy of the National Capital Planning Commission)

eight invited architects, including Carrère and Hastings.22 Over half of the registrants were from New York City, twelve came from Pennsylvania, and twelve from Washington, D.C.23 The competitors were also asked to choose the jury members by letter-ballot, and this resulted in the board of judges that included Charles F. McKim, Henry Hornbostel, and Austin W. Lord. All the winning entries, much to the bureau’s surprise, came from the “open” category rather than from the invited architects. The entry of Albert Kelsey and Paul Philippe Cret, Associate Architects of Philadelphia, was awarded first prize. Three entries from New York City placed: Edward Pearce Casey and Arthur Dillon (first prize), John Russell Pope (second prize), and Peter De Gelleke and William T. L. Armstrong (third prize).24 Kelsey and Cret’s winning design, as well as many of the published entries, conformed to the monumental character of Washington’s public buildings, especially

the neighboring white marble-clad palatial buildings. Washington’s “City Beautiful” proponents, a group of architects and urbanists who took inspiration from the Columbian Exposition’s White City, felt the Pan-American Union would solidify an important corner of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1792 master plan.25 The proponents Fig. 2.5. Aerial view from the top of Washington Monument, showing

Pan-American Union, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Red Cross Building. Harris and Ewing, photographer. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

of the McMillan Commission Plan also supported this choice, and two existing buildings were demolished in preparation for erection of the new building in this prime spot (Fig. 2.4).26 Its location reinforced the intersection of the Washington Mall, an extension of the Capitol Building’s axis, and the White House’s eastern lawn (Fig. 2.5). In its placement, the Union building reinforced the overlapping parklands that gave this civic topography its distinctive character. The site was also close to the location where the Three Americas Exposition was proposed twenty years earlier.

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In her monograph The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret, Elizabeth Grossman depicted Cret as the lead architect in this association with Kelsey, writing that Kelsey attributed the winning scheme to Cret’s parti, which was based on the “grand house” theme. Grossman identified this theme with the use of the cour d’honneur plan and other references to the building’s palatial scale and character, which she notes in the library’s reading room and the assembly hall. The inverted-U plan type was a well-known Beaux-Arts model for civic buildings.27 In the thirteen plans that were published, the patio Fig. 2.6a. Pan-American Union, first- and second-floor plans.

(Published in Barrett, The Pan-American Union: Peace, Friendship, Commerce, 92–93)

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scheme appeared in only a few submissions, but none handled the cour d’honneur in the same manner. Kelsey and Cret’s winning design scheme was also distinctive in the way the two most important functions were skillfully integrated with the patio. The missions of informational exchange (library) and cultural exchange and diplomacy (assembly and meeting rooms) were at the core of their winning design. The two-story, steelframed, marble-clad building was compactly organized around this central open-air space so that all of its principal functions could be easily reached (Figs. 2.6a and 2.6b). This was the perfect diagram for an institution that trumpeted unity. The inverted U acted like embracing arms and it invited the Pan-American Union’s member nations into its core. The patio was flanked

5

4

at ground level by ascending staircases, setting Kelsey and Cret’s design apart from the others. Records of the general public’s perception of the design and the manner in which the patio was portrayed in the press reveal that it was the building’s most engaging element. According to Barrett, however, the patio did not command attention as the design’s central motif but only served as an approach to the Hall of the Americas on the second floor, which he considered to be the real center.28 For the organization, this grand space, the Hall of the Americas, was considered the key feature because it served numerous ritual functions promoting the goals Fig. 2.6b. Diagrams for floor plans of Pan-American Union. Drawing by author.

3 9

8 7

2

10

6

1 GROUND FLOOR

SECOND FLOOR

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1 North and South America Statues 2 Aztec Fountain and Patios 3 Library and Latin American Model 4 Xochipilli, Aztec Garden and Pool 5 Garden Apartment Loggia 6 National Escutcheons 7 Gallery of Patriots 8 Hall of the Americas (assembly hall) 9 Governing Board Room 10 Diplomatic Waiting Room

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of multinational unity and cultural exchange, the stated purposes of the building. The strength of Kelsey and Cret’s design was how their diagram provided an efficient and logical framework into which the building’s components fit neatly. In this rational configuration, the two arms were devoted to offices and book-stack spaces that ran parallel to the stairs on both sides. The Columbus Library was located beyond the patio, directly opposite and on axis with the entry vestibule. A model of Latin America in the reading room was also located on this axis. The library’s ground-level location indicated it was for general use. The two sets of stairs led to the Assembly Hall, which corresponded to the library below. Second-story offices and boardrooms were placed so as to correspond with the offices below. This diagram helped to make sense of all the building’s functions and to distinguish between public and private spaces and those dedicated to visitors and delegates. Grossman aptly analyzed the manner in which such spatial logic was influenced by the Beaux-Arts design pedagogy. Given Pan-Americanism’s history of enlisting hemispheric loyalists of all persuasions, it is of particular importance to examine the contributions that led to the building’s final design. How, then, were all these tightly controlled and neatly interwoven spaces manipulated to express the Pan-American mission, and to what extent was this well-known and seemingly constraining building type altered in the process? One answer concerns the way the organizers of the competition envisioned Latin Americans using the building. Grossman suggests that another reason for the success of the diagram was the way it addressed the competition’s call for a domestic quality. But the domestic reference is complicated when Barrett’s interpretation is considered. He described the scenario of national representatives meeting as “children in the house of their father.”29 This colonial trope, which infantilized the non-U.S. republics, affirmed the United States’ position at the head of the table. After all, the U.S. secretary of state, even if a figurehead, was to lead the group. Although the domestic theme apparently satisfied the bureau, the role it played when the jurors

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made their recommendations is less clear. Because no record of the jury’s three-day deliberation survives, it is uncertain which elements distinguished Kelsey and Cret’s design from the others. The first extensive article that featured their design, published in 1913 in Architectural Record, implied that the “germ of the executed building,” apparently the winning device, was the superimposition of the Hall of the Americas on the Columbus Library. Kelsey and Cret’s design was the only published entry to do this.30 If the jury’s main criterion for choosing Kelsey and Cret’s design was that it represented the bureau’s principal mission to the public in an efficient and effective manner, then their design presented the best solution. The domestic theme, however, played a much more important role in the design’s transformation. Barrett would refer to the Pan-American Union Building as resembling a residence of significant stature. Yet its exterior presence is clearly more civic than domestic. Barrett’s reading was linked to a suggestion he made that there was a parallel between this new building and the White House, an implication that is revealing. He wrote: It was therefore determined to make the building nearer the type of the residence than the impersonal public building .  .  . when the representatives of the various countries pass the threshold they will have the impression of entering their own house . . . [they] may have the impression of receiving guests in their own residences. . . . To this end the whole building, while of a distinctively monumental character in keeping with its noble environment, has been infused with what might be called a sense of stately domesticity, as in certain palaces that express their character as habitations while they stand for some pre-eminent public purpose. The near neighbor of this building, the White House, is a felicitous instance of this.31

Barrett took the connection to the White House one step further when he stated that this permanent home of the Pan-American Union “practically makes Washington

the international capital of the twenty-one American nations.”32 The complex of Pan-American Union buildings that later emerged, still associated with this stately palace but expanding to other parts of the city, resembled a campus or mini capital city—a capital of the Americas within the capital of the United States, complete with its government structure and a grand house. The reference to the White House, however, was better suited to Barrett’s Garden Apartment, later erected behind the Pan-American Union Building, since he was the presumptive president of this hemispheric capital.

After the Competition Given the nature of architectural competitions, winning submissions always require subsequent design development, as design entries can hardly encompass all the details of a project. Once Kelsey and Cret’s selection was confirmed, they and Barrett agreed that the building’s architecture needed to more specifically reflect the organization’s mission. A number of sculptors and artists were brought in to collaborate on portions of the building. Although the building design was considered final, and reflected Cret’s hand, changes were suggested and set in place under Kelsey’s direction. In his Yucatecan Scenes and Sounds, written in 1919, Kelsey noted that he was appointed permanent architect after his and Cret’s association was dissolved. “I went to Yucatan in quest of ideas and local color .  .  . to obtain ideas to be used in the embellishment and completion of the Pan American garden at Washington. The Pan American buildings and their general garden layout had been designed and executed in collaboration with Professor Paul P. Cret, to whose skill and talent the success of the work is so largely due . . .” he writes. “In accordance with the original idea I resolved .  .  . to make these buildings and grounds increasingly interesting and more and more reminiscent of the aboriginal art of the Western Hemisphere.”33 Correspondence between the two architects reveals the mounting tension that ensued. Kelsey wrote to Cret in France and complained about the minimal time Cret spent on the project.34 In these letters, Kelsey informed Cret of the changes and

Fig. 2.7. Charles Matlack Price’s comparative photographs. (Published in “The Pan-American Union and Its Annex, Washington, D.C.,” Architectural Record 34 [Nov 1913]: 443)

adjustments he was making, noting how the building was gradually becoming more Latin. At first glance, it is difficult to detect differences between the winning design, which was published in the Bulletin of the International Bureau of the American Republics in May 1908, and the completed building, which was illustrated upon its dedication in 1911 in Barrett’s book The Pan American Union: Peace, Friendship, Commerce. A 1913 article, written by architectural critic Charles Matlack Price in Architectural Record, identi-

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fied some of the critical transformations that took place over the course of the building’s construction (Fig. 2.7). These three texts help reconstruct the motivations and short-lived proposals that did not ultimately figure into the finished building. Price’s extensive review of the transformation process drew heavily on Barrett’s text. Yet it provided some never-before-seen images that allowed readers to follow the changes. Particularly useful is the way the article juxtaposed three types of images, showing the competition drawings, the working drawings, and the as-built photographs. This arrangement illustrated both the extensive and the subtle changes that took place. Grossman’s biography of Cret makes minimal mention of this process but stresses instead that Cret was not interested in “symbology” and that Kelsey took the lead role during the design development phase, working closely with Barrett and the building’s contractors and artists. Price’s article is not only a record of the design process that is often overlooked; it also captures the moment when the building’s new identity came to fruition. The transformation that followed benefited from the Beaux-Arts attention applied to the plan. Price alluded to this when he stated, “It is one thing to follow the rules skillfully, it is quite another to add life and interest to the most perfect of skeletons.”35 Cret’s plan

was seen as a skillful application of the rules set out by the program, ordered spatially, but it was also understood that the design lacked visual and iconographic interest—“character” in Beaux-Arts rhetoric—once the competition was won. Price went so far as to call the design “a well enough mannered but quite commonplace or nondescript building.” This is reminiscent of the way the architect August C. Esenwein regarded his proposed plan and section for the Main Building of the original Pan-American Exposition on Cayuga Island. According to Esenwein, an architectural competition would later resolve the elevation. Any style would do, as long as the hierarchical structure that set hemispheric order in place did not change. Correspondence and propaganda pertaining to the Pan-American Union make it clear that from the outset Latin American dignitaries were regarded as visitors to the bureau, not residents. As such, they should be welcomed into a setting they would find comfortable. This attitude toward Latin Americans’ reception of the building profoundly influenced the way it was transformed. A visitor today may regard the building as no more than an alluring advertisement for the “exotic far South.” But the literature also indicates that Barrett’s intention was to make Union members feel at home. Barrett worked earnestly with the architects to create within the building an atmosphere of familiarity for the visiting delegates. They should be able to identify with the architecture, he believed, if the building were to serve as a vehicle that made delegates amenable to the compromise and cooperation of diplomacy. Indeed, if the headquarters felt like a home away from home it might serve to soothe any sense of unease, or even distrust. To do this, the architects proceeded to “Latinize” the building with the goal of “Pan-Americanizing” the delegates. Barrett’s idea was to make this U.S. building reflect the delegates’ cultures so that they might be inclined to bend to U.S. policy as compliant Pan-American subjects. Fig. 2.8. Rendering showing the North American and South American

statues of the Pan-American Union Building. (Published in Barrett, The Pan-American Union: Peace, Friendship, Commerce)

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The transformation process consisted of adjusting the building’s exterior and interior, as well as detailed planning of all furnishings, sculpture, and iconography. “Each detail, as well as the sum total of all,” Price wrote, “was changed in the working drawings, and even in the work in process of execution, to details at once appropriate, characteristic, and expressive of the origins and purposes of the specific building which they adorn.”36 Two alterations were made on the advice of McKim, one of the competition jurors and, more importantly, a member of the McMillan Plan Commission. First, 16  feet of height were added to the elevation, making the building a vertical rather than horizontal composition. Second, the building was set back 40  feet from the street, compressing the garden space behind the main building but providing a grander approach. These changes emphasized monumentality and helped the building reinforce the classical authority of Washington’s civic architecture. The internal transformation, however, ran contrary to McKim’s advice. Although the architects treated the building’s exterior like a BeauxArts shell onto which they could liberally impress a Pan-American countenance, they explored a completely different identity inside. Kelsey and Cret’s original design treated the building’s façade like a billboard that conveyed Pan-American unity; the words “North America” and “South America” were carved on either side of the main entrance (Fig. 2.8). Although the North American continent contains Canada, the United States, and Mexico, here it was represented only by the United States. Manipulation of the building’s façades after the competition occurred at the level of decorative detail in the hope of delivering a more nuanced interpretation of this geopolitical division. As Price demonstrated, classical motifs, which appeared in the competition drawings, were transformed to reflect indigenous cultures. The transformation of the façades communicated a stark division that cast the United States and Latin America as separate entities. The architects reinforced the division with two prominent, richly decorated pylons and statues that underscored the continental pairing (Fig. 2.9). The third-place winners, De Gelleke

Fig. 2.9. Pan-American Union Building, pylon view. (Library of Congress)

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and Armstrong, also used the binary device. Moreover, Kelsey and Cret’s divisive references extended to racial distinctions between European and Indian races in the building’s iconography, materializing an implicit developmental history of racial evolution. This duality was elaborated in anecdotal friezes overhead and other ornamental features. Most prominent of all was the manner in which two contrasting female statues in front of the pylons were interpreted in the organization’s literature. Barrett described them with an unabashed deterministic language: In each a draped female figure represents the genius of its division of the Western Hemisphere; each cherishes with maternal affection a nude boy approaching adolescence. These boys typify the youthful character of their respective portions of the World. In the North American group, the boy, strikingly alert in feature and action, expresses the more energetic spirit of the fully awakened North. The figure of “South America,” while young and strong, has a softer and more sensuous quality, expressive of tropical ease and luxuriance.37

Barrett also identified a dreamy disposition in the South American adolescent’s gaze, which he attributed to innocent wonderment and uncertainty about things to come. The female statues were part of the original competition drawings, but the adolescent boys were later additions. The architectural device of flanking an entrance with statues is an ancient tradition and can be read as part of a classical language. In the context of colonial architecture, this device raises a red flag. It is not unlike Edwin Lutyen’s design for the Viceroy’s House in Delhi (1913–1930). Lutyen’s twentieth-century use of this device was meant to represent the colonizer and the colonized: Great Britain was represented as male, and colonized British India as female. At the PanAmerican Union, presenting parallel maternal scenes was a way of alluding to similar yet different natures. The panels above the two female sculptures on the main elevation present shallow reliefs that depict parallel heroic assertions of independence. The architects

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referenced one of the most resonant themes of PanAmerican heritage: independence from the Old World. One panel depicts Washington bidding farewell to his generals at the close of the American Revolution. The other depicts the equally decisive moment when José de San Martín met Bolívar at Guayaquil and relinquished his leadership.38 The three central arches are flanked by two decorative designs that further emphasize the North and South America division. The one that corresponds with the north continent contains a figure of an infant of the “Caucasian race,” and the one that corresponds with the south continent contains a figure of an “American Indian type.”39 In totality, four sets of opposing pairs are established before the visitor even enters the building: alert/languorous youths; Continental Americanism/South Americanism; Washington/Bolívar; and Caucasian/American Indian. As if division had not been stressed enough, the façade also provided depictions of an eagle and a condor, symbols of the United States and Latin America respectively. The attempt to Pan-Americanize the design resulted in some perplexing articulations. The pylon’s cornice, for example, contains pre-Columbian stars that alternate with stone-carved rosettes. The stars are enclosed with circles that suggest an Aztec design.40 The star was reportedly used because it was identified as a symbol common to nine American republics.41 Apparently, the design was proposed after the stonecutters had already begun carving the rosettes in place. Price captured these moments, writing, “Note the ‘dainty’ Italian character of this detail, and the total absence of aboriginal motives, which were later introduced. Here was a project for an attractive building, not a building of character. . . . The heads of ‘British Lions’ on the centres of the pylons were eliminated. . . . Abolished, too, were all the French school ‘blocks’ and centering motives and other draughtsmen’s devices.”42 Rearticulated surfaces are seen in the interior spaces. The introduction of aboriginal motifs in place of classical motifs was an attempt to reinforce the American antiquity narrative, although the result was still a building that is starkly Beaux-Arts and classical: the Indian was in the details. This is a case of redefining classicism with new terms, of branding a

classical structure with pre-Columbian symbols. Was Kelsey’s intention to Pan-Americanize Western architecture, or to classicize the Native? The architects did not seem to think systematically about either. Rather, they chose to alter the building without proposing a new version of classical architecture or a Europeanized pre-Columbian aesthetic. This was a case of Western architectural ideas selectively and symbolically ornamented with indigenous motifs to construct multiculturalism from a European perspective. Through the extended period of transformation and invention, and with design interventions like this, Kelsey and Cret and their clients attempted to make their goals clear to the world and, perhaps as important, to themselves. Not all observers, of course, viewed the New World through the frame the Pan-American Union was establishing. Representatives of Latin America who agreed to take part in the Pan-American Union and to participate in carrying out its mission did not choose to reject these formulations outright, but they were well aware of other hemispheric conceptions. They would have been exposed to the Cuban writer and revolutionary José Martí’s most noted work, “Our America” (“Nuestra América,” 1891). Martí’s vision of an American continent upheld the values of the Latin American culture he strove to preserve, values that he felt rose above the capitalist materialism of the United States. Martí wrote some of his most important essays between 1881 and 1895 while living as a political refugee within what he called “the monster’s entrails” (las entrañas del monstruo), the United States of America. He would have depicted an entirely different representation of North and South America in the Pan-American Union’s principal façade. Martí formulated his vision of America while witnessing firsthand the formulation of U.S.-defined Pan-Americanism as a participant in the First International Conference of American States in Washington, D.C. He addressed the conference as a visitor, and the delegates acknowledged Martí in their 1908 time-capsule ceremony, when the new building’s cornerstone was laid. Among important documents marking the organization’s development, they included examples of Martí’s writings.

The warning Martí broadcast as he saw, during his U.S. visit, the imperialist “colossus of the North” contemplate the annexation of Cuba presaged other interventions, in particular the United States’ growing presence in Panama, which occurred shortly after Martí’s death in the Spanish-American War. The Pan-American Union had only just brought the tropics to Washington, D.C., when the United States found itself in the southern jungles of the Isthmus of Panama. U.S. Americans began construction of the Panama Canal in 1906, and it was completed in 1914. This led to three celebratory world’s fairs: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, and Panama City’s Exposición Nacional de Panamá (New Orleans attempted to join in the bidding but did not follow through with a proposal). The Panama Canal’s history parallels the design and construction of the Pan-American Union.43 This was a critical period for the organization as it asserted its agenda throughout the Americas. With the real estate it secured in Washington, D.C., and with the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone (also called the American Zone) secured in Panama, the institution was poised to grow in the years to come, and it did so rapidly through the 1920s and 1930s. The organization’s U.S.-dominant arrangement lasted until member states began to challenge it, beginning as early as the Fifth International Congress of the American Republics in Rio de Janeiro in 1923. Since the PAU’s inception, the U.S. secretary of state had automatically assumed the post of director of the governing board. Historian Roberto Herrera presents a fascinating point-by-point account of this transition, which began when Colombia suggested a democratic format for choosing the director.44 Latin American members demanded a restructuring of the voting procedures, the committee structures, and the protocols for choosing the director, which chipped away at the United States’ dominance and forced it to live up to the organization’s call for equality for all.45 The organization was further transformed in 1948 when it was restructured as the Organization of American States at the time that the term “Inter-American” began to replace “Pan-American,” which had increasingly come to be regarded as a

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were to look toward the head but should never expect to occupy the father’s seat. Over time, Latin American nations helped reconstruct a more perfect American union, despite its imperfect beginnings.

Transforming the “Latins” with Patio and Pool

Fig. 2.10. Bronze entrance door, Pan-American Union (Reproduced

with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

code word for “Yankee imperialism.” Developing their own Pan-America, or Nuestra Pan-América, at the PanAmerican Union required that delegates assert ownership of a building into which they were initially invited as guests. They entered a space designed to both welcome and placate them, and sat at a table where they

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Barrett and his architects reached into the realm of theatrical effect as they sought to construct a transformative experience for the benefit of Latin American delegates. They searched for effects to communicate the birth of the new Pan-American spirit, which was materialized in this new building. They hoped to see Latin Americans transformed into true Pan-American subjects as they entered and used the building. Barrett felt this could be instrumental in “sealing the deal” between the United States and its Latin American neighbors. The tropical elements with which the architects worked consisted of carefully selected finishes and special effects: tile work, relief panels, lighting, water, plants, and statuary. This architectural narrative began at the bronze entry gates and continued into the overgrown patio. It was later extended to the rear Blue Aztec Garden and Pool, and the colorful Garden Apartment loggia (Figs. 2.10, 2.11, and 2.12). Creating an artificial environment was a novel idea in Washington, given that subtropical Florida and Texas are the only U.S. regions that approximate the tropics, identified as the territory lying between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Moreover, this was also novel for the people from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, which exist outside this region; the same is true for the United States and Canada. Tropical imagery imparted an assertion of imperial prerogative over the tropics (particularly in the classical context of the Washington Mall). The completed building read like a peculiar architectural hybrid (rubber-fig and all) and clearly communicated the United States’ implied control over the nations to its southeast. In correspondence and writings about the building, Barrett justified the tropical theme as something that could inspire the delegates. This was not an attempt

Fig. 2.11. Patio and Aztec Fountain, Pan-American Union Building.

(Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

Fig. 2.12. View of ceiling detail in vestibule of Pan-American Union

Building. (Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

to acculturate Latin Americans to the United States, the process whereby a dominant, usually native, group culturally influences an immigrant group. Acculturation typically implies the loss or uprooting of the immigrant group’s own culture. Instead there was an implicit effort to get Latin Americans to identify with the Pan-American construct, as the U.S.-dominated organization defined it. The approach taken is more appropriately described as an anticipated form of transculturation: cultural change induced by the introduction of elements of foreign culture. This occurred by painting a picture, for the benefit of the Latin Americans, of a presumed known or shared culture. These constructed tropics would have seemed foreign to Chil-

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eans and Canadians alike, but the U.S. presumption was that all Latin Americans would identify with this scenographic evocation of tropical America. In 1947, the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz coined the term “transculturation” to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultural practices.46 Ortiz coined this term because it described the phenomenon of neoculturation—the idea that the formation of new cultural practices and conventions occurs during the process of transitioning from one culture to another. This concept best describes the inventive nature of the Pan-American movement, especially when one considers the imaginative formation of hemispheric subjects visible in later projects. Barrett and Kelsey used poetic license to project elements that they thought reflected the neocultural outcome of this new hemispheric relationship. They also projected a distinct vision of the tropics—a blue Caribbean setting that exuded a peaceful state of tranquility—perhaps to underscore the themes of neutrality and calm waters under benign U.S. protection. In contrast to Ortiz’ ethnographic study centered on tobacco and sugar production and the effect that Spanish colonialism had on the indigenous populations of Cuba, Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman bring together a series of pertinent studies that help conceptualize what occurred here. In Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, they call attention to the tendency to accept Caribbean characteristics as representative of all Latin America, which is seen in the transformation of the Pan-American Union and its garden. Yet as they examine cases of “ideological fiction with which the dominant (Anglo and European) cultures trope Latin American and U.S. Latino/a identities and cultures,” they also point out how Latinos also turn their own cultures into tropes with these frameworks.47 The transformative process in Washington occurred with the knowledge that Latin Americans had projected similar views of themselves in a number of world’s fair pavilions, as seen with the Mexican Alhambra in New Orleans. Subsequent architectural projects that developed when the Latin Americans attained greater control of the organization

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did not center on the same tropical-classical themes, although other Pan-American heritage themes were liberally employed. The peculiarities of the way in which on-site design decisions unfolded are important to consider in this analysis. This is especially so when considering Kelsey’s pedantic nature, visible in his own self-guided “tropical” training process. Furthermore, Barrett was very involved in the process, and he saw some of the works of the collaborating artists for the first time as they were being installed. This is not to suggest that Kelsey did not take his role as a cultural interpreter seriously, but to assert that the collage of ideas that resulted points as much to broader ideological constructions in the process of formulation as to Kelsey’s passion for the subject of Pan-Americanism. After winning the competition, Kelsey, plans in hand, sailed to Cuba and to the Yucatán Peninsula and other parts of Mexico to view “original” examples of “tropical architecture.” He also visited Mexico City’s museums to gain further insights into “Latin cultures.” His information-gathering expedition enabled him to work out methods to transform the European classical design into a quintessential Pan-American monument. When he returned to Philadelphia, Kelsey began to consult travel publications and books on Latin American archaeology. He visited the collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Natural History Museum in New York, and the National Museum in Washington. Even before Kelsey’s return to the United States, he had begun to alter his plans for the building. A chance encounter with the French architect Émile Bénard, the architect of the new Legislative Palace in Mexico City, resulted in Kelsey’s recommendation that the patio be amplified by 40  feet in length. Kelsey’s voyage of discovery was a crash course on pre-Columbian architecture, and Kelsey dedicated his book on the Yucatán to Barrett to thank him for this introduction to a new world. The result of Kelsey’s new insights is visible in the extent to which the cour d’honneur plan type of the Union building was altered and the tropical effect extended through its core. This process occurred princi-

pally at the ground level, and it followed the building’s main axis, from the front entrance to the rear garden. This horizontal trajectory dismissed, and altogether countered, the prominence that the central core of this plan type usually attains. The patio was a memorable and widely used space; many noted its dappled light and alluring features. Yet the building’s richly finished vestibule preempted the space, and the extension of the rear gardens proved to be equally enticing. One could traverse the building’s public spaces, starting at the entrance and reaching the rear garden, with the tropical signifiers acting as way-finding devices. Kelsey and Cret relied heavily on water and light to dramatize this effect and to maintain the scenographic theme, constructing a procession that recalled some of the world’s fair spectacles. Kelsey was familiar with Philadelphia designer Fred W. Darlington’s electric fountains, having published his work in The Architectural Annual in 1900.48 The tropical aesthetic was subdued in the Union’s Columbus Library. Kelsey’s series of special effects in their totality countered the centrality and prominence of the cour d’honneur: the building’s spatial climax did not culminate with the fountain. A number of the effects were only temporarily in operation and some were never installed. Today, with the relocation of the Columbus Library to the Pan-American Union Annex building and the conversion of the former library space into the Sala Bolívar, this sequential effect has been lost (Figs. 2.13 and 2.14). As one approaches the building, the tropical theme emanates from tripartite bronze entry gates, their elaborate metalwork presenting the letter “A” (for Americas) engulfed in vegetal ornamentation. Upon entering, a visitor also notes other invented hemispheric symbols, which include pictorial and literal references to the North and the South, the Three Americas, and the numeral twenty-one (representing the American republics). As one moves toward the patio, themes swirl around each other. Barrett described the entrance effect as mood altering and noticeably artificial. Past the bronze central gate of the triple-arched entrance, the richly ornamented, barrel-vaulted vestibule seems to be woven with pre-Columbian detail (see Fig. 2.12).

Fig. 2.13. Columbus Library, showing original layout in 1910,

Pan-American Union. (Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

Fig. 2.14. Sala Bolívar, previously the Columbus Library, PanAmerican Union. (Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

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This space serves as a transition from Washington to the lush patio. From the vestibule, the visitor already sees the fountain with its sculpted Aztec warrior (Fig. 2.15). With the patio’s combination of Aztec, Maya, and Inca designs, the architects hoped to affirm America’s tripartite genealogy and assert the pre-Columbian antiquity of the Americas. But this shorthand version of the pan-native theme left out U.S. Native Americans. References to U.S. Native Americans, who were not associated with the tropics, would have complicated the ideological economy of this representational space. The pre-Columbian trinity emerged in the early nineteenth century as the major divisions in the fields of pre-Columbian archaeology and anthropology, and this

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was the construct encapsulated in the patio. The tropical jungle that surrounds the fountain controls the experience of the space. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who subsequently founded the Whitney Museum of American Art and whose son financed Pan-American Airways, designed and built the Aztec Fountain, as it was called. Her design is markedly different from the Spanish-style fountain suggested in the competition drawings. The ease with which one was substituted for the other confirms Fig. 2.15. Visitors looking at the Aztec Fountain, Pan-American Union, May 1943. John Collier, photographer. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

the liberal manner in which the Pan-American heritage themes were exchanged. On the basin that crowns the final fountain design, 8 feet above the floor of the patio, one finds symbolic figures that correspond to the three chief phases of Mexican art: the Zapotec, Maya, and Aztec. The fountain was constructed with gargoylelike green-eyed feathered serpents that lunge overhead, dramatizing the falling water (Fig. 2.16). The fountain’s water trickles down to a pink marble basin, similar in shape to the eight-pointed Mexican star. The fountain’s symbolism is enhanced by its placement in the middle of four L-shaped planting areas that are thick with “exotic species,” including at one time the rubberfig tree (Fig. 2.17). Barrett called it the “continuity of the Americans in their own soil.”49 The fountain also incorporated inventive hemispheric representational devices that further raised its stature at the center of the building. One innovative lighting feature allowed

Fig. 2.16. Three members of the Inter-American Commission of Women, sitting in front of fountain in patio of Pan-American Union, November 1, 1940. (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University) Fig. 2.17. Experiencing the tropics in the patio. High school students visit the Pan-American Union, February 1942. Marjorie Collins, photographer. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

the fountain to be washed in various hues and to alternate colors to represent particular nations, depending on who was entering the building. “On occasion the national colors of the various countries are displayed in luminous running water,” wrote Barrett. “Both the colors and the changes of water are controlled at a keyboard desk in an adjacent room.” The high-tech fountain spectacle was one of these short-lived features, and it was used only on a few occasions in the 1910s. Such manipulations of color, water, and light hark back to

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Knudson’s designs and the Pan-American Exposition’s Electric Tower. The on-the-spot effect also brings to mind the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain intimating the crisis of dignity and authority that scenographic mechanics could induce when scenographic technology turned classical convention into kitsch. Long after their association ended, Kelsey informed Cret that at long last, with the proper mechanism, the serpent’s “jeweled eyes flash intermittently.”50 Whitney’s contribution and the patio continued to serve as a backdrop and point of interest. Although the surfaces of the building’s central patio contribute to the tropical effect, the architects chose not to subject its official functional spaces to the thematic decorative program. Similarly, the perimeter zones of offices were devoted to the exchange of information and accorded an institutional treatment.51 The Columbus Library was designed to be a repository and archive and was planned as a functional space for receiving and disseminating information about the Americas. The large reading room benefited from natural light, and the room’s principal object of study, a relief map, indicates the extent to which this educational space centered on the study of the Other. Located at the center, like a pinned exotic specimen, it made the PanAmerican Union’s purpose clear: this was a space devoted to the study of Latin America. Surrounding this focal point were a series of exhibitions, including the dioramas of Latin American commercial production featuring banana harvesters and coffee growers to complete the didactic display. Beyond the Columbus Library, visitors could immerse themselves in a tropical netherworld. The Blue Aztec Garden and Pool consumed much of Kelsey’s design efforts. When he returned to Mexico for more inspiration, he had a vision of sorts (captured in Yucatecan Scenes and Sounds) that led him to explore the tropical theme and incorporate a serpent motif. In the book, Kelsey describes how the elements of the design came to him while floating in a river with snakes, including the motifs for the Jade Fence, the illumination of the fence and pool, and the ambient feeling he strove to capture. These garden improvements were initially

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suggested because the view outdoors was unimpressive and the five large Assembly Hall windows looked out onto this space. Barrett wrote that it was the intention of the architects to convert the “featureless and practically arid acres on which the building stands into an international garden full of significant ideas and suggestions . . . it was no unimportant part of the original design to so characterize, and if possible, to so poetize [sic] this spot as to make it wholly neutral territory—a place apart, inspiring and beautiful.”52 The references to “international” and “neutral territory” preceded the references to the Caribbean Sea that were later introduced. The new theme ultimately presented the narrative of a “deep ocean blue” that was supposed to encompass the entire grounds, including the pool, plant life, the main building’s rear façade, and the Garden Apartment’s loggia. Barrett described the extent of the color saturation: “The tiles lining the pool are blue, and this color note will be echoed by a hedge of blue hydrangeas behind the open rail. The panels of the [main building’s] rail will be filled with blue faience [transparent panels], which may be illuminated by night.”53 Price noted that Kelsey was working on “decorating the cornice of the main building to echo the [garden’s] color scheme,” but Barrett later reported that it had been painted blue and yellow.54 Kelsey had started work on another Carnegiesponsored building with indigenous references for the Brotherhood of North American Indians, near the PanAmerican Union site.55 For that building, Kelsey announced that he would visit Indian settlements “from the Isthmus of Panama to Alaska in search of ideas.”56 The tropical theme, explored in water, color, and light, was elevated to a mythical level. Barrett called for overlaying the concrete floor of the terrace with tile work depicting what he called “blue pygmies” and other archaic figures. An Indian figure, which he referred to as a “Sad Indian,” and which William A Reid, in his Story of the Pan-American Union, identifies as Xochipilli, the Aztec God of Flowers, was later placed at the head of the pool (Fig. 2.18). In 1926, Diego Rivera used the same figure in his Tropical Mexico and Xochipilli and His Votaries fresco in the Court of Labor at the Ministry of Education building in Mexico

City. Referred to as a symbol of universal peace in Barrett’s text, the statue figured prominently in a garden light show controlled from the Assembly Hall. The goal was to dramatize the scene when viewed from the Assembly Hall’s central window, which looked down onto the rear garden. By locating a control switch for a “special-effects” garden light show in the windowsill, programmers in the Assembly Hall could amaze Latin American “guests.” In references to the garden-pool area, the “eternal Carib summer” and the “tropic seas” are repeatedly mentioned, again demonstrating that an essentialist reduction of the Caribbean was being projected as representative of all of the Americas. The complete ensemble—the terraces, pool, garden, and loggia—was designed for this grand spectacle, which was referred to as a climax that began with the “illumination of the strange archaic allegory in tile at the rear of the grounds.”57 The effect of the light switch was to

cast the whole courtyard in a “strange blue-green radiance” that illuminated the wildly colored grounds, giving the courtyard a “weird purplish tone,” an effect further emphasized by the pool (Fig. 2.19). The symbolic meaning of this effect was never explained, but it seems to have been a simple act of theatrics. Apparently, the courtyard’s transformation in light was intended as the opening number for what was to follow. The architects planned to reconstruct the bottom surface of the pool and statue to produce what was described as a “sublacterine effect.” Barrett described the rest of the show: Fig. 2.18. Xochipilli statue and the Jade Fence behind in the Blue

Aztec Garden of the Pan-American Union Building. (Courtesy of Marv Solberg)

Fig. 2.19. The Blue Aztec Garden and Pool night view with lights. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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After the moon has set and the stars have gone to sleep, a beautiful coral reef of translucent marble will define itself slowly, surely and with clearness, to make all beholders feel something of the lure and wondrous charm of tropic seas. Phosphorescent marvels will appear and disappear, until the minds of all . . . are centered upon this spot, and then in the place now occupied by the Indian by a stroke of modern magic the statue of UNIVERSAL PEACE will burst into light and dominate all. In the bottom of the basin, polychrome terra cotta will be used as well as marble to represent strange marine growths, long trailing seaweed in pale greens and faded yellows . . . and other kinds of coral peculiar to the waters of the Caribbean.58

Barrett confirmed that these theatrical effects were designed specifically to impress Latin American visitors, whom he repeatedly described as the intended audience for the spectacle. Describing the light show, Price also reported that “the Latin-American [was] highly temperamental” and “deeply impressed by the superficially pleasing,” which was a product, in his opinion, of nature and heritage. The theatrics were meant to give them “wondrous tales to carry back of the marvelous home of all the Republics in the capital city of the great United States” (Fig. 2.20).59 The Garden Apartment’s loggia, the terminus of the building’s main axis, extended the tropical theme with its own rich colors, textures, and pre-Columbian iconography (Figs. 2.21 and 2.22). The lower portion was executed, according to Barrett, “in a range of blues, greens, and blue-greens, the frieze of relief panels of Aztec figures in tan-color, and most of the remainder [in] a rich deep red, relieved by incidental introduction of vivid colors.”60 Price reported that the garden pottery, which was considered to be “far too Italian in suggestion,” was going to be replaced by special pieces in blue and yellow and lavender, molded in aboriginal shapes.61 Fig. 2.20. Coffee Day Reception at the Pan-American Union Building, showing illuminated Aztec Fountain, April 1, 1961. Ed Clark, photographer. (Time and Life Pictures Collection, Getty Images)

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Although the tropical and pan-native themes of commonality were introduced in the building’s public, ground-level spaces, the themes that emphasized the discovery narrative and the New World’s revolutionary heritage figured prominently in the building’s second-level spaces, the zone of formal diplomacy. In contrast to the “exotic” excursion programmed along the building’s main axis, a parallel but elevated path was established to mark the movement of diplomats. This was punctuated with a series of unifying spaces. The delegates’ ritualized path of diplomacy extended through a series of rooms, where symbols of the American republics appeared in various formats. Along the way, the twenty-one American republics were represented in equal terms. Beginning with the patio corFig. 2.21. View of Blue Aztec Garden, pool, and Garden Apartment,

Pan-American Union Building. (Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

Fig. 2.22. Colorful loggia tilework, director-general’s apartment behind

the Pan-American Union. (Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

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Fig. 2.23. Pan-American Union, staircase leading to Assembly

Hall. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Fig. 2.24. View from the stairs, looking into the patio, PanAmerican Union. Note the patio and cornice escutcheons. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) Fig. 2.25. Gallery of Patriots and National Flags, Pan-

American Union. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

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nice, the polychrome terra-cotta frieze was dressed with escutcheons bearing each nation’s coat-of-arms. Because twenty-four escutcheons worked out better with the configuration of the patio, Barrett included Canada, even though it was not a member of the organization at the time. Two additional escutcheons, bearing the words “Justice” and “Freedom,” were included to heighten the spirit of collectivity. The escutcheons alternated with plaques bearing the names of twelve patriots. Ten men representing independence movements were included, as well as Columbus and Samuel de Champlain, who represented discovery (Canada was again represented with Champlain’s inclusion).62 The perspective of diplomacy was outlined with these national and revolutionary themes and enhanced by geometrical order. Each room along this path would be distinctly conceptualized and coded with hemispheric meaning. Accessible from the vestibule, this promenade of diplomacy invited delegates to ascend either of the twin stairs corresponding to the bifurcated façade that explicitly reflected the U.S.–Latin American partnership (Figs. 2.23 and 2.24). At the top of the stairs, delegates were led into the Gallery of Patriots and National Flags, where they once again experienced a formal space completed with symbols of hemispheric unity (Fig. 2.25). The gallery was filled with busts of the “great men” of the Americas, with some of the statues spilling over into the two corridors surrounding the patio. The inclusion of these figures and their symbolic arrangement as a communion of leaders were perhaps meant to imply that delegates follow a similar protocol. The statues were located so delegates could see them on their way to adjacent rooms—to the offices, boardrooms, and Hall of the Americas. The building’s binary undercurrent appears once again, if only briefly, where a single bust of George Washington was placed opposite two busts of Bolívar and San Martín. Washington faced the central door of the Hall of the Americas, a select location inasmuch as the United States initially maintained control of the director-general’s position.63 From the patio, Washington’s presence was also symbolically noted overhead. The politics of representation played out with the ar-

rangement of the busts balanced by national flags displayed overhead. Equally sized embroidered silk flags of the twenty-one republics hung in the gallery.64 The freedom of arrangement overhead also allowed for the addition of flags. From the Gallery of Patriots and National Flags, diplomats proceeded to the Hall of the Americas dominating the center, or to smaller gathering chambers flanking the hall. The boardroom at the south end of the great hall, which Barrett called “one of the show rooms of the building,” was designed for the governing board’s regular meetings as a complete expression of Pan-Americanism. Here unity was represented with material culture. Invented furnishings were designed to invoke hemispheric unity; this was considered integral to the building’s design and the institution’s mission. A 20-foot-long oval table was meant to represent the component nations of the Americas, and each of the twenty-one chairs was marked with a national coatof-arms. More important, the chairs were made from a single mahogany tree from the Dominican Republic (Fig. 2.26). The symbolic meaning materialized in this furniture was carefully construed. The Dominican island, called Hispaniola by Columbus, was considered to be “the birthplace of America.” The seats used by the Pan-American leaders had been hewn from a tree grown in the soil of this place. To add another layer of meaning, the mahogany chairs were upholstered with Spanish leather, resulting in a crafted mestizaje, a fabricated allusion to the racial intermixing of the native people and the Spaniards. Material culture replicated the racial and cultural composition of the New World as the Pan-American Union saw it. Canada, although excluded, was not forgotten. Its chair was produced but stored in a closet until it was invited to join the institution in 1990.65 Canada would fully participate from that point onward, with Quebec City hosting the Third Summit of the Americas in 2001. The boardroom’s color-coordinated walls in browns and gold give it a dark, serious ambience. This effect was extended by the dull yellow brocade with which the walls are hung and the gilded bronze friezes that line the room’s walls. Each Churrigueresque frieze

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Fig. 2.26. Conference table and twenty-one chairs, Governing Board

Room, Pan-American Union Building, 1910. Albert Kelsey and Paul Philippe Cret, architects. (HALIC, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #30634 © The Art Institute of Chicago)

presents a geographical diagram of the continent corresponding to the wall’s cardinal orientation. Designed by the sculptor Sally James Farnham, each 2-foot-9inch-tall frieze locates narratives of conquest according to where the event took place, oriented to the north, east, west, or south in the room. The ceiling reproduces forms that referenced the indigenous people of the Americas, such as peace pipes, lilies, and serpents.66 Here the pan-native theme explored so thoroughly at the ground level was expanded to include U.S. Native Americans and North American natural motifs, as well

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as references that spanned from the colonial conquest to independence. Today, this room is a remnant of the earliest membership—the days of the twenty-one—for it is not able to accommodate the thirty-five member nations that make up the Organization of American States at the turn of the twenty-first century. The conference room at the north end of the Hall of the Americas was later expanded to include a library stack room as technological innovation transformed the allocation of space in the Pan-American Union. Before it was expanded, this room was planned as an informal meeting and dining room that could be used in connection with the Hall of the Americas.67 The finale was the Hall of the Americas, the largest and most impressive space in the building. This room was designed as a “grand hall” for entertaining and official presentations (Figs. 2.27 and 2.28). This was the

most important room in the building, where delegates enacted the rituals of Pan-America. It is the terminus of the procession of diplomacy, and it could be transformed to represent variations of the hemispheric model with chairs, tables, and trappings. This barrel-vaulted space was supported by twenty-four fluted columns with Corinthian capitals, making this, of all the building’s rooms, the most European in style in the sense that it was devoid of overt Orientalist motifs and tropical iconography. The room is filled with insignia, including the Fig. 2.27. Hall of the Americas, Pan-American Union. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library) Fig. 2.28. American delegates experience a tropical banquet in the Hall

of the Americas, Pan-American Union. (Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of the American States)

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words “Columbus” and “Pax.” The reference to peace in the central escutcheons, which replaced an earlier plan to display the letters “AR” (American Republics), may have occurred to honor Carnegie’s interest in fostering international peace efforts. In a speech he gave at the building’s inauguration, Carnegie noted William I. Buchanan’s recent death as well as that of João Nabuco, the delegate of Brazil, and called the building a pantheon to all the Pan-American heroes who made this building and the Pan-American Union possible.68 A bust of Carnegie was later placed in the hall. There are instances in the Hall of the Americas where some of the Pan-American themes do surface, but the space retained a consistent level of classical ornamental detail. Where references to American aboriginal cultures and art were inserted, they are presented with the support of European decorative conventions. For example, according to Price Roman Trophies are transformed into “Aztec Trophies,” the entire ensemble placed between triglyphs in the hall’s frieze.69 Here, the architects represented the origins of the various colonizers of the Americas—the English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French—as they celebrated the indigenous cultures of the continents.70 In other portions of the room, Italianate elements in Cret’s design were altered into what were imagined as “Latin and aboriginal” analogues. In another instance, classical rondelles were replaced with iconographic impressions of pre-Columbian motifs. The tropical and PreColumbian themes found on the ground floor were kept to a minimum on the second. This grand room’s formal qualities were meant to exude associations with diplomacy and national presence above all, and it succeeded, as was broadly recognized and appreciated—and even memorialized in film. In the 1936 film China Clipper, the fictionalized story of Pan-American World Airways that propelled Humphrey Bogart to stardom, the room appeared in a scene that presented the delegates of the American Republics contemplating the success of the new aerial venture. In this cinematic fiction, the Hall of the Americas represented the core space of Pan-America, where the organization exercised its power to formalize plans for the Western Hemisphere.

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Nuestra Pan-América Walking in the vicinity of the Pan-American Union Building today, one sees not a lone, imperious capitol of the Americas, but an institutional landscape of buildings, landmarks, and public spaces that convey diverse messages about the hemispheric enterprise. By the centennial of its inauguration, the Pan-American Union had expanded and incrementally acquired additional Washington properties. The growth first occurred westward along Virginia Avenue with the Pan-American Union Annex, built in 1937 and designed in the Spanish Renaissance style. By 1948, the organization had purchased two additional neighboring buildings, including one called the Pan-American Administrative Building. In 1963, the Organization of American States hoped to build another office complex and contacted the Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn, but he declined the offer.71 In 1959, when the Uruguayan artist and architect Carlos Páez Vilaró was commissioned to paint a mural along a tunnel connecting the original structure and the annex building, a Latin American finally contributed to this building complex, albeit underground. Páez Vilaró called his mural Roots of Peace (Raíces de la Paz), and it was once considered the longest mural in the world at 510 feet. Only staff members enjoy it today, as it provides a comfortable conduit for travel between the buildings, especially during cold Washington winters. In his homage to the discovery narrative, Páez Vilaró hoped to recreate the continuity of cultural development by exploring movement through one’s perception of the tunnel’s effect. In 1976, the organization converted Barrett’s residence (sometimes called the Pan-American Union Annex) to the Art Museum of the Americas, and a Casita located next to it was used to house the organization’s archives. In the 1990s, the organization expanded to the General Secretariat Building, and later it expanded even farther from the Capitol grounds when the InterAmerican Defense Board moved to the historic Franklin MacVeagh House, the “Pink Palace.” Latin Americans contributed to the grounds on two other occasions. In 1959, Venezuela gave the United States the Simón Bolívar Park, a plaza linking the origi-

Fig. 2.29. Pan-American Health Organization, Román F. Siri, 1961– 1965. (Courtesy of the Pan-American Health Organization)

nal Pan-American Union Building and the Annex. It includes an equestrian statue of Bolívar and a marble walkway framed with six water jets pouring into a fountain pool; each jet represented one of the nations liberated by Bolívar. A good distance down Virginia Avenue, one also finds the Pan-American Health Organization building and plaza, erected in 1965. This independent organization sponsored a competition in 1961 that was won by the Uruguayan architect Román Fresnedo Siri.72 The organization’s mission is embodied in this massive Modernist structure, presenting a curved structure embracing a smaller round building, which serves as the assembly space (Fig. 2.29). The Inter-Development Bank, which was established in 1959, is farther away on the opposite side of the Capitol, and it does not figure into this

institutional landscape. Although the Pan-American Health Organization and the Inter-Development Bank are no longer linked to the Organization of American States, they grew out of the Pan-American Union’s efforts to direct and deliver modernizing social and economic initiatives in the Americas. A map of Nuestra Pan-América showing sites of the many hemispheric projects developed over the years expresses the extent to which hemisphericism took root in Washington (Fig. 2.30).73 In addition to the Three Americas Exposition, proposed in 1890 for the quadricentennary, and the buildings associated with the Organization of the American States, the map also includes other proposals that never saw the light of day.74 This includes a Pan-American building proposed for the Sesquicentennial Freedom Fair, which was planned for 1950. This structure was supposed to face three large pavilions shaped as the letters “USA.” Its

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9

11 10 8 7

14

6

3

5 2

4

1

12

Po to m

ac

Ri v

13 er

Fig. 2.30. Site plan showing Nuestra Pan-América’s built and pro-

posed structures. Existing structures and monuments include: 1. the Pan-American Union Building (today the Organization of American States), the Director-General’s Garden Apartment (today the Museum of the Americas), and the Casita; 2. the Pan-American Union Annex (connected to the main building with the underground tunnel); and 3. the José Cecilio del Valle memorial. Other statues near the OAS include memorials to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cordell Hull, Queen Isabella of Spain, Pablo Neruda, and Teresa de la Parra. The informally known Avenida de Las Américas, a segment of Virginia Avenue containing numerous memorials, is home to: 4. the José Artigas memo-

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rial; 5. the Simón Bolívar memorial and plaza; 6. the General José de San Martín statue; 7. the Bernardo de Gálvez statue; 8. the PanAmerican Health Organization; and 9. the Benito Juárez statue. The outer reaches of Nuestra Pan-América include: 10. the General Secretariat Building, and 11. the Inter-American Development Bank. This map also shows (in red) the three proposals that would have extended this hemispheric landscape: 12. the Three Americas Exposition buildings (1889–1892); 13. the Pan-American Building included with the Sesquicentennial Freedom Fair proposal (1950); and 14. the Festival of the Cities of the New World Pavilion, planned for Pershing Square (1965). Drawing by Shannon French.

very inclusion demonstrates the Pan-American movement’s importance, although its relative importance is revealed in the comparison of its size to the “USA” structures (Fig. 2.31).75 The map also includes a pavilion designed by Philip Johnson in 1965 for a proposed Festival of the Cities of the New World. Collaborating with Charles Eames, Johnson proposed a cantilevered Fig. 2.31. Sesquicentennial Freedom Fair proposal, 1950. In this photograph, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) stands next to J. Howard McGrath (D-RI) and points to the Pan-American Building, located on axis with the main entrance into the U.S.A. complex. The image appeared in the New York Times, April 16, 1949. (Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos)

structure on Pershing Square (Fig. 4.54). The superimposition of this “hemispheric capital,” or Nuestra Pan-América, onto this institutional cultural landscape in central Washington, D.C., confirms that the U.S. PanAmerican movement was an enterprise of importance from the outset. This Pan-American landscape of gardens and revolutionary figures complements the United States’ own “American” heritage, expressed throughout the rest of the city.76 Stemming from Barrett’s efforts, which he initiated with the founding of the Pan-American Society, numerous Pan-American societies, clubs, and associations extended this landscape of diplomacy throughout

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the Americas. Pan-American conferences and meetings were initiated throughout the 1920s and 1930s to address a variety of disciplines and humanitarian needs, some representing entities associated with the Organization of American States, some as independent efforts. The idea for the Inter-Development Bank grew out of one of these conferences, as did initiatives that led to the Pan-American Health Organization, the PanAmerican Olympics, and the Pan-American Highway. In 1920, the Pan-American Architectural Congress held its first meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, in order to establish a network of communications across the Americas (see Table 2.1). Interestingly, this preceded the formation of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne by nearly a decade. The Pan-American Architectural Congress agreed at the Montevideo meeting that the congress would meet every three years in the capital of an American nation, and an architectural exhibition was planned for each meeting.77 The group hoped “to create and maintain close relations of friendship and understanding between architectural institutions, associations and individual architects of the Americas.”78 Although these organizations embraced the concept of Pan-Americanism, they did so to point to their regional membership and common areas of interest. Their mission, however, was limited to architectural issues and not to the conceptualization of a Pan-American architecture. The associations’ early publications indicate the strong influence of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1925, the American Institute of Architects appointed its own committee on the Pan-American Congress of Architects, with Kelsey as one of six U.S. architects.79 Nuestra Pan-América’s eclectic landscape began with an attempt to bring the tropics to Washington, D.C., an effort that echoed the spectacles of the world’s fairs and a desire to make Latin American delegates feel at home. It was an effort that began with an extension of the patio and that reflected the United States’ prominent presence in the Panama Canal Zone at the time. This geographic and symbolic knuckle, which physically joined the two American continents, perpetuated perceptions of U.S. imperialism and brought

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Table 2.1. Pan-American Architecture Congresses

First

Montevideo, Uruguay

1920

Second

Santiago, Chile

1923

Third

Buenos Aires, Argentina

1927

Fourth

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1930

Fifth

Montevideo, Uruguay

1940

Sixth

Cuzco, Peru

Seventh

Havana, Cuba

1950

Eighth

Mexico City, Mexico

1952

Ninth

Caracas, Venezuela

1955

Tenth

Buenos Aires, Argentina

1960

Eleventh

Washington, D.C., USA

1965

Twelfth

Bogotá, Colombia

1968

Thirteenth

Lima, Peru

1970

1947–1948

U.S. attention to the world of the tropics. The United States’ presence in Panama actually complicated intercontinental dynamics: it did not help that this territory was called “the American Zone.” It was an ironic case of extremes that a classical building, which was meant to physically and ideologically serve the Pan-American Union’s mission, was transformed into a tropical space. In Barrett and Kelsey’s eyes, however, the tropicalization process was not meant to emphasize differences between dominant and subordinate cultures. It was supposed to create a unifying hemispheric space for Pan-American subjects, where they could identify with a common, fictional creation narrative. With Xochipilli, the pan-native theme was reduced to a single symbolic icon meant to encapsulate this unity. This figure also presented the imagined birth of Pan-America, a throwback to Roosevelt christening the Native American infant at the Buffalo Exposition. The elaborate garden theatrics represented the performance of an American conception narrative, the Caribbean baptismal pool suggesting that the Pan-American subject would be reborn in the care of this paternal Washington, D.C., institution. One can only wonder what the representatives of visiting nations thought of this, if they felt they were being mocked. No accounts of their reactions

have been found. The symbols and themes would have meant something entirely different to each. This would certainly have given them an idea, too, of how they were perceived by their northern neighbor. Even so, the PanAmerican Union Building successfully broadcast its mission, and it inspired similar projects throughout Latin America and even Europe, giving an indication that its larger ideological message of hemispheric dialogue met favorable acceptance.80 The centerpiece of Nuestra Pan-América remains tenuously situated in the history of architecture. The Pan-American Union Building references classical, tropical, and pre-Columbian conventions, yet at street level, Parisian classicism, the architectural lingua franca of the Western Hemisphere in 1910, dominates. If it were turned inside out, an entirely different set of representational conventions would prevail. As a product of an on-site transformation, it does not rise to the level of invention seen in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Los Angeles houses of the early 1920s, which architectural historian William Curtis has called “Wright’s Pan-American dream.” This comparison is debatable, as architectural historian Anthony Alofsin has persuasively argued against the interpretation that Wright sought inspiration from pre-Columbian sources.81 In its moments of

theatricality, with its iconography and play of color and light, the building resembled the Los Angeles architect Robert Stacy-Judd’s all-American, neo-Maya designs of the 1920s. The building may also be seen as a visual journal of Kelsey’s transformative trips to the Yucatán. The Pan-American building is perhaps best regarded as a snapshot of the image of an institution as it was coming to know itself as the Pan-American Union. It was an institutional branding exercise that resulted in a built proposition. There is a risk in describing the building, along with its rubber-fig tree, as hybrid, because it is not an offspring of mixed parentage. Its distinctive style comes from the transformation of one method of architectural representation onto another, made necessary by the director-general’s belief that it should communicate a specific message and rise above the conventions of civic architecture that prevailed in Washington in 1910. It was here that Albert Kelsey, as coordinator and architectural provocateur, made his mark. The Pan-American Union Building attracted attention in the popular and professional press. The rubber-fig tree came to symbolize the institution’s ability to develop beyond its beginnings, which were tied to commercial interests, and establish an operation that bore fruit, even if it was an unexpected product of this new union.

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3

IN SEARCH OF MODERN PAN-AMERICA The Columbus Memorial Lighthouse

T

HE INAUGURATION PLANS FOR THE

Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, in 1992 included a series of spectacular events. But plans began to dim when every American republic except Argentina declined invitations to attend. The atmosphere worsened as the day approached, with a protest bomb killing bystanders in a nearby town, the labor unions organizing antimonument marches, and a snub from Pope John Paul II, who refused to hold mass at the monument. Locals had hoped their memorial, which projected a cross-shaped light skyward and was designed to hold Christopher Columbus’ remains, would elevate the international reputation of Santo Domingo (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). The monument was based on British architect Joseph Lea Gleave’s 1931 design. But by 1992 the monument was no longer meant to celebrate Pan-America or a modern notion of hemispheric unity, as its initial enthusiasts had hoped.1 The building of the monument caused the destruction of thousands of dwellings, and its planners called for a wall to be built to hide any remaining evidence of Santo Domingo’s poverty, which the press quickly named the Wall of Shame. This memorial for an event centuries past was an architectural anachronism, with its shrinelike containment of corporeal remains and Christian religious symbolism. By the time it was finally built, the amalgam had been abandoned by its original promoters. It is ironic that a design that received so little press upon its unveiling in 1931 received so much negative press at the time of its inauguration sixty-one years later. Fig. 3.1. (facing page) Aerial view of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse.

Otto Piron, photographer.

Fig. 3.2. The Columbus Memorial Lighthouse cross-shaped beacon,

1992. Jeremy Horner/CORBIS, photographer.

The Columbus monument’s disregard for an already overburdened urban condition, described by urban theorist Mike Davis as a case of “Haussmann in the tropics,” underscored the routine misappropriation of PanAmerica’s grand projections. The monument was built for entirely different reasons and followed a trajectory set by a dictatorial regime.2 Gone were the design elements that had originally emphasized its Pan-American mission of multinational unity—the twenty-one roads splaying out from the monument in the direction of each Pan-American country—and the plans to construct a Pan-American center on the grounds. The late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century hemispheric fairs had initiated these types of projects with their isolated fairgrounds where explorations of Pan-American themes took place. The Pan-American Union Building expanded on this collection of themes. In the late 1920s, the architectural competition that yielded the Columbus memorial also pursued this line of exploration and was directed by Albert Kelsey. The competition’s technical advisor, Kelsey devoted much of his life to shaping the two-stage competition. Yet in 1992, a structure with such overt religious symbolism reflected little of Kelsey’s vision of modern Pan-America. The competition was one of three in the 1920s that explored the program of an airport, and Kelsey hoped the competition results would make a significant contribution to this building type. The airport originally planned next to the monument was dropped from the program. Media coverage following the memorial’s construction reported that Santo Domingo would experience a power outage every time the beacon was cast skyward. Viewers in 1992 found the monument neither Pan-American nor modern. Because the project’s visibility was clouded for more than sixty years, and the 455 design entries went virtually unnoticed or were examined in cursory form only, the competition’s influence on the development of Pan-American architecture was minimal. Unsuccessful fund-raising through the mid-1940s and the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s eventual control of the project nearly led to its extinction. Nevertheless, the search for modern representations of the

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Pan-American concept that did take place illuminated the concept’s ideological development in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The extensive record of the competition gives a glimpse of the modern PanAmerica that was envisioned at the time. This chapter examines three areas of development that illustrate this vision: Kelsey’s authorship of the two competition programs, the historicist and Modernist elements seen in many of the 455 design entries, and the transformation and marketing of the lighthouse project in the 1930s and 1940s. During this time, the theme of Pan-American heritage receded and the monument’s cross emerged as a new symbol of commonality. With the Christian cross as its main theme, the monument’s promoters emphasized the hemisphere’s shared history as a site for conversions. This change of focus led to new strategies reflecting the promoters’ desperation as they sought to raise funds. The hemisphere’s Christianizing heritage was posited as a surrogate for the good work and humanitarian aims of the modern, secular, intergovernmental organization that had initiated the competition. Kelsey boldly conveyed his vision of the monument in the two competition programs he wrote, one for each stage. Kelsey had emphasized the Christianizing mission and importance of the cross as a symbol. He was quite heavy-handed in the preparation of the program, and he hoped to prevent what had occurred with the Pan-American Union Building seventeen years earlier, when he had to elaborate on his and Paul Cret’s design to endow the building with more explicit and literal identifying symbolism. His influence was visible in a number of the published design entries and in the project statements now deposited in the Columbus Library archives. Most of the hemispheric interpretations that resulted, however, did not convey the modern interpretations Kelsey hoped to see. He and the Pan-American Union’s director, Leo S. Rowe, carefully documented the three-year competition, leaving detailed and revealing accounts that demonstrate how a discursive framework was formulated and how the design entries responded to this set of expectations. Rowe succeeded John M. Barrett as director-general

of the Pan-American Union, and the search for PanAmerican identity that Kelsey, Cret, and Barrett had initiated continued under his tenure. The two competition programs established the design parameters that Kelsey and the Pan-American Union decided upon and to which participants were asked to respond. An examination of Kelsey’s role in formulating them follows the trajectory that began with his involvement in the Pan-American Union’s design. Gleave’s design was awarded first prize because he simultaneously addressed the historical and modern elements of the competition program. The late 1920s and early 1930s was a transitional period, when the École des Beaux-Arts represented mainstream architectural practices in the United States despite challenges from proponents of the Modern movement in architecture. In stage one of the competition, Gleave presented a modern, abstract structure that was highly symbolic with its references to Christianity, although his drawings did not yet express the dynamism visible in his stage-two entry. His final design, with strong preColumbian and Pan-American symbols, was dynamically expressive but still wrapped in historicism. The recumbent cruciform building expressed the rising movement of an airplane taking flight, which could also be interpreted as the perceived momentum that Christianity brought to the Americas. In subsequent models, the indigenous surface iconography Gleave introduced slowly disappeared. The pre-Columbian, Columbian, and Christianizing iconography proved to be complementary elaborations and did not compromise the building’s character as a dynamic, modern structure. A case in point occurred when Gleave prepared a model of the monument to be displayed at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933. Gleave transformed his design, presenting a Streamlined Modernistic icon. The scheme’s flexibility was again evident when the consulting architect Teófilo Carbonell Seijas oversaw its execution in Santo Domingo. The building today reads like a concrete Brutalist midrise. Decorative crosses are reduced to ornamental patterns stamped across the walls of the building and the surrounding pavement, its long arms compensating for the fact that

the building is more daggerlike in plan. The light beam does not reflect the long cross plan. If these elements were eliminated, the memorial’s design would not necessarily resemble a cross. The Columbus Memorial Lighthouse’s history chronicles how the ideology of Pan-American identity was used to frame and negotiate tensions between the U.S. and Latin American states dating from the second decade of the 1900s. Architectural monuments have served as transnational tokens of peace, as in France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty to the United States, and nations have collectively built memorials to convey ideological representations of greater good. Although a multinational payment strategy was imposed to fund construction of the Columbus memorial, the idea of building such a monument originated as a transnational, nongovernmental project meant to improve U.S.Dominican relations. The Dominican Republic became one of the United States’ main targets for broadening its sphere of influence when Washington officials began to worry that the country’s immense debt to European creditors might lead to European intervention. Aggressive U.S. control tactics came disguised as cooperative activity, or what historian George Pope Atkins calls “non-governmental transactions.”3 President William Howard Taft’s administration (1909–1913) amplified such practices with its “dollar diplomacy” campaign, which encouraged U.S. entrepreneurs to make capital investments and extend loans in the Caribbean region, notably to the Dominican Republic.4 The architectural competition was directly linked to the activities of U.S. Customs Receiver William E. Pulliam, who forcibly managed Dominican trade from 1905 to 1938.5 After the Panama Canal’s inauguration on August 15, 1914, Pulliam “began a systematic agitation in favor of” building a Memorial Lighthouse, bringing the proposal to the Pan-American Union’s attention.6 Initially, he wanted to rely on public contributions because he considered the project a test of loyalty to the Western Hemisphere, and it is here that another version of the Pan-American subject emerges: “If voluntary contributions from PanAmerica are not made and made enthusiastically,” he said, “it is best that the project pass into the discard.”7

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Funding would occur by raising a collection with popular subscriptions of voluntary one-dollar donations from “Pan-Americans,” as Pulliam put it.8 The impending European war put a hold on the plan, but Pulliam proposed it again to the Pan-American Union in 1922.9 Pulliam was in a prime spot to make the monument a reality, for as the U.S. Customs receiver, he was “both the closest link and the greatest potential source of friction” between the United States and the Dominican Republic.10 The presence of a U.S. receiver, imposed on the Dominican Republic by military force in 1905 and lasting until 1941, represented the apogee of the United States’ effort to dominate Latin American commercial markets, especially in the Caribbean. The competition was initiated in the context of political, military, and economic intervention.11 Improving and modernizing the Dominican Republic’s capital city was linked to the United States’ imperialist grip. The history of U.S. imperialism is intertwined with the building of the Columbian memorial. An irony of this history of imperialist intervention and control is that the United States distanced itself from the project during much of the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo, which lasted until 1961. When he came to power in 1930, on the eve of Gleave’s win, Trujillo embraced the monument as he did the city, which he renamed Ciudad Trujillo in 1936. A subscription system based on national population was initiated with Trujillo’s cooperation. As his reputation worsened, however, the United States grew wary, and by 1949, the PanAmerican Union had severed its support of the lighthouse project. In 1992, the United States again rejected the memorial when groups of indigenous peoples and others opposed its inauguration.12 Not only was the memorial no longer associated with U.S. Pan-Americanism of the 1920s and 1930s, but few would even consider it a relative of the Pan-American Union Building today. Yet as this study demonstrates, the two monumental structures were supposed to have been a pair. These two buildings—one bureaucratic and one symbolic—represent the two principal monuments constructed in the name of U.S.-defined Pan-Americanism. A benefit of examining these architectural com-

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petitions is that they register changing architectural trends. The eclectic array of design strategies produced for the lighthouse competition presented wide stylistic diversity, as occurred with the Chicago Tribune competition in 1923 but not the Pan-American Union competition of 1908.13 The entries reflected the architectural interests that emerged in the Modern period, which by 1929 included Art Deco, Streamlined Modernistic, and Russian Constructivism.14 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Modernism was slow to enter the U.S. cultural milieu, as confirmed by the jurors’ rejection of numerous Modern schemes in the first stage. Kelsey revealed his own misgivings about the modern representation of Pan-America, although his mention of Erich Mendelsohn in the second program and depictions of modern Latin American urban scenes suggest he was looking toward the future. Although the competition relied on an international jury, the strong pull toward U.S. trends grounded in Beaux-Arts practices came from the two jurors who dominated the process. Raymond Hood (with John Mead Howells) and Eliel Saarinen had won first and second place respectively in the Chicago Tribune competition, and their schemes typified this transitional period. Their skyscraper designs exemplified the modern building technology of the period but remained cloaked in historical detail, especially so in Hood and Howells’ case. Juror Frank Lloyd Wright, who replaced Hood during the competition’s second stage, played a key role in the selection of the winning design, and he advocated for a Modernist outlook. The jurors saw many of the themes that appeared in previous Pan-American projects: the pre-Columbian, Columbian, Spanish Colonial, independent New World, and tropical references. Given the memorial’s theme, a large number of entries focused on Columbus. In both program documents, Kelsey made a strong case for recognizing the city of Santo Domingo as a distinct historical site. He propagated the rhetoric of primacía (primacy), Santo Domingo’s long-standing origin myth, which cast Santo Domingo as the “Cradle of the New World.”15 This was the site of Columbus’ landing and Europe’s first American settlement. It helped that officials could claim that Columbus’ bodily remains

were entombed there (even if their authenticity was in doubt). Dominican preservationists and promoters had developed the claim of primacía in conjunction with the city’s numerous preservation and tourist programs.16 Consequently, design entries tended to highlight an Old World–New World dichotomy, rather than the U.S.–Latin America framework, although a number of schemes presented the North and South American continents coming together. However, it was the competition process itself, rather than the design entries, that mirrored U.S.–Latin American relations. The Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition has received relatively little historical notice. One reason was because the jury selected relatively unknown architects at each stage. The rejected entries included those of the most illustrious participants, some of whom would go on to have highly prolific careers. Notable European designs, such as those submitted by Alvar Aalto and Tony Garnier, were cast aside, as was the design belonging to the newly formed partnership of Howe and Lescaze. A group of Russian Constructivist entries, including one submitted by Konstantin Melnikov, also met with rejection. The architects who won the first stage and went on to have noted careers included the U.S. architects Helmle, Corbett, and Harrison and Donald S. Nelson and Douglas D. Ellington, as well as Luis Moya Blanco and Joaquín Vaquero Palacios of Spain. The entries of the most notable architects have never been recognized as significant in their bodies of work, omissions that attest to the lack of importance ascribed to the competition. When the competition is mentioned in architectural histories, it is because of some of its memorable entries, Melnikov’s being the most commonly cited.17

Kelsey’s Perfect Competition In 1923, the Columbus Lighthouse proposal was submitted for consideration to the Fifth International Conference of the American Republics in Santiago de Chile, and the twenty-one member governments passed a resolution declaring that a monument to Columbus should be built in Santo Domingo. It was not until May

1926, however, that the monument was approved by the Pan-American Union. Pulliam made plans to go to Washington, D.C., in December, at the request of the Dominican Republic’s president, Horacio Vásquez, to help Ángel Morales, the Dominican foreign minister to the United States, launch the project.18 After Pulliam and Morales met with the Pan-American Union’s governing board, the PAU passed a resolution on March 2, 1927, supporting the monument, stating that member governments should support and cooperate to build the proposed monument.19 The resolution also stated that the Dominican government could use part of the $300,000 appropriated for site preparations to pay for the competition and the awarding of prizes. Kelsey was appointed the competition’s technical advisor in 1927, after Cret declined this role. Cret recommended seven architects, but Kelsey’s name was not on his list.20 Pulliam’s vision of the lighthouse was inspired by the description of the Dominican historian Antonio Del Monte y Tejada. In his Historia de Santo Domingo, written in 1852, Del Monte y Tejada elaborated a plan for a memorial that concentrated on Columbus.21 The “tomb and beacon light” that Pulliam promoted differed because they also included statuary representing North and South America. Kelsey’s promotion of a memorial representing the American republics demonstrated that his conception was still tied to a Pan-American identity. Other variations of a memorial were also proposed. The one element always mentioned, the lighthouse, received the most emphasis in the programs. It is arguable that this inhibited many of the entrants’ abilities to formulate independent artistic visions, and it did not help that Kelsey reprinted Del Monte y Tejada’s description of his imagined memorial in the program’s preface, probably under pressure to satisfy Dominican interests.22 Dominicans and Spaniards had long been convinced that a lighthouse was the most resonant symbol for a Columbus memorial. The appropriateness of a lighthouse, placed at the site of discovery, not only evoked the life of a sailor but also the mythical story that heralded the Age of Enlightenment. Its beacon literally “enlightened” modern-day travelers and would signal

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their safe arrival on the shores of America. Members of the house of Veragua in Spain, Columbus’ descendants, had also suggested that the Spanish Crown build a lighthouse. A proposal for a crypt emerged in response to the alleged discovery of Columbus’ bodily remains, which were exhumed in Santo Domingo on September 10, 1877. This prompted the Dominican government to form a Memorial Lighthouse Commission in 1879, but a memorial was never built. There was a failed attempt in 1880 to erect a monument, proposed by General Gregorio Luperón, provisional president of the Dominican Republic.23 Del Monte y Tejada had suggested nearby Cape Isabela for the memorial, but Luperón changed the site to Santo Domingo. In 1887, a statue of Columbus was erected in Santo Domingo’s principal plaza, thereafter called the Plaza de Colón. Discussions of a memorial lighthouse resurfaced in 1892 but were eclipsed by efforts to erect a tomb for Columbus’ remains.24 The so-called bodily remains would carry greater weight as the city continued to claim hemispheric centrality in more elaborate programs of cultural tourism. It was also hoped that in conjunction with a significant building project, the city could be elevated in importance. Memorials and monuments to heroes commemorated important figures. But those containing bodily remains and relics could be used to elevate a site to the realm of a secular shrine. Dominicans were aware of numerous Columbian-themed associations throughout Latin America, and they hoped theirs would promote increased tourism. In 1892, an elaborate marble mausoleum was erected following a competition won by the Catalan architect Fernando Romeu and the artist Pedro Carbonell. The crypt was erected in time for the quadricentenary celebration in Santo Domingo’s cathedral, identified as the “first” church of America on the city’s tourist maps (Fig. 3.3). A decorated box in the central space of the 45-foot-high crypt contained what were believed to be Columbus’ remains; iron crosses overhead marked the location as a sacred space. Given the interest in building a monument, Pulliam Fig. 3.3. The Columbus Mausoleum, Santo Domingo Cathedral.

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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knew to gather local support before approaching the Pan-American Union. In a lengthy note that he wrote to Franklin Adams, then the counselor at the Pan-American Union, Pulliam confidently reported that “all the big boys have fallen into line, including our dear archbishop. The Dominican press también.”25 A monument of significant size was desired, and knowledge of the technology to construct a skyscraper was considered important for building the lighthouse, prompting Pulliam and others to also consider the winners of the recent Chicago Tribune competition.26 The Pan-American Union ultimately made its vision known when the Committee Appointed to Study Means of Pan-American Cooperation proposed that each American republic send “a portion of earth from its soil to be deposited at the base of the monument, and a product of its art or industry to be used in the building . . .,” recalling Zaremba’s proposal for 1892.27 It stipulated that an American or Spanish architect “residing in the United States” should determine, with the Dominican Republic’s government, the appropriate site for the lighthouse. It also offered $20,000 to invite a select number of architects to work on the lighthouse, but its twenty-one members were unable to decide who would be invited to design the monument.28 Pulliam had written off Dominican architects and did not make any suggestions. At one point, he dismissed a Santo Domingo architect, calling him a “native near-architect.”29 In 1925, a New York City architect, Benjamin W. Levitan, presented a lighthouse proposal to Pulliam in Santo Domingo that was a throwback to the Columbian tower proposals. Levitan’s design contained some of the figural elements seen in the crypt, referring to the domed sarcophagus and cross. It also predicted Gleave’s monument with its cross-shaped beacon (Fig. 3.4). Levitan’s design proposal was a “hemispherical tomb, topped by a latticed steel lighthouse 130 feet higher than the Eiffel Tower . . . flashing a four-ray beacon 200 miles.”30 The design did not resurface after its brief mention, but it can be seen in photographs of the Madrid exhibition

(see Fig. 3.8). By 1928, the committee had decided to hold a competition open to architects from Spain and the American republics, but later expanded to architects from throughout the world.31 The U.S. government’s decision to appropriate $800,000 for the lighthouse, more than doubling the Dominican Republic’s contribution, also led to a proprietary attitude toward the monument, as had also occurred because of Carnegie’s contribution to the Pan-American Union Building. Kelsey had to weigh his own interests against all the previous proposals and stipulations forwarded by the newly formed Permanent Committee, composed of Latin American ministers, that would oversee the project.32 He saw himself as the glue that held the project together, at one point stating: “I’m the most important factor now in the success of the undertaking. I’m the one to work up the publicity in the daily press, the architectural press, and among the architectural societies of the world. . . . I’m the one who, in addition to writing the program, having the translating done, getting estimates for printing, correcting proofs, etc., must prepare lists

Fig. 3.4. Columbus Memorial Lighthouse proposed by Benjamin W. Levitan. (Published in the Cranford Citizen and Chronicle, March 26, 1925)

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of distinguished architects to whom personal letters must be written.”33 Kelsey organized the competition in accordance with the rules of the American Institute of Architects, confident that the two stages would help the organization sort through all its options.34 Stage one was meant to be a sketch competition and elimination process, from which ten architects would be chosen to compete on the basis of a different program. The call for ideas was meant to shape the requirements to be embodied in stage two.35 Kelsey hoped that a winning symbol generated in stage one could “easily be conceived by some one [sic] endowed with little or no architectural knowledge.”36 “In short,” Kelsey wrote, “the first competition is being held largely to determine what will best symbolize the event to be commemorated, and it is frankly confessed that some of the elements of the problem are not yet known.”37 The desired “symbol” was open to interpretation. Only a brief mention of the Pan-American concept was made in the program. A number of architects refused to participate when this format was announced. After registering, Hood withdrew when he realized that the stage-one winning entries were to be published in the second-stage program document. He felt that it would be unfair for an architect’s idea to be taken without recompense and that this plan would discourage prominent architects from entering the competition.38 If a winning symbol were submitted, the Permanent Committee wanted to reserve the right to incorporate the idea or ideas in the second program. It planned to give the authors credit but also make the idea available for others to appropriate.39 Kelsey insisted that this would not be a problem because the “open-ended” competition was not dependent on the design of a single object, but rather of multiple elements (the airport, lighthouse, museum, park, and residential quarters), and this would lead to a diversity of schemes. This was a difficult case for Kelsey to make to architects, however, because the lighthouse was emphasized in the competition’s name. Other critics predicted that the schemes for stage one would fail to produce different approaches to the many parts of the requirements.40 To prepare for his task of writing the stage-one pro-

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gram, Kelsey planned a much more extensive trip than the one he had taken during the Pan-American Union Building’s design. He was determined to take the competitors on a literary “tropical excursion” in the program he wrote. In June 1927, he accompanied Morales on a twenty-two-day study of Santo Domingo to select a site for the memorial and to procure an accurate survey. The men chartered a plane so they could examine potential sites in relation to how the memorial might be viewed from the city and by visitors arriving by air or sea.41 They also began to establish the program requirements and competition rules. It was perhaps this experience that inspired Kelsey to take on another role not specified in his job description, that of cultural mediator and interpreter of all things Dominican. He proceeded to outline directives for how to design a monument befitting a historically, symbolically, and climatically specific context. His task was to communicate his knowledge to a general architectural audience, and he sought to influence the competition by encouraging a form of regionally sensitive architecture. His two programs evolved into design primers that amplified his earlier efforts to tropicalize the Pan-American Union Building. Kelsey’s competition programs belong ideologically to a series of European publications developed since the late eighteenth century that addressed the problem of designing in foreign environmental conditions, specifically in colonial French Africa and British India.42 His instructions took the form of “Bulletins,” which he produced in response to registrants’ questions. For example, in the “Second Bulletin,” one competitor asked: “In the heat of the tropics is it advisable to employ a great deal of metal and glass?” Kelsey replied: “No. Both should be avoided as far as possible. Thick walls, low buildings, wide overhanging cornices and shady arcades and patios are suitable for the tropics.” When another competitor asked: “Is color essential?” Kelsey replied: “Color contrasts can never be too intense on a lighthouse. Even in northern countries they are often striped with primary colors, while in the tremulous atmosphere of the steaming tropics it is even more important to do something to identify them from a dis-

tance.”43 Historian Chee Kien Lai observes how the English architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry made similar recommendations in their book, Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones: “It is also necessary for buildings in the humid tropics to be fairly near together when they are ranged in groups because man has far less energy in the tropics than elsewhere.”44 Kelsey’s advice was not free of this type of biological tropical trope, although the program was meant to simulate the experience of travel for the competitors. The first competition program was divided into two parts, with Book One dedicated to the history of the project and the competition rules. Book Two was composed of eleven sets of essays called “Flashes,” playing off the lighthouse theme and giving readers access to Kelsey’s impressions. Each competitor had to read through colorful accounts of Kelsey’s travel experiences, which were intermingled with Santo Domingo’s history and sections on Columbus. Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism is pertinent here in considering Kelsey’s persuasiveness and authority in speaking for the “native.” He described himself wandering through Santo Domingo’s streets like an anthropologist, noting local behaviors and observing the way locals acknowledged his presence. In one account he wrote about a Dominican peon and a limousine that transports a rich American, presumably Kelsey. He presented carefully calculated descriptions and personal interpretations that represented Santo Domingo as he saw it, creating a highly subjective “how-to” book that invoked the native and Columbus. This was a reprise of the trip he took to Mexico to prepare him for the Pan-American Union’s transformation. Kelsey was convinced that the program was an effective strategy for framing the competition in cultural terms, and that he could communicate valuable experiences with his carefully worded and illustrated pages. Hoping to convey his architectural and urban impressions to architects and artists worldwide, Kelsey wrote in international terms, making references to a modern Dominican urban landscape and presenting the varied scales of the city to communicate the necessity of analyzing it like an architect. He presented the

city from the viewpoint of a pedestrian, then as a driver, and finally from the air. He wanted designers to get past their own preconceived and racist notions. Yet even as he painted a colorful picture, Kelsey did not want designers to presume on the languor imputed to the tropics but to look to Santo Domingo and its people as a modern and evolving society. In one of his most memorable communications to Rowe, Kelsey justified his position, stating: “Indeed, I have tested out several architects and many laymen on Santo Domingo. All of them think it a negro republic, more or less savage and none of them know of its countless treasures, and very little of its customs and its importance historically. Don’t you see that they need to see through an architect’s eyes?”45 If the problem was framed as one in need of a Modern architectural solution, he believed, a universal way of thinking could lead to the disclosure of a Pan-American identity. Kelsey exhibited a Modernist sensibility in his mention of the “architect’s eye,” hoping to elicit a knowing reading of the city and culture that inspired what he recognized as a new cosmopolitan and international interest in architecture. His aspirations were grand. Kelsey noted that Santo Domingo was the midpoint between Montreal and Buenos Aires, necessitating “the greatest airport of the Western Hemisphere.”46 The Columbus Memorial Lighthouse was to be sited across the Río Ozama on the still-developing eastern side of the city, referred to as the Pan-American quarter in the program. The locals regarded this tabula rasa, which looked out onto the Caribbean, as an important future harbor for the city. With coastal and road work underway, it presented the perfect location for modernization to take place. Kelsey’s last “flash” attested to the city’s development with its title, “Some of the Things the Dominicans Are Doing to Help Themselves.” One can almost see how Gleave’s design emerged from the “flashes.” In one section, Kelsey included Columbus’ decree, which may have read as if it was meant to instruct the competing architects directly: “You shall put up crosses on all roads and pathways, for as, God be praised, this land belongs to Christians, the remembrance of it must be preserved to all time.”47 In recasting the site and city as a place deserving sanctification,

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Kelsey prompted the designers to do the same. Other essays focused on modern developments, such as “The Middle Link of the Inter-Continental Airway,” “Atmospheric Conditions,” and “A Ray of Pure Light from the Realm of the Ideal,” where he notes how the lighthouse will aid “Pan-American Air Lines.” After mentioning the Parthenon, Kelsey also asks in this section, “Could not a Pan-American Procession be worked up from the rich and colorful early history of the Americas to equal the Pan-Athenaic Procession?”48 With this query he presented the design problem as an exercise in linking the Americas with a beacon of light that had a sanctifying and ritualistic effect and was bold enough to weather climatic conditions in a tropical marine atmosphere.

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Fig. 3.5. Stage-one site plan showing suggested placement of the light-

house. (Published in the first competition program)

In describing the important elements of the monument, Kelsey mentioned the Pan-American concept but he did not present it as the lens through which to view the project. One gets a sense that the ideological concept’s modern development was still unclear in his own mind, especially given the balance between the historical content and the contemporary interests in architecture he was trying to sustain. On the site plan, the airport landing field was called an “Aerodromo PanAmericano” and the road leading from the site to the city was the “Paseo de las Naciones,” presumably the

twenty-one American republics (Fig. 3.5). The competitors were guided by a number of ambiguous directives that did not clarify Kelsey’s goal, such as instructing them to “design a monument which shall exercise a power over the mind that the current architecture of the day, with all of its obvious perfections, does not possess.”49 This was balanced by specific requirements, such as one stating that the monument could not exceed 600  feet in height. It was also to be constructed of structural steel and reinforced concrete and faced with a “nobler material.” The hierarchical ranking of materials implied a historicist attitude suggesting that Kelsey hoped to see a strong iconographic connection to the history of Santo Domingo. The site plan in the program indicated the monument’s preferred orientation, directly in line with the historic city center, further emphasizing the balance of old and new. The program referred to the city’s eastern area as a future Pan-American center where official and residential districts would be built. The requirements specified a memorial on an elevated platform, a museum to be connected to it, a structure large enough to contain the existing chapel in the cathedral that was to be moved to this new structure, and a lantern. Architects were asked to submit a comprehensive plan illustrating the airport, an example of a residential quarter, government and residential structures, and a new house for the president of the republic. The program was issued on January 1, 1928, and the Pan-American Union reproduced it in a limited edition as a hardbound book adorned with gold letters and a seal on the cover. Copies were printed in English (2,500 copies), French (1,250 copies), and Spanish (1,250 copies).50 The next day the New York Times announced the competition, stating: “Shaft, to Cost $4,000,000, Will Be Marine and Air Lighthouse and Memorial Tomb.”51 That day, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, acting as chairman of the Pan-American Union’s governing board, announced the competition. The competition requirements included six sheets of drawings with accompanying text submitted as two or three paragraphs “to make [the design entries’] meaning entirely clear to a jury composed of men who see through different

lenses.”52 They had decided that an international jury composed of three jurors, one each from Europe, Latin America, and North America, was appropriate. The jurors would serve twice, once in Spain and once in a Latin American city (Rio de Janeiro was eventually chosen).53 When the competition participants were asked to cast votes for the jury, however, few Latin American architects were nominated.54 As Kelsey warned: “Not one in twenty of the competitors in the United States knows the name of a single South American architect.”55 Uruguayan architect Horacio Acosta y Lara was eventually asked to join Hood (United States) and Saarinen (Europe), who had also registered for the competition but decided to serve as jurors instead.56 As a political move, Kelsey suggested that Acosta y Lara, the least known of the three, be appointed chairman of the committee.

Pan-America’s Heritage Is Explored in Stage One Kelsey waited fifteen months between the disbursement of the program and the submission deadline before the fruits of his labor arrived in Madrid for the jury to review. The jurors were asked to choose ten unranked entrants, who would then be invited to resubmit plans and models to compete in the second stage. A successful submission pool led to intense jury deliberations and to exhibitions of the design entries and winners in Madrid and Rome. These days were captured in Kelsey’s diary entries, which he began in late March 1929 upon arriving in Madrid with his wife, Henrietta Kelsey. Yet even before Kelsey arrived, his days were filled with anxiety. Before departing, he was in contact with President Vásquez of the Dominican Republic regarding a possible site change. Apparently, the 2,500-acre tract’s uneven surface would compromise the airport’s runway design. Kelsey did not want to shake Spain’s confidence in the project or jeopardize the United States’ $800,000 appropriation, which was under congressional review, so he asked that this not be made public. He also arrived during a time of national political unrest as Spain mourned its recently deceased queen mother. Two other events underway in Spain that year her-

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alded architectural developments: Seville’s IberoAmerican Exposition and Barcelona’s International Exhibition, their openings occurring almost one month after the competition deadline.57 Seville’s celebration of the Pan-Hispanic movement opened May 9 and consisted of a Spanish neoclassical fairground with ten participating Latin American countries. The exposition’s main attraction was a set of buildings surrounding the Plaza de España designed by Spanish architect Aníbal González. The great architectural event of the Barcelona exposition turned out to be a small, modern structure, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, which opened May 19. Although it is likely that Kelsey kept abreast of these developments, he was completely consumed by the Madrid exhibition. Kelsey was quite enthusiastic about the competition and felt it would leave a mark, especially with the airport design. “Neither President Vásquez nor anyone in the Dominican Republic,” he wrote to Rowe, “can visualize the aviation features of this project. For this reason they are going to get a surprise when they receive photographs of the best designs.”58 Upon his arrival in Madrid, Kelsey found letters and requests to participate from numerous countries that had not been forwarded to Washington, D.C., and had never been opened.59 He also received appeals from Finland regarding two sets of drawings by Finnish architects; they were apparently on board a steamer stuck in the ice in the Baltic Sea. One of these sets may have been Aalto’s submission. A railroad strike in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) may have delayed a submission, and there was a problem with delayed mail coming from the Hawaiian Islands.60 All these delays complicated matters, as the staff had to hang over two thousand sheets of drawings (each entrant submitted six separate sheets) from forty-eight countries for the jury to review in two locations: in the Palacio de Cristal and in Madrid’s Parque del Buen Retiro. The U.S. ambassador to Spain had had a year to prepare for the event, but what Kelsey encountered did not meet his standards.61 Nevertheless, from his temporary office, he maintained the Pan-American spirit that animated the event. He decorated his office with

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hemispheric trappings—a set of twenty-one flags of the American republics—and played the Pan-American card to his advantage. When the Dominican minister, Tulio M. Céstero, arrived, Kelsey stretched a 10-footlong Dominican flag over his desk and supplemented it with a smaller U.S. flag. Céstero was sent by President Vásquez to keep an eye on the competition process. “While we are on very cordial terms,” Kelsey wrote, “[Céstero] has brought two other Dominicans into the office .  .  . and they drop hints indicating that Mr. Pulliam’s suspicions are well founded.” Kelsey did not elaborate on what was meant by this, but this type of intrigue peppered his diary. The jury stage was much more than a design review and selection process; it was a practice in strategic diplomacy and hemispheric promotion on foreign soil. Ceaselessly generating publicity for the monument, Kelsey met with the U.S. ambassador to Spain and organized dinner engagements with the ambassadors of the American republics. He met Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the sculptor of the Aztec fountain with whom he had worked during the Pan-American Union’s construction. In addition to submitting a design entry to the competition, Whitney was in Spain for the dedication of a monument to Columbus she executed at La Rábida monastery near the city of Huelva, a gift from the United States (Fig. 3.6). Whitney shaped a cubist representation of Columbus that cleverly used his head to form a cross, an indication of the extent to which Columbus and the Christianizing missionary expedition were conflated in the 1920s.62 Kelsey wrote in his diary about an impressive luncheon with the Spanish Permanent Committee, headed by Columbus’ descendant, the Duke of Veragua.63 Delightful moments were balanced by stressful incidents. It made Kelsey very nervous that Walter M. St. Elmo, the auditor of the Dominican customs receivership in Santo Domingo, who had launched a campaign of suspicion about the authenticity of Columbus’ remains in the city, decided to travel to Madrid. A journalist for one of Madrid’s newspapers interviewed St. Elmo, who called into question the relevance of the monument. One can imagine Kelsey’s anxiety when St. Elmo made a public address stating that the

Fig. 3.6. Monumento a Colón, La Rábida monastery, Huelva, Spain, 1928–1929, by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Fig. 3.7. The international jury in Madrid; left to right: Eliel Saarinen, Raymond Hood, Albert Kelsey (technical advisor), and Horacio Acosta y Lara. (Pencil Points, October 1931)

bones in Santo Domingo’s cathedral did not belong to Christopher Columbus.64 He targeted Kelsey personally when he warned: “We fear that someone has imposed upon yourself and those in charge of that [Columbus Lighthouse] project in Washington, and perhaps persuaded you that this step, although not contemplated or authorized by that Resolution, was proper and in order. It was a thinly veiled attempt to thus obtain the official recognition of the Pan-American Union of their authenticity and to adroitly utilize the Union for the furtherance of a grave and wrong injustice.” St. Elmo believed that he could prove that Columbus’ remains had been exhumed from the cathedral on December 20, 1795, by Archbishop Portillo and Gabriel de Aristizábal and taken to Havana. He called the discovery of the remains in Santo Domingo in 1877 the “profanation of the very memory of Columbus as well as the ghoulish profanation of the tomb of some unknown dead who had been buried in this cathedral.”65 The questionable

status of the remains did not prove to be a hindrance to promoting the project.66 All of this promotional activity came to a halt on April 3, 1929, the submission deadline. The jurors arrived the day before, a Tuesday, and after a small ceremony, they went to work (Fig. 3.7).67 They reviewed the design entries and their accompanying project descriptions, which were submitted in English, French, or Spanish. They familiarized themselves with the display space and submissions on the first day and then began to eliminate projects. The group worked together, and by the end of the following day, a majority of the sets of drawings were taken from the walls and piled on the floor. Only fifty to sixty sets remained on the walls. Kelsey tried to remain optimistic about the whole event and reminded Rowe that they would pay a mere $25,000 for more than four hundred ideas.68 The competition had successfully attracted a large group of reputable architects.

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Table 3.1. Latin American Participation in the Columbus Memorial

Lighthouse Competition and the Chicago Tribune Competition* CMLC REGISTRATION

CMLC ENTRIES

CTC ENTRIES

Mexico

37

9

1

Peru

17

6

-

Cuba

35

5

Brazil

17

3

Chile

26

Uruguay

28

Argentina Panama

Table 3.2. Global Participation in the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse

Competition and the Chicago Tribune Competition, 1922* CMLC REGISTRATION

CMLC ENTRIES

CTC ENTRIES

United States

585

113

145

Italy

145

49

9

2

Germany

202

41

37

-

Latin America

196

39

3

3

-

France

168

39

7

3

-

Spain

77

31

2

32

3

-

U.S.S.R.

84

26

0

2

2

-

Austria

46

11

5

Colombia

4

1

-

Hungary

40

6

2

Costa Rica

2

1

-

Sweden

35

7

-

Ecuador

2

1

-

England

49

5

4

Guatemala

4

1

-

Holland

37

5

11

Puerto Rico

7

1

-

Switzerland

22

5

-

Bolivia

4

-

-

Canada

18

1

4

Dom. Republic

5

-

-

Other Nations

266

77

El Salvador

-

-

-

TOTALS

196

39

Haiti

1

-

-

Honduras

2

-

-

Nicaragua

1

-

-

Paraguay

1

-

-

Venezuela

9

-

-

196

39

3

COUNTRY

TOTALS

COUNTRY

3

*Both competitions yielded a number of anonymous submissions, which are included in the tabulations. Source: Secciones 2 y 5, Asamblea Nacional, Madrid, Spain, May 6, 1929, CML, 148.

*Both competitions yielded a number of anonymous submissions, which are included in the tabulations. Source: “Architects Registered in the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Architectural Competition,” March 5, 1929, CML, 148.

National committees of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse had been formed in every member nation of the Pan-American Union to recruit competitors and raise funds for the memorial. Kelsey kept close track of the countries represented.69 He made efforts to attract famous architects and sent letters to architectural societies worldwide. Through the Fédération des Sociétés Françaises d’Architectes, he and his colleagues contacted Louis Cordonnier, Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Auguste and Gustave Perret, and Tony Garnier (the only one to submit an entry).

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Le Corbusier and the Perret brothers mailed in registration forms but did not submit entries.70 When concerns were raised five months into the competition that out of the 505 registration cards received thus far not a single one came from Latin America, the appropriate committees were notified. A week later, 39 Latin American architects (6 percent) out of the new total of 630 had registered, and eventually 196 Latin American registrants (9 percent) were among the 1,970 total applications received from sixty-five countries (see Table 3.1).71 The 196 Latin American registrants represented

Table 3.3. Notable Latin American CMLC Entrants, by Country

Argentina

Ángel Guido, Fr. Holoubek, Manuel Torres Armengol

Brazil

Alvaro Carlos de Arruda Botelho, Flavio de Rezende Carvalho, Federico Sommer

Chile

Juan Martínez Gutiérrez (received submission from Spain), Rodolfo A. Oyarzún Philippi (received submission from Austria), Smith Solar & Smith Miller

Colombia

Jesús Arango Restrepo

Costa Rica

José Ma. Barrantes

Cuba

Esteban Rodríguez Castells, Agustín R. Gómez, César E. Guerra M., Mira y Rosich, Manuel de Tapia Ruano

Ecuador

Jorge Enrique Mideros

Guatemala

Wilhelm Krebs (German)

Mexico

José Arnal (Spaniard), Enrique G. García, Luis MacGregor, Antonio Muñoz García, Miguel de la Torre, Manuel Salazar y Arce, Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Octavio Valencia

Panama

Rolland C. Buckley, Manuel Ruiz Rivas

Peru

Martín Eloy Alvarado, Charles Mackie, Ricardo de Jaxa Malachowski, Bruno Paprocki, Héctor Velarde, Pedro E. Saldías y Maninat

Uruguay

Jorge Caprario, Cándido Lerena Juanicó, Jorge Reghem

Source: Columbus Memorial Library, OAS. Canada

almost every nation: Argentina (32), Brazil (17), Chile (26), Cuba (35), Mexico (37), Peru (17), Uruguay (28), and thirteen other countries (see Tables 3.2 and 3.3). Five architects from Santo Domingo registered for the competition but ultimately none submitted a design entry. Mexico, Peru, and Cuba produced the majority of the design entries, and El Salvador was the only Latin American country that did not participate in any capacity. The largest number of entries came from the United States, but not as many as had been submitted to the Chicago Tribune competition.

Another notable response to the lighthouse competition came from the U.S.S.R., a country that had not participated in the Chicago Tribune competition. Of the 84 Soviet registrants, 26 submitted entries, including some of the most prolific architects in the country.72 This reflected the extent to which Soviet architects considered competitions to be an important design outlet. Their training emphasized the production of designs “on paper,” as very little building was occurring at the time.73 The series of competitions for the Palace of the Soviets that followed, between 1931 and 1933, was a turning point marking the end of modern Soviet architecture. The lighthouse entries presented a provocative set of designs. The Palace of the Soviets competition brought worldwide attention to a particular strain of abstract Russian design called Constructivist architecture. It is no surprise that Melnikov’s design entry, with its profound symbolism, caused much discussion during the jury deliberations in Madrid.74 Kelsey encouraged several Soviet associations of architects to send as many entries as possible, and he felt confident that the competition program would “appeal mightily to the Russian imagination.”75 The competition also broke new ground with the unprecedented number of women, sculptors, and engineers who registered. Whitney was the most famous woman to register, and the Polish-born artist and sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski also submitted a design. Neither placed, but both were published in the second competition’s program. These registrants were treated as second class. When faced with a low supply of form letters with which to respond to the registrants, Rowe asked Kelsey to let him handle requests from the “unconventional” correspondents. He instructed: “Such letters, like those from women, sculptors and engineers, have to be handled by me, while our form letter does not seem to do for more than half of the other applicants.”76 In the end, the Permanent Committee seemed content with the number of submissions, yielding more entries than any competition held previously. Perhaps Kelsey’s knowledge of the famous architects who were being eliminated led to his frustration with the jurors: he also complained about their architectural

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tastes and lack of understanding of the site. After witnessing the hasty elimination of so many designs that first day, he wrote in his diary: While I have great admiration for the architectural knowledge of both Hood and Saarinen, I am a little disappointed in their intensely practical points of view. Of the two, Saarinen is more of an artist. .  .  . Saarinen  .  .  . has nicer instincts and understands certain refinements much better than Hood. .  .  . Hood is the apostle of big business and swiftness. He is a masterful man, very well trained, but impatient and somewhat of a bluffer. Acosta on the other hand, is a Latin, and has some of the qualities that seem to be essential for a juror concerned with such a problem as the Columbus Memorial. I have not yet been able to decide how much he knows or how good his taste is, and I am rather inclined to believe that both of the others are stronger personalities, but from my point of view, Acosta understands the ideal back of this enterprise better than either of the other two.77

The jurors selected ten unranked winners and a second set of ten “half settled” submissions. Twelve new sets of drawings arrived on the last day of judgment, and as fate would have it, one set was chosen from these late arrivals and included in the winning ten. The submission belonged to Joseph Lea Gleave.79 The following European and U.S. architects were selected: Ten Winners of Stage One of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition ENGLAND FRANCE FRANCE GERMANY ITALY SPAIN U.S.

Kelsey’s criticism was moderated only slightly when the jurors completed their selection two days later. It is clear that he would have chosen an entirely different set of winners. He wrote: The Jury is very good in considering the big fundamental elements of the problem—Saarinen in particular—but none of them are particularly in sympathy with what I have tried so hard to impress upon the competitors in the first program. All of them seem to think that sculptors can supply the ideas for the detail, and therefore give very little attention to the spiritual and intellectual qualities that this monument should possess. Hood is the most forceful of the three.78

Kelsey was hoping for a project based on a fundamental symbol that worked with the building’s order and composition and that was integrated with the arts. He did not want a practical scheme that needed augmentation, a process he had already experienced once.

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U.S. U.S. U.S.

Joseph Lea Gleave Louis Berthin, Georges Doyon, and Georges Nesteroff Theodore Lescher, Paul Andrieu, George Défontaine, Maurice Gauthier Josef Wentzler Pippo Medori, Vincenso Palleri, and Aldo Vercelloni Joaquín Vaquero Palacios and Luis Moya Blanco Will Rice Amon Helmle, Corbett and Harrison, Robert P. Rogers (Poor and Oltar-Jevsky)80 Douglas D. Ellington Donald Nelson (New York) and Edgar Lynch (Paris)

Of the ten honorable mentions, four entries came from the United States; three from France; and one each from Czechoslovakia, Italy, and the U.S.S.R.81 The lack of Latin American winners worried Kelsey, yet he seemed content at the end of the initial judging. “The strain is over,” he wrote to Rowe after the winners were awarded. “Except for some very minor slips, the program, to date, has been carried out satisfactorily.” Overall, he was “amazed by the quantity of good stuff that [had] been submitted.”82 Kelsey described the closing ceremony in detail, especially the king’s hour-and-a-half visit, which was carefully photographed for the second competition program to help aid the fund-raising campaign in Latin America.83 Although the jury made a plea not to exhibit

or publish the winners to avoid influencing the second stage, Kelsey proceeded to plan an exhibition, and the president of the Spanish National Assembly recommended that it should open before the official six-month mourning for the queen mother ended so he could attend before he visited the Barcelona and Seville expositions. The president had opposed the public viewing and tried to call off the formal opening, the banquet, and the king’s visit.84 The Spanish architectural society insisted, however, that the exhibition open posthaste. Acosta y Lara read the jury’s report at the inaugural banquet (Fig. 3.8).85 The report stated, “. . . realizing that the preliminary Competition is a search for an idea, it has chosen those projects that have the promise and possibility of development into a great conception in the final competition, rather than those that have a perfection of study.”86 The report reiterated the problem set forth by the competition program, which was the search for an appropriate symbol for Columbus’ discov-

ery of America and the events in history that followed. Hood and Saarinen had already departed Madrid with the understanding that an exhibition would not take place. The Dominican minister and the Duke of Veragua visited the exhibition. The king arrived in mourning attire. Military officers in gold-braided uniforms marched in formation in the drawing-filled Palacio Cristal. On this momentous occasion, Kelsey captured in his diary the off-the-record comments that were made by the royal party, especially those of the U.S. ambassador, Ogden H. Hammond. Passing a design that “faintly resembled a lamp post with a statue of Columbus with its arm around it, [Hammond] turned with a twinkle in his eye to the Duke of Veragua and said, ‘Your grandfather has had a bad night.’” Of the Soviet designs, Kelsey obFig. 3.8. Acosta y Lara reading the international jury’s report at the

opening of the exhibition in Madrid. (Published in the second competition program)

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served, “All the Bolshevik designs interested the king, though he confessed he could not understand them, nor could anybody else. Yet for my own part I see a great deal of serious striving in these designs.” Then Kelsey added: “When we came to a very bad design, which I think must have been drawn by an Indian from Central America, on the detail sheet was displayed the statue of a nude Indian chief. Pointing at its buttocks, His Majesty remarked with a naughty little twinkle in his eye, ‘It might do for a woman, but never for a man.’”87 During the exhibition, Tony Garnier, Albert Guilbert, and Paul Bigot formally complained that Saarinen was not a legitimate European representative, as he had lived in the United States since 1925, and that the jury process had not been thorough enough. The architects insisted on another form of jury selection for the second phase, with the possibility of holding another competition altogether, but these recommendations were ignored.88 The French architects could not conceive how more than two thousand sheets of drawings could be examined in three days, and they demanded a new examination of the projects and that an exhibition take place in Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations. The French architects also asked that the committee make an appeal for a larger jury “so that the different tendencies of art shall be represented thereon.”89 They proposed that each large nation having an ambassador should designate two judges, and each nation having only a minister should designate one judge. They hoped to see a French juror. Earlier, Le Corbusier was ranked second on the potential jury list as the European jury member. Votes received from South America toward the end of the voting period, however, shifted the vote to Saarinen.90 The public was allowed to see the exhibition through May 15, one week after the period of mourning was over.91 Kelsey began to plan the second exhibition in Rome. Four Italian architects who had personally delivered their drawings in Madrid informed Kelsey of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s interest in the Memorial Lighthouse. Kelsey agreed to bring the exhibition to Rome if two conditions were met: the Italian government should furnish an exhibition hall, and King Umberto, Mussolini, and a representative of the pope

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should open the exhibition. Photographs of such a celebration would, of course, provide excellent propaganda for the second program.92 By mid-July, the cases containing the competition exhibition had reached Rome, but Kelsey postponed the exhibition until Mussolini returned from his travels.93 He stalled again after the exhibition was hung, delaying the formal opening until he was granted a special interview with Mussolini.94 The exhibition ran from August 7 to August 12. Kelsey captured the event in a note to Rowe: “The entire façade of the art palace was well decorated while inside tub shrubs and plants, long swags of laurel, great carpets and a dozen soldiers in gleaming helmets with swords gave brilliancy to the interior. The center of the building was given over to the prize drawings. The others were grouped by nations and carefully labeled.”95 The Italian hanging committee of architects chose the design entry of nonfinalist Henry Hornbostel for a place of honor, and a photograph of the room exhibiting the Latin American entries was included in the second program. Kelsey finally returned home with the winning entries, and the rest of the drawings were shipped back to Madrid and from there to the original owners.96 Although he quickly turned his attention to developments in Santo Domingo and continued to tend to the discontent expressed by some of the competitors, he began thinking about the second program.97 He mollified Bigot by promising to publish his design in the new program, which would include eighty-seven different projects in addition to the winners and honorable mentions. Kelsey also informed Rowe that “one of the very best designs,” submitted by “two of the most talented and established architects of the time,” never arrived in Madrid, and he offered to publish these drawings as well. He made a similar promise to a Czechoslovakian architect who was threatening a lawsuit. Kelsey still occasionally expressed reservations about the competition’s outcome: “Well, when you receive the photographs of the ten winning designs,” he told Rowe, “and note that nine of them are of different types and that few of them have much to say about Columbus or Pan-Americanism, you will understand my quandary. It is my purpose, if I never do anything else, to bring this work to a successful issue,

and as I have written you before, it all depends upon the way I write the next Program.”98 After approving the winners, the Permanent Committee worked on the cost of the memorial and the process of government contributions. Kelsey knew that the second program could play an important part in drumming up interest, but the participation of the Latin American countries would be tested. The committee had recommended that the governments of the American republics contribute $1 million or $1.5 million on the basis of population, in the same manner that the Pan American Union was maintained. The payments would be spread over a period of four years, the first payment to be made in 1930.99 They outlined the apportionment of payments among the governments. With the exception of the Dominican Republic and the United States, the rest of the countries were divided into four groups according to each country’s population.100 Brazil and Mexico would be asked to pay the most, followed by Argentina and Colombia. A joint resolution was submitted to the U.S. Congress authorizing the appropriation of $871,655 as the contribution of the United States toward the memorial.101 The committee knew that this was a difficult task to accomplish: all of the American republics would have to make the same effort. As he selected projects for the second program, Kelsey took the payment scheme into consideration, but he also used the selections as an opportunity to reflect on the ideal he hoped to see. He featured the projects that he felt were most provocative in this regard. Accompanied by extensive notes and recommendations, his overview of the design entries seemingly eclipsed the jury’s report. He gave the most space to the schemes he hoped the top-ten winners would pay attention to, and he used others to point to the themes he found most relevant. His political mind was at work in the layout of the program beyond the winners and honorable mentions. Bigot was first, Whitney got a generous spread, and Flavio de Rezende Carvalho of São Paulo, Brazil, and Carlos Obregón Santacilia of Mexico City, Mexico, received extensive coverage with full pages each. A second Mexican design, belonging to Luis MacGregor of Mexico City, was inserted almost

haphazardly at the very end without accompanying text. The three schemes to receive the most coverage, which point to Kelsey’s interest in finding the PanAmerican ideal, belonged to Giovanni Crescini of Milan, Italy; Richard Thiede of Cologne, Germany; and Konstantin Melnikov of Moscow, U.S.S.R., who was given the third full page. Of Crescini’s scheme Kelsey pointed out that “PanAmericanism—the common work of humanity”—was the main theme (Fig. 3.9). The shaft of Crescini’s tower took the form of an organ pipe cactus in a cluster, a species native to Mexico and the United States. Kelsey drew readers’ attention to the manner in which the PanAmerican spirit was captured in the figures that flanked the four sides of the base. Christopher Columbus, his brother Bartholomew Columbus, Charles Lindbergh, and St. Dominic represent the Old World, New World, United States, and the Dominican Republic. This is emphasized with the colors of Christianity, the U.S. flag, and the nations of Latin America. Thiede’s scheme was included for the way in which its twenty-one rings were stacked one atop the next to construct the shaft, and because the architect presented drawings depicting the monument as it would be seen from the sea, the ground, and the air. The numerous designs of Bruno Ferrati of Milan, Italy, were included because each explored a different theme with one architectural solution, the New World with the arch and the discovery narrative with the mural-clad building, for example (Fig. 3.10).102 Although critical of the Puerto Rican scheme presented by Pedro A. de Castro of Santurce, Kelsey pointed out the “twenty-one sisters” represented by sculptures of women holding up torches that crowned that lighthouse. Kelsey addressed the Pan-American theme directly when he reviewed Melnikov’s design (Fig. 3.11). His curiosity about the Russian design entries is clear from his comments. Reflecting Soviet trends of the period, these design entries presented monuments with dynamic mechanical components meant to symbolize progress and freedom of expression. With their abstract language, some referenced North and South America, as did Melnikov. His monument contained red and blue fins in constant rotation—representing the North and

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Fig. 3.9.

Fig. 3.10.

Fig. 3.11.

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Fig. 3.9. (facing page) Competition entry by Giovanni Crescini, Milan, Italy, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program) Fig. 3.10. (facing page) Competition entry by Bruno Ferrati, Milan, Italy, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program) Fig. 3.11. (facing page) Competition entry by Konstantin Melnikov, Moscow, U.S.S.R., for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program) Fig. 3.12. Competition entry by Flavio de Rezende Carvalho, São Paulo,

Brazil, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program)

the South—with Pan-American unity expressed as a constantly changing configuration. The rotational motion of Melnikov’s monument was to occur in different time cycles, depending on wind movement; Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International was the obvious reference here. Melnikov hoped to illustrate the unending process of developing relations between the North and the South that the Western Hemisphere had undergone and would continue to experience in defining itself. The red and blue rotating fins captured this perpetual dance, while the conical structures within symbolized the New World tenuously balanced on the Old World, which contained Columbus’ remains. Tatlin incorporated four basic forms as functional spaces within the spiraling helix that constituted his tower, while a cone reinforced the spiral in Melnikov’s design. The spiral was used repeatedly in hemispheric projects and would continue to surface. Kelsey enjoyed Melnikov’s entry, but his bias toward regional references was clear when he reviewed other projects. In one memorable moment, reacting to an abstract Russian entry, he commented: “But how far away it all is from mantillas, high combs and the sound of guitars.”103 Carvalho’s design seemed to provide the right balance for him. Noting the incorporation of the pan-native theme, Kelsey pointed to Carvalho’s liberal incorporation of pre-Columbian iconography (Fig. 3.12). Carvalho’s elaborations on Marajoara Indian motifs were not unlike Kelsey’s Jade Fence and Garden

Apartment loggia at the Pan-American Union, although Carvalho was pointing to the similarities between modern design and this form of Indian art. Kelsey had emphasized ancient cultural forms and enjoyed the stark contrast this brought to Washington, D.C. In a few other schemes, Kelsey noted the importance of tropical references, although he chose unconvincing examples, such as Hornbostel and Wood’s entry. His point centered on the architects’ choice of colors, the blue referencing the Caribbean (Fig. 3.13). Despite the emphasis he placed on other themes in the program, Kelsey was unaffected by designs that resorted to the predictable imagery of a heroic Columbus, including nautical references (giant ships and statuary depicting Columbus the Navigator), illuminated globes (representing the illuminated lighthouse or the world), and references to Columbus’ Christianizing mission (with cruciform shapes and

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chapels used as design elements). Kelsey included a number of schemes that referenced the indigenous populations and other American symbols, including an evocative entry from a Chicago architect, Szukalski (Fig. 3.14). Resembling Crescini’s pipe cactus and Carvalho’s pre-Columbian interpretations, Szukalski’s design presented a golden ear of corn emerging from a cubist platform ornamented with stylized pre-Columbian motifs. Kelsey’s harshest criticism was of the boldest Modern designs, such as Garnier’s (Fig. 3.15). Like Melnikov’s design, Garnier’s presented a spiraling structure. However, his design resembled not Tatlin’s tower, but the Eiffel Tower. His spiraling exoskeleton visibly housed and protected an inner form, and Garnier depicted his Columbian crypt as a historical structure. Here, modern construction methods were meant to enhance the sanctification of Columbus’ remains, and the beacon’s location at the end of the airport’s runway also elevated its symbolism. Kelsey noted the king of Spain’s remarks when he saw Garnier’s design: “How dizzy one would be before reaching the top.” He then noted: “Has he thought of America as only a workshop, forgetting that twenty of the Americas are both Latin and Catholic and that even in the north, at times they have a sense of reverence, and would hate to have Columbus memorialized in engineering terms?”104 Kelsey was not as critical of Obregón Santacilia’s design but noted that he was a “devotee

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of the modern school.” He was careful not to upset the Mexicans. Obregón Santacilia stuck closely to the nautical theme with a Streamlined Modernistic design that said little of his exposure to José Vasconcelos’ theory of a universal mestizo race, published in La raza cósmica (1925; Fig. 3.16). Vasconcelos asserted that mestizos represented a confluence of all cultures, and Obregón Santacilia explored this idea in his work in Mexico. Surprisingly, he did not engage the concept when presented with the opportunity to express it in New World terms. Other work not published in the second program appeared in other publications, including the work of some of the Russian architects and two Finnish designs. Finnish architect Erik Bryggmann presented one of these design schemes, which abstractly combined the lighting and viewing components of both programs at the top of a slender tower, similar to Obregón Santacilia’s design.105 Aalto proposed a reinforced concrete spiral tower that abstracted the Western Hemisphere as a pillar of progress, futurism, and solidarity, as indicated in his statement (Fig. 3.17a–g). Interestingly, he deflected all regional specificities, an approach he was later known for. His gestural design is reminiscent of the M.I.T. dormitory Baker House (1949), if only for its Fig. 3.13. Competition entry by Henry Hornbostel and Eric Fisher

Wood, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program)

Fig. 3.14.

Fig. 3.15.

purity in form. In his lighthouse scheme, Aalto hid the functional elements so that his lighthouse seemed to burrow out of the land like an enormous drill bit. Finally, the Chilean architect Rodulfo A. Oyarzún Philippi of Santiago presented a spiraling tower that looked like a hybrid of Garnier and Aalto’s designs, his gradually tapering structure also recalling, as Kelsey noted, the pre– Columbian El Caracol ruins of Mexico (Fig. 3.18). What these schemes indicate is the extent to which many of the Pan-American heritage themes resonated

Fig. 3.16. Fig. 3.14. Competition entry by Stanislaw Szukalski, Chicago, Illinois, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program) Fig. 3.15. Competition entry by Tony Garnier, Lyon, France, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program) Fig. 3.16. Competition entry by Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Mexico

City, Mexico, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program)

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Fig. 3.17a–g. Competition entry by Alvar Aalto, Abo, Finland, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Alvar Aalto Archives)

with European, Latin American, and U.S. architects. Globes and the masts, spirals, and tapering towers were repeating iconographic form solutions. These approaches surely reflected Kelsey’s instructions. Yet the manner in which they were incorporated conveyed their reference to ideological conceptions of the New World. One would imagine that the winners paid careful attention to all the schemes to see what elements made them stand out. One difference between the winning and mentioned submissions and those selected by Kelsey is that the premiated schemes are straightforward and Fig. 3.18. Competition entry by Rodulfo A. Oyarzún Philippi, Santiago,

Chile, for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. (Published in the second competition program)

display formal clarity in their use of symbols. In numerous site plans and building forms throughout the book, the symbolism of the cross came through clearly. One can see how this must have reinforced Gleave’s original conception.106 The competition was an educational experience for Kelsey, who was just getting to know the Latin American architectural scene. At one point, he boasted to Rowe about how hard he worked to get the Mexican architect Federico Mariscal to register. “He was educated at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, is one of the best architects of Mexico, and the son of Porfirio Diaz’s! Celebrated Minister of Foreign Affairs.”107 The competition produced the largest number of Latin American design entries of any international competition to that point, yielding designs from many of the most important early Latin American modern architects, especially from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru.108

Kelsey Orchestrates the Second Stage On the Permanent Committee’s recommendation, The Christopher Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition: Program and Rules of the Second Competition introduced a slightly altered program. The construction of the memorial was to be carried out incrementally, so the project could be considered as four separate units: the lighthouse, a Pan-American Park, a landing field, and a government building.109 A new site plan was included, showing the placement of the components in greater detail (Fig. 3.19). Although the previous site plan presented the monument and airfield as located, toward the center of the imagined Pan-American quarter, the new plan expanded the complex across an east-west axis. With this change, the monument and airfield were to be separated by a greater distance from one another, with activity on the west side addressing such urban improvement projects as the rebuilding of a bridge across the Río Ozama and a proposed harbor. On the eastern side, the plan included a golf course and hotel, and identified the point from which a new perspective was to be drawn. The antenna of a new intercontinental radio station was also located on the axis. Inasmuch as the revised site plan

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Fig. 3.19. Stage-two site plan with insert showing stage-one competition entry belonging to Lionel H. Pries of Seattle, Washington. (Published in the second competition program)

was drawn in great detail by Kelsey on March 15, 1930, his desire to design the grounds and monument seems undeniable. The location of the monument was elaborated with topographical and site features suggesting stairs from a harbor, and the exact location of the monument was illustrated with a star-shaped platform, with lines splaying out in all directions. A site-plan view of a scheme belonging to U.S. architect Lionel H. Pries of Seattle was included to illustrate the division between road and air travel. Setbacks delayed the second jury session until October 1931, giving architects nearly twenty months to improve their designs.

In addition to the site plan and reproductions of selected design entries, Kelsey also included a section called “The Architectural Development of the American Republics: Impressions of the Technical Adviser.” Contrasting with the “flashes” of the last program, the “impressions” contained photographs depicting the romantic and gritty scenes of the New World. One image presented Pizarro’s mummy in Peru in order to emphasize the crypt, and another a night view of the Los Angeles City Hall, completed in 1928. This section began and ended with an image of the Christ the Redeemer of the Andes statue (1904), located on the border between Argentina and Chile. The figure is shown carrying a large cross. The repetition of the image at the end of the program document emphasized its importance to Kelsey. The section that followed included final in-

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structions, requirements, and photographs of the site with technical information. Kelsey endeavored to present a comprehensive picture. He was concerned that a genuine “American” architecture would not come forth, given the number of Europeans who had been premiated.110 He wanted to inspire competitors to produce an architecture not restricted by nationalist perspectives or agendas. His effort was intended to make up for their limited knowledge of Latin America. He noted: “When a lecturer like Newman, who addresses tens of thousands every year, gives a lecture on Brazil without mentioning its culture, scholars like Nabuco and Dom Pedro II, nor the style and fashion of the place, the traditions, and those things that Brazil is, [but] rather dwells on Americanization, it seems to me that there is a crying need for what I am trying to do.”111 Kelsey’s preferred method of instruction was to have the finalists experience the site firsthand by making an “air journey” to Santo Domingo. Alluding to the insight and inspiration that this could bring, he wrote to Rowe: “Change and progress, speed and international unity are in the air.”112 He forcefully introduced into his text the subjects of air travel and internationalism, which he hoped would eliminate parochialism. Kelsey wrote to Rowe that “something entirely universal is going on which will soon make cities more and more alike . . . as yet the airport has not been developed in an architectural and monumental manner, like the cathedral plazas, the alamedas and paseos in most of the old Spanish cities of Latin America . . . therefore the problem confronting the ten remaining competitors is to do something extremely modern and cosmopolitan, to create a type of airport with its beacon light that shall be a model.”113 His fixation with an airport-monument as the ideal solution reflected not only the growing importance of air travel but also the inevitability of an international community he felt was at the core of the PanAmerican concept.114 Kelsey knew he needed to engage a complex reading of Pan-America, with technological improvements and the airport building type as central issues. At the same time, he was dealing with the fact that, as he believed, “the Americas [looked] all alike to most of the competi-

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tors, or [were] seen through purely narrow local eyes.”115 He wanted the competitors to go to Santo Domingo because so many of the designs initially submitted “showed no interest in either climatic conditions, historical associations, aboriginal art, any of the Americas, or even in Columbus himself.” Interestingly, this string of concerns referenced almost every Pan-American heritage theme previously considered.116 Kelsey elaborated upon this when he wrote to Rowe: “My chief purpose in this exhaustive analysis . . . is to inspire the ten remaining designers to make a fresh start in sympathy with the tropics, with the Spanish Colonial Empire, with the art of the early Mayas, and with a very definite thought of Christopher Columbus.”117 Kelsey’s tendency to see these themes as a collective prevailed as he prepared an itinerary for the entrants, which included visits to Veracruz, the “cathedral towns” of Mexico, the Yucatán and the principal Maya cities, Havana, and Santo Domingo. For those who could not make this trip, he suggested museums that contained plaster casts of fragments of Maya and Spanish sculpture and architecture.118 Kelsey hoped to see a monument that could convey a simultaneous global and local reading of Pan-Americanism and a regionally sensitive perspective on Latin America. “What I am trying to do is to internationalize and humanize,” he wrote. “To compel the competitors each to get away from his purely local, little point of view. I want to take the reader into other people’s lives; make the Frenchman realize that there are intelligent architects in Spain, Italy and the United States.”119 He also wanted these architects to change their views of Latin America and the Caribbean. He was convinced that he could motivate and transform them with his own “interesting” prose. “So with Haiti,” he wrote, “I can make that section inspiring, with a little more study, and make the reader see negroes in a new way, and make them understand their fancies as something most agreeable and interesting.”120 Kelsey proposed a cultural regionalist architecture that mobilized formal exploration to operate as a form of cultural mediation.121 With these directives, Kelsey projected his assumed Pan-American identity. He had learned to maintain an appearance of objectivity by not taking the side of the

United States or of Latin America. He continuously claimed that he represented a nonpartisan, neutral Pan-American role, an attitude he attributed to his twenty years of association with the Pan-American Union. He wrote on one occasion: “Not being an official, no one suspects me of being a pronounced Nationalist or of being in any way concerned with the jealousies and rivalries that exist between the different Americas. If I blunder, YOU CAN REPUDIATE ME as an irresponsible enthusiast, and enthusiasm and unremitting devotion to this problem is needed” (Kelsey’s emphases).122 Kelsey wanted to broadcast this message by touring the larger cities of Latin America at his own expense.123 He thought that because no Latin American had won the first stage, his presence in Latin America might help to placate them.124 He later wrote to Rowe, outlining such a trip and explaining his proposed stance: “I of course shall welcome any instructions you care to give, and want to be posted on all matters of etiquette, as well as warned with reference to political sore spots. My pose will be that I am a Pan American, and not a Gringo.”125 The publication of the program marked the beginning of a long history of fund-raising. “As no prizes were gained by Latin American architects,” he wrote, “it will therefore placate Latin American readers to see Sr. Acosta y Lara, of Montevideo, in the centre of the picture. . . . [This picture] will make each member of each national committee understand what a cosmopolitan and non-gringo start has been made.” He also included a picture with Dominican priests “as a means of interesting the Knights of Columbus to pay for the chapel.” He noted that the inclusion of Acosta y Lara was so that “the Latin American critics will not be so apprehensive of United States’ tutelage.”126 He later wrote: “The idea of holding the exhibitions in Madrid and Rome was to impress the Latin Americans and others with the international aspect of the undertaking, and with U.S. magnanimity. .  .  . My thought has always been to make all our literature as Latin as possible—and more Spanish than other Latins.”127 The most important portions of the program were the instructions for the architects and the evaluation methods to be used by the jury. The height was reduced

to 400  feet from 600. The chapel remained a central component, but a museum and library were added as separate elements. A lantern was also required, but now to facilitate air and ocean travel.128 The competitors were allowed a maximum of six sheets, a 1:400 scale model, and a detail model not to exceed 3 feet in height.129 In evaluating the designs, the greatest percentage points would be given to massing and composition (40  percent), and the least to the four different criteria, including the lighting system (5 percent). This item was accorded a surprisingly low percentage, considering the importance assigned to lighting technology and the lighthouse in earlier statements.130 On March 1, 1930, Pulliam sent an urgent telegram to Rowe informing him of a political coup in the Dominican Republic that had removed President Vásquez from power. With his Pan-American mind at work, Pulliam advised: “Instead of it damaging the cause of the Faro (lighthouse), I think it should promote it if it is properly capitalized at the psychological moment . . . maybe the American people would make available the entire sum as a peace offering to Santo Domingo.”131 Rowe responded with a note stating that the situation would probably not affect the campaign, but he wondered whether the new administration was prepared to fund the second stage of the competition as generously as the first stage.132 Pulliam later told Rowe that the new government was favorably disposed to the Memorial Lighthouse. President Rafael Estrella Ureña was inaugurated on March 3 and was to serve as part of the provisional government until an elected government replaced him on August 16. General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo intimidated the opposition, however, forcing a “shot-gun election” to take place.133 Highly questionable election results placed Trujillo in office, and it did not take long for the Dominican Republic’s Listín Diario to report that the U.S. Congress would vote against the appropriation for the monument.134 The tumultuous political landscape burdened the competition, and this was further worsened by natural disaster. On September 3, 1930, Hurricane San Zenón devastated Santo Domingo. All materials were originally due in Rio de Janeiro on June 1, 1931, but this had

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to change.135 Kelsey’s regular communication with the finalists kept them abreast of the developments. As a substitute for the missing program, he sent them a blueprint showing the “desired relation of the lighthouse to the ancient palace of Columbus.”136 By February 21, 1931, “Bulletin No. 3” was sent out stating that the Ozama Bridge, which connected the city with the site, had been destroyed. A new four-lane concrete bridge would be required, and the competitors were asked to include such a proposal in their schemes.137 To make matters worse, Hood informed officials in Washington that he was so busy with his work on Radio City Music Hall in New York City that he asked if the jury could move to Havana because a trip to Rio de Janeiro would require too much time. The Permanent Committee was not willing to make the change, and Hood was replaced. The competition’s original participants had been asked to make recommendations for the jurors, so the PanAmerican Union consulted their list of candidates in order to choose a substitute. The tabulation of votes for the selection of the North American juror was as follows: Paul Cret: 89; Raymond Hood: 73; Frank Lloyd Wright: 50; Benjamin Wistar Morris: 38; and Cass Gilbert: 37. Cret was originally registered for the first stage of the competition and therefore had been deemed ineligible for the jury.138 Rowe asked him to serve as ju-

ror for the second stage, but Cret declined. Wright was consequently asked to represent the United States. A second exhibition in Rio de Janeiro was scheduled to open on October 12, 1931, following the jury’s final decision. All the projects arrived in Rio on time, and after jury deliberations, the awards were announced before a large gathering at a special session of the National School of Fine Arts.139

Gleave’s Transformative Cross Following a short jury deliberation, Joseph Lea Gleave of Nottingham, England, was awarded first prize. Celebrations in the streets of Manchester, where Gleave had studied architecture, erupted when he won stage one: an architecture student had surpassed some of the world’s most famous architects at that stage (Fig. 3.20). The second win confirmed that Gleave had perfected his solution and that he had learned from the other published designs. The second prize was awarded to Donald S. Nelson and Edgar Lynch of Chicago, who had completed their first-stage design while students of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Employed by Bennett, Parsons, and Frost by 1931, Nelson and Lynch produced their final design in collaboration with the sculptor Oskar J.  W. Hansen, known for his bronze winged figures at Hoover Dam. An image of Nelson and Lynch’s stage-two design appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune shortly after the win, their photographs revealing their youth (Figs. 3.21 and 3.22).140 Their design changed significantly from the first stage and resembled a compacted version of Hornbostel’s scheme. Their earlier design may have inspired Gleave to make his monument’s head more compact and use the pavement and landscaping features to emphasize the cross. Of the two, Nelson would go on to have a successful career. He participated in the design of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago and then worked for George L. Dahl on the Texas Centennial ExFig. 3.20. Joseph Lea Gleave and schoolmates celebrating after the announcement of his win after stage one. (Courtesy of David Sutherland Gleave and Carolyn Lea Gleave)

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position in Dallas in 1936. Nelson subsequently established his own practice in Dallas. Rather reluctantly, the jurors awarded a third prize to Joaquín Vaquero Palacios and Luis Moya Blanco of Spain, and a fourth prize to Théodore Lescher of France.141 The jury took on a dour tone when discussing these entries in what some considered “harsh language.” Kelsey recommended that they still be published after he and Acosta y Lara “toned it down.” “No worthy third in line with the qualifications of the first two designs appears,” the report stated. “Nor a fourth .  .  . the following characteristics are given briefly in outline to indicate why the remaining eight are of a standard below award.”142 It was odd that the jurors publicly stated this while awarding a third and fourth prize. There was near-unanimous approval of Gleave’s recumbent cross-shaped lighthouse scheme, although

Fig. 3.21. Stage-one competition entry by Donald Nelson and Edgar

Lynch, Paris, France, and Chicago, Illinois. (Published in the second competition program)

Fig. 3.22. Top: Stage-two competition entry for the Columbus

Memorial Lighthouse; bottom: Donald Nelson (left) and Edgar Lynch (right). (Published in the Chicago Daily Tribune, October 18, 1931)

Fig. 3.23. Monument of “Christo Redemptor,” inaugurated in 1931,

overlooking Botafago Beach. Also visible is the Sugar Loaf mountain in the Rio de Janeiro harbor. Paul George Lawler, artist.

the design had been significantly altered from the first stage. Its clarity of form and simplicity gave it instant iconic presence, the fundamental symbol Kelsey was looking for. The cruciform scheme struck a chord with the Cariocas, as a monumental statue of Christ the Redeemer had just been dedicated overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro (Fig. 3.23). From a distance, it looked like

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Image unavailable for electronic edition.

a giant cross. This prompted the cardinal archbishop of Rio de Janeiro to say that “soon in Santo Domingo a much larger cross, flat on the ground, will dominate the Western Hemisphere.”143 Kelsey felt that the final round of judging produced a first-place design that worked well for those who “still feel that the ‘Cross’ is potent.”144 He also felt that reaching a unanimous decision in awarding first prize was a great achievement in comparison to the controversy over the League of Nations competition in Geneva in 1927. Rowe remained concerned about the jury report and sent letters asking the advice of Hood and Cret.145 Hood replied that he did not feel that Rowe should suppress the publication, stating that the choice of first and second prize was as he had expected. He added that Wright probably made “a platform of the occasion from which to deliver his personal ideas about architecture.”146 Cret stated that the report was written in “a patronizing tone appropriate for an article of criticism, but questionable in the present case.”147 The report’s negative tone was partly due to expectations not met. The jurors stated: “It was not expected that the

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Fig. 3.24. Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, exterior perspective and partial plan. Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Although the building is inscribed with the completion date of 1908, the rendering was made around 1929–1930. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. (Art Resource, New York)

ten competitors winning the first prizes would restrict themselves to the ideas they [originally] submitted . . . the projects lacked innovation: Except in the employment of one great modern resource, artificial light, none among the ten designs now submitted in final competition express[es] what previous civilizations with more primitive resources could not have better expressed.”148 The competition program had suggested that the architects develop their projects further but also take into consideration all the published schemes. In mentioning Wright, Hood referred to his development of a distinctive form of Modern architecture, exemplified by Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, which was built in 1905–1908 (Fig. 3.24). This cubic structure was constructed of cast-in-place concrete. Gleave’s scheme exhibited the same massive form,

boldly executed with planar walls and bands of windows that underscored the impressive scale (Fig. 3.25). Wright had seen the schemes in the second competition program but was not impressed with them. Writing to Lewis Mumford from his studio, Taliesin, on September 10, 1931, Wright mentioned leaving for Rio on the 19th. He writes: “A job on my hands. I can’t vote for anything the previous trio recommended [referring to the jurors]. I guess I am going down to register a minority report.”149 Gleave’s design had changed considerably with his addition of pre-Columbian iconography, and it is likely that this helped change Wright’s mind. Kelsey appreciated Wright’s contribution but was taken aback by his behavior in Rio de Janeiro. Wright publicly supported a student strike that was currently taking place (confirming Hood’s suspicions of his self-aggrandizing behavior). The Brazilian architecture students were protesting their university’s censorship of Modernist texts. Kelsey wrote: “To do Wright full justice, he has made quite a dent. To be sure, he is not suave, and talked about rebellion in architecture when seated next to the provost of the University . . . which was not tactful in view of the fact that a ‘students’ strike’ is not yet fully settled . . .”150 Wright encouraged publicity in Rio without reservation, and he did not mind being photographed with the students. He lectured on his viewpoints whenever he was given an opportunity.151 The newspapers in Rio and the United States reported widely on his activities, the New York Herald Tribune stating, “Wright Returns from Abetting Students’ Revolt. Architect Backed Rio de Janeiro Youths to Whom Modern Books are Banned.”152 Wright’s activities aside, Kelsey felt that the United States received a mixed reception in Rio, and he left with unresolved feelings about the jury. Responding to the new site-plan requirements, Gleave had reversed the orientation of the lighthouse to address the old town; it had originally faced the opposite direction and abutted the “Aerodromo Pan-Americano.” In examining Gleave’s original site plan, one cannot help Fig. 3.25. Joseph Lea Gleave’s stage-one competition entry for the

Columbus Memorial Lighthouse showing two sections and his site plan. (Published in the second competition program)

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Fig. 3.26. (facing page) Joseph Lea Gleave’s stage-two competition per-

spective. (Published in the Illustrated London News, October, 31, 1931)

Fig. 3.27. (facing page) Joseph Lea Gleave’s stage-two competition

model. (Published in the Illustrated London News, October, 31, 1931)

Fig. 3.28. Aerial view of Gleave’s revised model showing surface iconog-

raphy on the building and surrounding pavement. (Courtesy of David Sutherland Gleave and Carolyn Lea Gleave)

Fig. 3.29. Close-up of Gleave’s revised model showing main entrance. (Courtesy of David Sutherland Gleave and Carolyn Lea Gleave)

but wonder if his radiating lines had influenced Kelsey’s site drawing for the second stage. Comments found in Gleave’s sketchbook indicate he was searching for a way to present the cross as the “right” symbolic gesture. One drawing is titled, “The Grand Gesture of the White Race of the 20th Century,” and in other sections he emphasized a promenade across the spine of the cross toward the transept. He made a note in reference to the monument’s lower end, suggesting that a light source there was appropriate, “as men came from God,” and in other sections he noted that it might be treated like a “back wing or tail of [an] aeroplane.” In another draw-

ing, where the path through the building’s central spine terminates in a courtyard, he wrote, “Path of Penultimate Progress.” Gleave’s original drawing displayed a cross and the inscription “XPO Ferens” (Christo Ferens, or “Christ Bearer”) on the main façade. As William D. and Carla Rahn Phillips noted, Columbus adopted this cryptic signature in 1500 to symbolize his role “in carrying Christ across the water” to the New World.153 As occurred before, one Pan-American heritage theme could be substituted for another, and it was evident that Gleave chose not to focus on the discovery narrative but instead linked Columbus’ Christianizing mission with the Pan-American Union’s mission. The earliest published photographs of Gleave’s model indicate that he envisioned surface iconography in the form of panels. In the Illustrated London News, the monument appeared to be a smooth structure built in a lush jungle, an effect visible in a stunning perspective in which the icon has a glowing surface (Figs. 3.26 and 3.27). Although correspondence suggests that the competition model was shipped to London, another model was apparently built for a royal viewing (Figs. 3.28 and 3.29). This heavily articulated model corre-

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Fig. 3.30. Post-1933 Columbus Memorial Lighthouse model showing

the monument without the entry loggia. (Courtesy of David Sutherland Gleave and Carolyn Lea Gleave)

sponds to Gleave’s descriptions. Gleave referred to its recumbent form as an Aztec serpent or a human body lying prostrate. Yet he also considered its “very shape to be reminiscent of aeroplanes, ships, motor cars—an absolute symbol of the Modern Movement.” He noted that the cross was elongated to emphasize progress, and the approach into the building was also about the path to progress. The embracing arms of the loggias, the Court of Columbus, were meant to embrace the visitor. The visitor would then face an awesome wall where “the hundreds of names carved all over the surface mark[ed] it unmistakably as PROGRESS.” The wall’s iconography captured the stories of Columbus, Pizarro, Lindbergh, and others. “Venturing finally into the slit,” he writes of the visitor, “between the great rough, red walls, he would be attracted directly to the brilliant tomb in the centre of the chapel .  .  . and passing the Tomb, he would come to the great Canyon of Columbus.” This path would follow the life of Columbus. Visitors would reach the end and then turn back and rise to the top of the monument, walking toward the great beacon, “the altar of modern progress.” Gleave then wondered: “Would he see the symbolism in the twentyone spokes of the encircling brazier?”154 He referred to the roads that were supposed to symbolically lead to the American republics, which he had drawn in the first

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stage to represent residential quarters. In later models, the loggias forming the Court of Columbus at the head of the monument were removed and the surface articulation was also toned down (Fig. 3.30). The jury praised Gleave’s design because it made use of a twentieth-century resource, artificial light, “but not to the point where symbolism interfered with the simple beauty of the work of architecture.” The jury was impressed with the way the monument’s mass would be viewed from the air, the way its cruciform canyon would be cooled in a tropical climate, and the simplicity of the earthquake-proof construction. Gleave was invited to Santo Domingo in October 1932 and was honored with festive celebrations.155 Initially there was concern over Gleave’s ability to oversee and direct the project because of his young age. He had completed a course in architecture at Manchester University in 1927 and, beginning in February 1930, established an office in Manchester. After Gleave won the competition, the Royal Institute of British Architects awarded him an honorary associateship. In the years to come, Gleave would repeatedly express his disappointment with postponement of the memorial’s construction, but he stated: “I am young enough to be able to afford to wait for it, and shape my life to suit it.”156 On winning, Gleave entered into a contractual agreement with the Pan-American Union. The organization had an incentive to commence construction because if it did not begin five years after the award was made, it was obligated to pay Gleave $15,000. Gleave continued to develop the project, reporting to Rowe on occasion that he was preparing sketches to show how the “PanAmerican Ideal” would work into the scheme. He also developed the roads, explaining, “Roughly, the radial roads spreading from the head of the cross are named and dedicated to the twenty-one nations. The heads of the roads against the monument would have an altar, or a loggia, or something similar (all different) to form a national shrine, with the flag and soil brought from the

individual countries, mixed together where the roads meet at the head of the cross.”157 When Gleave was invited to build a model of the lighthouse for the 1933 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, he enthusiastically accepted. The Listín Diario reported that although the Dominican Republic was not in a position to erect an expensive national building at the exposition, it should present a model of the lighthouse, including a miniaturization of the memorial’s lighting system.158 On a trip to Chicago to meet the exposition’s president, Rufus Dawes, Gleave helped locate the best site for the model. It is likely that the Streamlined Modernistic styling perceptible at the fairgrounds inspired Gleave to further refine his design, and it helped that the monument’s powerful luminous effect was fitting for this world’s fair. As Lisa Schrenk noted, the 1933–1934 exposition symbolized the contribution that construction and technical inno-

vations could make to economic recovery. Bold colors and dynamic lighting were used to capture this “can do” spirit.159 A central site was chosen between Raymond Hood’s Hall of Social Sciences and the lagoon (Fig. 3.31). The model, which still contained the embracing loggias, was 50 feet long and 4 feet high, and located on a plot of land planted with dwarf plants, shrubbery, and grasses. Surrounding this plot was a paved footpath for viewing the model. At night the model was illuminated with white floodlights, and “red sheets of light [will] issue from the canyons and a revolving beacon light [will] also be shown” (Fig. 3.32).160 Gleave’s Chicago fair model was unmistakably Streamlined Modernistic. Yet the press devoted more attention to a reenactment of Columbus’ discovery in the lagoon directly opposite the memorial model. There was little mention of the lighthouse or, as Pulliam described it, “the one exhibit at the Fair which symbolized the whole undertaking.”161

Fig. 3.31. Columbus Memorial Lighthouse replica model built for the Dominican Republic section at Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition of 1933. (Courtesy of L. F. Appel) Fig. 3.32. Aerial view of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse replica model built for Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition of 1933. Postcard notes that it is 1,400 ft. long and 120 ft. high. (Courtesy L. F. Appel)

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The abstracted Chicago model marks a significant phase in the evolution of Pan-American architecture for the abandonment of historical stylistic models. Whether it could still sustain a connection to the PanAmerican movement was another question. Promotion of the memorial continued to center on the iconic form and increasingly on its cruciform light projection. As its promoters framed and reframed the memorial’s many symbols, its expression of the Pan-American concept began to dissipate. Pulliam, who continued to promote the lighthouse from Santo Domingo, initially suggested that Gleave be presented as the “Lindbergh of architecture.”162 He later noted that as a result of the

Great Depression, “people are turning more than ever to the cross,” and suggested playing that up.163 The memorial was used to tap into Catholic religious identity across the Americas and to frame Columbus’ journey as a Christian mission. Pulliam also recommended soliciting John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and playing up the Catholic connection. “It will be in the Latin American zone, one of the few sections of the world in which Mr. Rockefeller’s benefactions are not already in evidence,” he advised.164 In a subsequent letter, he reiterated, “why not offer [Rockefeller] in a dignified manner the opportunity to consider from all of its various angles—Christianity, Altruism, Panamericanism—the proposed PanAmerican Columbus Memorial.”165 Pulliam continued to work diligently on the monument’s propaganda, reminding Rowe that the prospect for funding from Latin America did not look hopeful. He recommended pursuing personal donations for “el Faro de Colón,” as it was called in Spanish.166 By 1937, in collaboration with the Dominican government, the Pan-American Union resorted to fund-raising spectacles. They organized “El Vuelo Panamericano Pro Faro a Colón” (the Pan-American Flight for the Columbus Lighthouse) with four airplanes, “the Colón” and “the Niña, Pinta and Santa María,” flying from Santo Domingo in a circuitous route over Latin America, eventually landing in Panama.167 As a Dominican commemorative stamp illustrates, the propaganda for this event also presented the monument as a symbol of Columbus’ Christianizing mission, captured with the “XPO Ferens” reference (Fig. 3.33). This was a replay of the Pan-American Goodwill Flight that had taken place in 1933, the year that Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Good Neighbor Policy. The Pan-American Union’s contractual agreement had expired, and Gleave was never paid. When the flight of 1937 ended in tragedy with one plane crashing, events associated with the lighthouse and Columbus were increasingly seen by Dominicans as part of a Columbus fucu, a curse that locals were convinced existed. Fig. 3.33. Dominican Republic stamp showing Columbus Memorial Lighthouse and airplane

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Pulliam resigned from his position in 1938, and the New York Times reported soon after that President Trujillo was prepared to commence work on the lighthouse. He expected the lighthouse to be completed by 1942, the 450th anniversary of the discovery of America. Trujillo ramped up his efforts to raise funds for the monument and made a radio broadcast throughout the Dominican Republic called “Message of Pan-American Fraternity” to express his call for inter-American loyalty.168 Trujillo proposed a League of American Nations in 1936, but his increasingly disreputable status did not gain him support. On the other side of the Atlantic, Gleave grew impatient with the lack of progress and what he considered to be potentially problematic site developments. He wrote to Rowe to express his concern once again over the $15,000 payment.169 Pulliam did not seem very hopeful that Gleave would be paid. Gleave had kept up with developments in Santo Domingo, reminding Rowe of the contractual agreement he had with the PanAmerican Union, specifically, that the winner would have control of developments that included the harbor. Gleave was concerned that harbor developments could ruin the effect of the memorial. This put the United States in an awkward position. Santo Domingo was changing dramatically as a result of Trujillo’s many civic projects and the dictatorial regime he imposed on the country. The memorial’s loss of symbolic relevance was apparent when it was displayed at New York’s World’s Fair of 1939 in the style of Norman Bel Geddes’ “Futurama” exhibit (Figs. 3.34 and 3.35). After entering the General Motors Pavilion, visitors were invited to view a city of the future, designed by Bel Geddes and displayed in miniature below them. The model city displayed how transportation innovations and superhighways would soon transform cities. In the Pan-American Union PaFig. 3.34. Fairgoers viewing General Motors exhibit, “Futurama,”

Norman Bel Geddes designer, New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940. (Bel Geddes Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

Fig. 3.35. Aerial view of “Futurama” model. (Bel Geddes Collection,

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

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Fig. 3.36. (facing page) Diorama of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in

the Pan-American Union Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

Fig. 3.37. (facing page) Model in front of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse diorama, New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940. (Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States) Fig. 3.38. Fairgoers in the Pan-American Union Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

vilion, visitors were invited to a similar exhibition to view a diorama of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse (Figs. 3.36, 3.37, 3.38). The memorial was presented as a modern structure connected to the airplane. Visitors viewed it as if they were seeing it from the air. It was presented as a grand national project, and President Trujillo showed his support for it when he visited the fairgrounds and reviewed his country’s military perfor-

mances. The memorial was thus remembered as neither a model of airport advances and lighting technologies nor a religious symbol, but as the prime symbol of a dictatorial regime that had already consumed the nation. When the U.S. government terminated its administration of Dominican customs in 1941, Trujillo took control of the lighthouse. Three years later, he took advantage of the centennial of the Dominican Republic’s independence from Spain to dedicate the site of the future lighthouse.170 As part of the laying of the monument’s cornerstone, the government built a shrine where Columbus’ remains were to be located, and the outline of the memorial was excavated in preparation for constructing the foundations. Again the cross was emphasized with the shrine. In 1947, when Trujillo repaid the country’s foreign debt, there was a short-lived feeling of change in the city, which was crushed by impending crisis. That year the “Caribbean Legion” assembled an army on the Cuban island of Cayo Confites

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to invade the Dominican Republic and oust Trujillo. On June 19, 1949, exiled Dominicans flew fourteen seaplanes into the Dominican Republic at Luperón Bay with this goal, but were defeated by Dominican forces. Trujillo accused Cuba and Guatemala, and then Costa Rica and Mexico, of complicity in the “airborne invasion.”171 Seeing that support from these and other American republics was waning, the newly formed Organization of American States decided to terminate its support of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse on November 18, 1949. It sent a check for $26,122.56 to the Executive Committee overseeing the lighthouse in Santo Domingo. The check included the quotas paid by the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, miscellaneous contributions and income, and a small balance remaining in the Architectural Competition Fund.172 The United States’ withdrawal from the project seemed fated, as Kelsey died in 1950.

Building the Unwelcomed Columbus Memorial One of the last efforts to promote the monument occurred in the 1950s when Trujillo underwrote publication of a government-sponsored journal, El Faro a Colón.173 The nineteen issues produced between 1950 and 1957 bore an image of the proposed lighthouse on the cover, with Gleave’s twenty-one radiating roads. Each issue began with a portrait of Generalísimo y Doctor Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. The image was usually accompanied by a statement declaring that the erection of the lighthouse was due to Trujillo’s devotion to Pan-Americanism, a movement that at this point was apparently not powerful enough to mend U.S.-Dominican relations. The United States did not revive its participation after Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. The memorial project was not revived until the third presidential administration of Joaquín Antonio Balaguer (1960–1962, 1966–1978, 1986–1996), which was popularly seen as a continuation of the Trujillo regime. By the time Gleave died in 1965, the project had been forgotten. The completed memorial was finally unveiled for

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Fig. 3.39. Joseph Lea Gleave’s competition rendering. (Reproduced

with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

Fig. 3.40. Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 1992. (Courtesy of Mercedes Ramírez Guerrero)

the Columbian discovery quincentenary in 1992. As built, it adhered closely to Gleave’s design (Figs. 3.39, 3.40). In Balaguer’s effort to construct a series of major projects to perpetuate his reputation, he appropriated the monument but omitted many of the elements that gave it meaning. Las Américas International Airport had opened in 1959 near Santo Domingo, and there was no effort to construct Gleave’s twenty-one roads. In its final form, the monument acquired an even stronger religious orientation, almost to the point of parody. Consulting architect Teófilo Carbonell oversaw the memorial’s execution, and as built, it appears to have the same stark slickness as Carbonell’s National Theater, built in 1973. Having visited on Columbus Day in 1999, I was surprised by the absence of people and the lack of celebration. The memorial’s internal canyon is one of its most arresting features. Yet it also emphasizes the monument’s remoteness from Santo Domingo and from Dominican culture (Fig. 3.41). Resembling a catacomb, it imparts a surreal scale with its long repetitive pattern, which is intensified when one walks toward the monument’s low end. Traces of the Pan-American theme appear in a few places, such as across the exterior where the names of the American republics are located and in the Salas de las Vírgenes, the portion of the memorial dedicated to the Virgin Mary’s depiction across the Americas.174 The building’s Christianizing theme is also apparent in the etched quotations from Pope John Paul II’s homily at the monument in October 1992. The matrix of Pan-American heritage that is seen in the walls’ surface patterns presents many of the symbols that once lent meaning to numerous hemispheric projects, but the wallpaper effect imparts little today (Fig. 3.42). Dominicans had hoped the memorial would catch the eye of an international audience and bring Santo Domingo the tourism their country desperately needed.

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Fig. 3.41. The Great Canyon of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse.

(Courtesy of Mercedes Ramírez Guerrero)

Fig. 3.42. The modern matrix of an evangelical Pan-American heri-

tage captures references to Christianity, Columbus, the American republics, and pre-Columbian culture. The windows, for example, are citations of the Temple of the Three Windows in Machu Picchu, which Kelsey illustrated in the second competition program. (Courtesy of Mercedes Ramírez Guerrero)

Yet it only received negative media attention. Rowe and Kelsey had hoped to gain worldwide attention, but Gleave’s winning architectural design elicited a lukewarm and short-lived response from the architectural press. The competition did not obtain the recognition that the widely published Chicago Tribune competition received, a competition that had helped the architectural community rethink the skyscraper. The designs it yielded contributed to an ongoing discourse on the skyscraper, the modern city’s icon of progress. The icon chosen to represent Pan-America, however, conveyed an image that did not resonate with the architectural establishment. The historicist and religiously themed Columbus memorial had little to contribute to Modernist design thinking or to technological issues, despite its modern searchlight. The project failed to deliver on the promised advances in airport technology and navigational systems. The competition nevertheless gave hundreds of architects worldwide an opportunity to explore the Pan-American concept. In reflecting on Kelsey’s effort to construct an architectural representation of the Western Hemisphere with the memorial, one could say that the competition yielded an extensive collection of hemispheric representational models. Most important, for the first time designs with this focus were produced by architects from outside the Americas. It is unlikely that even technological prowess and the full representation of the Americas would have ensured acceptance of the monument in 1992. Santo Domingo was never a crossroads of the Americas. It neither served as a key trade or commercial node nor did

it become the traveling hub that Kelsey imagined. The Balaguer administration’s hope that the monument would establish a popular pilgrimage site in Santo Domingo was a $200 million delusion that locals have not forgotten. Santo Domingo does not represent the birthplace of the Americas to most Americans, and DNA tests that do not support claims that it is Columbus’ remains that are interred there also lessen the memorial’s relevance. Traversing the Columbus canyon today does not open a gateway to the Americas but a pathway to an unknown end. Kelsey and Gleave’s imagined PanAmerican procession certainly never came to be. Pan-Americanism here was rooted in the hemisphere’s history as a monumental Christian mission. This interpretation might have worked when economic crisis and impending war led to international anxiety in the 1930s and 1940s. After Trujillo embraced the idea, the United States abandoned the memorial and its Pan-American promise, although the monument was conceived as a means of ameliorating U.S.-Dominican tensions in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The fact that this was a case of failed technological Modernism, and one tainted by controversial historical claims in 1992, made the monument seem to be little more than an anachronism. Moreover, as the monument emerged as a lightning rod for media criticism, it was ignored a second time by the international architectural community, giving further credence to the Columbus fucu. The monument’s inability to sustain the attention of a national and international audience reflects the limitations of the Pan-American ideology and construct when it was explored at the scale of the twenty-one American republics. Hemispheric projects developed in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, especially in southern cities with ties to Latin America, proved to fare better at sustaining an exploration of Pan-American architecture. Such projects also illustrate the extent to which local loyalties were able to maintain a commitment to the concept of Pan-Americanism.

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4

GATEWAY TO THE AMERICAS

Dreaming Interama, HemisFair Living

W

HEN A GROUP OF MIAMI AR-

chitects envisioned Interama’s underwater gateway to the Americas, they imagined futuristic towers at the end of a journey—three illuminated masts symbolizing unity across the continents (Fig. 4.1). In the mid-1960s, this nautical portal acknowledged Miami’s role as a major Atlantic port city. Interama was an attempt at civic one-upmanship. Following a period in the 1940s and 1950s in which no world’s fairs were held in the United States, Seattle had captured the mood of a fast-moving modern world with its Century 21 Exposition monorail and Space Needle in 1962 (Fig. 4.2). Interama, Miami’s homage to North, Central, and South America, looked to the future in a way the Pan-American heritage themes had not done before. The architects’ renderings depicted ascending elevators that brought visitors to what looked like space-age skypods—the whole picture resembling steel-clad sea creatures sprouting from Biscayne Bay (Fig. 4.3). This was one of many design proposals dating to 1919. Numerous Miami fairs had been negotiated, designed, and redesigned, and this would continue through the 1970s. Attempts to realize Interama would leave an impressive stack of drawings, models, and the perennial media look-back at the great Miami fair that never was. Interama’s history presents a view of how the Pan-America of commerce, trade, and travel shifted cultural perspectives to challenge the meaning of Pan-American identity and reinterpret it. This was Fig. 4.1. (right) Proposed underwater tunnel, Inter-American Trade and Cultural Center (Interama), Miami. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida) Fig. 4.2. (facing page) Monorail at Century 21, Seattle World’s Fair, with Space Needle in background. Ralph Crane, photographer. ( LIFE Magazine, July 1962; courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Fig. 4.3. Proposed Tower of Freedom, Inter-American Trade and Cultural Center (Interama), Miami; rendering, ca. 1964. (Courtesy of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, Miami News Collection)

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also the case with San Antonio’s cleverly named HemisFair ’68, which presents the starkly contrasting case of an urban-based Pan-America, one sprouting from a historic downtown. The fact that Interama and HemisFair ’68 were in development at the same time underscores fundamental differences in the way they were conceived and in the manifestation of these differences for shifting conceptions of Pan-American identity and subjectivity. As only the HemisFair came to fruition, its development confirmed that the characteristics defining a hemispheric city and its citizens had changed significantly by the 1960s. Business and leisure travel no longer determined which city could claim to be a gateway to Pan-America. HemisFair’s location in San Antonio, 150 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, tied it to an ideologically revised conception of Pan-America emerging in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, a narrative that parallels the Washington, D.C., institution’s Nuestra Pan-América. The Panama Canal’s completion in 1914 inspired hemispheric projects throughout the United States. In 1916, the Pan-American Union’s director-general, John Barrett, encouraged Miamians to build a downtown Pan-American University, where locals could study alongside Cubans and South Americans. William Jennings Bryan, the recently retired U.S. secretary of state and chairman ex officio of the Pan-American Union’s governing board, settled in Miami and promoted the idea of twin Pan-American universities, one in Miami, the other in Panama City, Panama.1 The international campuses would include dormitories and colleges of commerce and citizenship. This focus reflected Miami’s status as a port city and the anticipation of the entrepreneurs investing in it that Latin Americans would play a significant part in its growth. The establishment of Pan-American Airways in Miami in 1928 had also elevated Miami’s international status and legitimized its claim to hemispheric centrality in strikingly modern times. When San Antonians engaged Pan-America in 1916, they did so with the formation of the Pan American Round Table, a woman’s group originally offering shelter and aid to refugees from the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. Refugees also ben-

efited from the Pan-American Union’s guidance, but the Pan American Round Table resisted any focus on commercial and political conflict. San Antonians did not attempt to claim hemispheric centrality as Miami had, for the gateway title was typically reserved for cities with maritime commerce, trade, and travel to and from Latin America. Perspectives changed beginning in the 1930s when San Antonians began to imagine their city bisected by the Pan-American Highway, which started in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and ended in Panama (see Map E.1). Unofficial extensions had been drawn northward, passing through Edmonton, Alberta, and ending in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, which is now the highway’s northern terminus.2 In 1936, the Mexican consul in San Antonio, Benjamin R. Hill, organized a goodwill motorcade from San Antonio to Mexico City after the inauguration of the first segment of the “Inter-American Highway,” as the portion leading from Nuevo Laredo to Panama was called.3 The term “Pan-American Highway” was used to describe the concept and entire system, but different portions are identified by different names. San Antonians saw this as an opportunity to reposition their city as an important stop along the way and as a gateway to the Laredo–Nuevo Laredo International Bridge.4 As San Antonio’s cultural ties to Mexico were materialized in this unifying road, its diverse populace and cultural heritage attracted greater attention. In contrast to the international Pan-America that continued to evolve in Miami because of its maritime and aerial networks of exchange, San Antonians explored their hemispheric identity in urban-based, cultural-heritage terms. San Antonio’s business elite began to dream of a new economic market that offered tourists a distinctive experience. If the nearby town of New Braunfels could promote its German town center as an off-road attraction for those “motoring down to Mexico,” what could San Antonio offer? Locals took this question to heart in the mid-1930s, especially after witnessing Dallas’ commemoration of Texas’ independence from Mexico at the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 and the fair’s continuation, the Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition of 1937. The “Cavalcade of Texas,” a live

production of Texas history presented in Dallas, spilled out onto the fairgrounds, with the New York Times reporting “Brilliant Coloring Marks Costumes as Cowboys and Indians Mingle with the Crowds.”5 Visitors noted the Texas-accented Modernistic fairgrounds and the faux-historical pre-Columbian and Spanish reconstructions. The designs recalled the Spanishand Moorish-style architecture seen in South Florida, not to mention Miami’s Art Deco. Knowing that San Antonio could do better, its mayor, Maury Maverick, hired Dallas architect O’Neil Ford in 1939 to restore a historic neighborhood called La Villita and convert it into a visitor-oriented marketplace. The local Spanishlanguage newspaper, La Prensa, kept Mexican Americans informed of the developments. The newspaper announced on September 16, 1940, “Excepcional Fiesta Nacional Habrá Hoy en La Villita,” as it announced the local contest to crown the Reina de la Raza at the local beauty pageant.6 Pan-American identity was discussed in this Spanish-language newspaper alongside local commentaries on the importance of cultural exchanges between the two “races,” identified as Latin and Anglo. At a League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) meeting to honor Maverick, the mayor noted that the restoration of La Villita had served as a vehicle to strengthen the relations between Mexicans and North Americans and that it was a symbol of the kind of fraternity that should predominate throughout the American continent.7 This presented a fundamental difference between Pan-Americanism conceived as a common experience across the Americas and one that was locally based and contingent on local, personal cases of cultural exchange. San Antonians saw themselves as the product and model of hemispheric fraternity that grew out of (and was tied to) their distinctive cultural locus. By 1941, the city had used Works Progress Administration (WPA) funds to construct the Paseo del Río, the city’s famous River Walk, to continue rebuilding and refashioning their downtown as a tourist destination. San Antonio was on the road to establishing itself as a Pan-American economic center of cultural tourism. This new notion of hemispheric centrality did not hinge on international networks, but on the idea of a

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crossroads of cultural and national diversity, embodied in a city’s populace. Locals promoting Interama and HemisFair embraced Pan-Americanism as a concept intimately tied to their cities’ identities and hemispheric citizenry. Yet while Miamians saw this as stemming from an international Latin American presence in their city, some San Antonians considered Pan-Americanism to be at the root of their historical existence. In both Miami and San Antonio, local explications were formulated that identified citizens of the two cities as “Pan-Americans” by virtue of living there. The architecture of the two fairs set the stage for this imagined identity, although the propositions in Miami were noticeably more prescriptive than in San Antonio. Interama organizers intended to produce Pan-American subjects by inviting people of the Americas to live side by side on the fairgrounds they were planning. Some of the most famous architects in the United States were commissioned to design Interama, including Marcel Breuer, Louis I. Kahn, Paul Rudolph, Josep Lluís Sert, Edward Durell Stone, Harry Weese, and Minoru Yamasaki. With their subtle pre-Columbian and overt subtropical references, the architects engaged Pan-American identity themes that had surfaced in past projects. San Antonio’s HemisFair organizers chose a different path, as they showcased a local Pan-American citizenry rooted in the city’s Mexican American heritage. They did not seek to create a distinct Pan-American architecture but instead regarded their fair as a backdrop for the city’s historically rich downtown and cultural activities. The two expositions tested each city’s claim to the title of “Gateway of the Americas.” Interestingly, cities in Latin America did not make such sweeping claims, reflecting the United States’ continued tendency to presume leadership of the Pan-American project. As fair organizers worked to legitimize their gateway claims, their focus on the imagined hemispheric subject who would people the fairgrounds called for new architectural approaches. Historically, hemispheric projects had been conceived in terms of the union of “Latins” and “Anglos” at a fair, an institution, or a landmark. But this binary framework began to change, along with the demographics of many U.S. American cities. When

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HemisFair was being planned in the 1960s, San Antonio’s Anglo business elite noted that there were almost as many Latins as Anglos in their city. HemisFair’s organizers marketed San Antonio’s mestizo history. The gateway claim was advanced in the 1960s to reinforce the city’s pursuit of commerce, trade, and travel with Latin America as the Pan-American mission was tied less to the activities of the Organization of American States and more to the business end of local and regional market-to-market Western Hemispheric relations. To what extent, then, did this new interpretation of Pan-America, which sought legitimacy by framing a U.S. mestizo cultural landscape, influence construction of Pan-American architecture? By the 1950s, alternative views of the Americas in popular culture began to gradually change long-standing presumptions about “Latins” and “Anglos.” Although sharp distinctions had been reinforced in popular culture with Hollywood films that served the Good Neighbor policy of the 1930s, alternate depictions also began to surface. The exoticizing elements that shed a colorful light on Latin character ranged from the cartoon parrot Joe Carioca (Daffy Duck’s counterpart in Walt Disney’s Saludos Amigos in 1942) to the musical performer Carmen Miranda. The portrayal of a modern Cuban American subject in the I Love Lucy television series (1951–1956) socioeconomically identified the subject with upwardly mobile Latin and Anglo lowermiddle-class families in search of the American Dream. It was one of the first television depictions to present a “normal” view of a Latino subject and, consequently, to reframe the binary model. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo (Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz) were also the first interethnic couple to be accepted by U.S. television audiences, who embraced the Pan-American duo. Moreover, their son, “Little Ricky,” represented a crystallizing moment for the hemispheric subject, for as a product of this bicultural pair, he represented a Pan-American no longer tethered to a composite and abstract symbol of the American republics in suspended, amicable coexistence. On the show, an alternative U.S.-defined view of Las Américas, seen through Arnaz’ eyes, presented a gradual break from the past. Lucy and their U.S. Ameri-

Fig. 4.4. New York of the future, postcard, 1911. Richard Rummell, artist. Fig. 4.5. Avenue of the Americas proposal showing “Inter-American Building(s),” by Hugh Ferriss. (Ferriss Collection, Avery Library and Archives, Columbia University)

can working-class urban neighbors, Ethel and Fred Mertz, along with millions of U.S. viewers, went along for the ride. The show did not deflect all stereotypes and clichés that painted Latin America in vibrant colors (in black and white): Ricky was “excitable,” but the agency was firmly controlled by Desilu Productions, Inc. Ball, in particular, forbade racial stereotyping from entering the show. Sitcoms reflected changing U.S. politics as they carefully balanced their parodies and imitations of everyday life. A number of U.S. cities would face dramatic developments as Latino demographics increased, most notably between 1942 and 1962 with the Bracero Program, which resulted in 5 million Mexicans entering the United States. In other cities besides Miami and San Antonio, the use of the hemispheric concept vacillated between its references to a U.S.–Latin American partnership and to U.S. American Latinos.8 One example occurred in 1942 in Austin, Texas, when the city was promoted as a

hemispheric center by Ben B. Hunt, professor of history at the University of Texas. Hunt proposed “United Nations of America: An Academy of the American Hemisphere.” He identified the state’s Mexican American cultural heritage as part of the reason for locating the institution in Austin, stating that Texas was the true “cross-roads of the Western Hemisphere.”9 New Yorkers also positioned their city as Pan-America’s commercial center in order to attract Latin American industry to the United States. This idea dated back to a proposal by the Mexican architect Francisco Mujica for a preColumbian-inspired Pan-American skyscraper, which he proposed in 1929–1930, and before that to Francis H. Kimball’s Pan-American skyscraper (Fig. 4.4).10 In the early 1940s, New Yorkers began a series of projects that led to renaming Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. This included plans to build twenty-one skyscrapers, one for each of the American republics. Delineator Hugh Ferriss rendered the newly renamed avenue, and architect Edward Durell Stone’s New York University architecture students built models of these new PanAmerican icons of commerce and trade (Fig. 4.5).11 By the time the avenue was renamed and inaugurated in 1951 (signified with plaques rather than skyscrapers), New York’s growing Dominican and Puerto Rican im-

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migrant population forced a rethinking of the PanAmerican mission. Latino ethnic groups in the United States increasingly positioned themselves as cultural entities with political and social aspirations, especially during the 1960s. The Pan-American-themed building that finally dominated New York’s skyline was the skyscraper built astride Park Avenue in 1963 and leased by Pan-American Airways as its headquarters.12 Other U.S. cities responded to increasing Latino populations with cultural projects gathered under the Pan-American umbrella, but none as ambitious as the hemispheric fairs planned for Miami and San Antonio. Interama and HemisFair marked a high point in the history of Pan-American architecture, not only because they were the last major projects of the twentieth century but because they occurred at the historical moment when the politics of the African American civil rights movement began to intersect U.S.–Latin American relations. As this occurred, it was inevitable that growing numbers of Latinos would challenge older conceptions of Pan-America, especially those based on the imaginary meeting of “Latins” and “Anglos.”13 There was much discussion about how Interama could attract wealthy Latin American elites to Miami.14 Yet although envisioned as a welcoming institution for Latin Americans, Interama drove Cuban Americans to protest their exclusion from the fair’s planning and design. In contrast, even as HemisFair showcased a local Mexican heritage—and the fair was a pet project of the city’s U.S. Congressman Henry B. González—it also served as a medium for conveying ethnic community discontent. The local Raza Unida Party, led by Mexican Americans who identified themselves as Chicanos, sued the fair organizers and later orchestrated an antifair campaign.15 The two fairs were influenced by the political climate of U.S.–Latin American relations in the 1960s. Because predecessors to Interama dated back to the 1930s, Miami’s hemispheric fair history began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, introduced in 1933. HemisFair and Interama also reflected the sentiment underlying John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, introduced in 1961. Both hemispheric policies reflect the rigorous efforts made nationally to

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improve U.S.–Latin American relations, disseminate positive images of Latin America in the United States, and, in the early 1960s, deflect the appeal of communism in Cuba. These policies reinforced the conviction that U.S.–Latin American relations could be improved by U.S. initiatives and, in the case of the fairs, by architectural and urban development strategies posited as an extension of these efforts.16 Interama’s development paralleled the Kennedy administration’s conflict with Cuba—the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. The U.S. government’s interest in depleting Cuba of its highest-ranking professionals with the Cuban refugee programs it initiated, like the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act of 1966, resulted in a rapidly shifting urban environment in Miami. Yet while these programs were meant to improve U.S.–Latin American relations, their domestic ramifications were not always embraced. This occurred when a transformed Miami began to clash with Interama’s idealized representation of the Western Hemisphere.

Interama and the Inter-American Subject The Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center, or Interama, as the project came to be called, emerged in the 1950s. The term “Inter-American” had been used interchangeably with “Pan-American,” and increasingly so as “Pan-American” came to be associated with “Yankee imperialism.” Hugh Ferriss was commissioned to lead a team of local architects in designing the project on the marsh shore of Biscayne Bay. Ferriss came to Miami after having worked on the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940, the short-lived Avenue of the Americas proposal, and the United Nations Headquarters, so he was no stranger to multinational projects.17 The Ferrissled scheme failed to gain the federal financial support needed to build it. The project was revived when a team of famous architects was hired in 1965. This group prepared a fully developed design proposal, presenting a distinct transformation of the world’s fair genre, perhaps one of the most innovative features of Interama despite its short-

comings. More important, this fair proposal marked the moment when the Pan-American subject was identified as a key element of Interama. The architects saw Interama as an opportunity to address some of the critical issues facing the architectural profession at the time. They decided to explore alternative dwelling systems and models of city design with this imaginary Inter-American subject in mind. At Interama they hoped to offer resolutions to the problems of the discordant modern U.S. city and to the challenges of collaborative design, leading one of the architects, Marcel Breuer, to state, “Perhaps we will have a regard for Interama as a turning point—a proof that on an important scale, collaboration and individuality are basic for the same work.”18 The fact that Interama was projected as the key Pan-American center for diplomatic, commercial, and cultural exchange at this time indicates how Miami saw itself as the inevitable place for this nexus. Interama brought together a city claiming the title of “Gateway to the Americas” and architects wanting to make strides with their designs. In the foreground the Inter-American subject stood as the imagined inhabitant of the fair. Miami’s inability to acknowledge the actual Inter-Americans in its own city contributed to the failure of the fair’s proposal. Today, Interama’s history reads like a comedy of errors, with the project’s fits and starts attributed to the unpredictable forces of land speculation, federal subsidies, and political appointments. Interama’s inability to gain federal and state support in its attempt to construct a new kind of designed, monumental city in marshland sealed its fate. Despite Miami’s logical location and the contributions of Pan-American Airways to linking Miami and Latin America, the vision of an ideal Inter-American subject rising out of remote marshlands was not compelling enough to gain sustained local support. Miami’s assertion of hemispheric centrality dated back to William Jennings Bryan’s Pan-American University and the establishment of Pan-American Airways, and even earlier when, after settling Miami in 1891, the town’s founder, Julia Tuttle, prophesized that it would be a “Gateway to the Americas.” By 1930, when President Herbert Hoover declared the first observance

of “Pan-American Day” on April 14, 1931, Pan-American rhetoric was well-known in Miami.19 The realization of promising networks of exchange during the 1930s was reminiscent of nineteenth-century Pan-American infrastructural projects. By 1930, All America Cables, Inc., had spent half a century connecting the continents with cable service, dating back to its predecessor company, International Ocean Telegraph Company. In 1931, the Pan-American Highway’s tentative route was drawn, and that same year, the Pan-American Clipper airplane was introduced, initiating extensive international mail service and travel to the Caribbean and South America.20 In contrast to the earlier projects, these efforts to establish networks across the Americas concentrated on the movement of people as well as goods. Pan-Americanism in the 1930s was increasingly a transcultural experience rather than a transnational enterprise tied to trade opportunities. By the time Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy was introduced in 1933, the nation was familiar with the Pan-American concept and some U.S. cities had begun to respond with their own versions of good neighborliness. This policy emphasized the progressivism of the United States, encouraging a view of two separate entities coming together with the underlying message of one nation helping all the others. Newspaper reports of this period reveal how Miamians embraced the concept by the 1930s; the term “PanAmerican” regularly appeared in the national press in association with Miami. The city’s Pan-American Day events received generous coverage in the New York Times, as did reports of Pan-American Airways’ expanding operations. Miami was a city that had been built on a fictitious historical past conceived by developers who envisioned a tropical fantasy of tourist attractions in the Mediterranean, Arab, and Spanish styles. Other Florida cities also gave the concept a spin, as Tampa did with its Pan-American Hernando de Soto Exposition of 1939. Miami could ride high on Pan-American Airways’ tailwind, and the city grew confident as the company expanded and dominated air travel in the Western Hemisphere and beyond. A series of pre-Interama proposals emerged as early as 1919. From this point onward all proposed versions of

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Fig. 4.6. Proposed Pan-American Exposition Building in Miami,

designed by H. Hastings Mundy. (Published in Port Greater Miami, February 1932; courtesy of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, Miami News Collection)

the fair were attempts to create Pan-American-themed fairgrounds that posited not only an invented style or new form of architecture but also an isolated fair site distant from the city’s core. This occurred initially with designs for an island site, which was explored through World War II, and then with designs for a marsh farther from the city center. One of the earliest published schemes appeared in Port Greater Miami in February 1932, a design by architect H. Hastings Mundy (Fig. 4.6). Mundy envisioned the city-owned Causeway Island in Biscayne Bay near downtown as a hub that could eas-

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ily be linked to Pan-American Airways’ growing markets connected to port activities. This was not the site of the 1960s Interama proposal, although the 1960s site also took advantage of Biscayne Bay. Mundy proposed a Pan-American Exposition Building, which he called “an International Merchandise Mart at the Crossroads of the Americas.” His project description claimed that Miami was the only combined “air and sea world port” in the United States. Miami first asserted its claim to be the transportation hub of the Western Hemisphere with a Pan-American fair conceived to win Public Works Administration (PWA) support in 1933. An examination of the 1933 fairground design indicates that, as had occurred with previous hemispheric projects, the U.S.–Latin America inequality was emphasized, with the United States dominating the fairgrounds. In the plan, the main pavilion represented the host nation and it dominated an array of modestly sized, marginally located Latin American pavilions. In the minds of its creators, the inclusion of Latin America was enough to make this fair Pan-American. The design was reintroduced in 1935 as the Pan-American Exposition Building and Convention Hall (called the Pan-American Trade Mart), and a more detailed plan and an elevation of the project were published. The building exhibited strong basilican references, but it was designed in a Streamlined Modernistic style (Fig. 4.7). The project was a collaboration between some of Miami’s best-known architects: Phineas E. Paist, August Geiger, Richard Kiehnel, Russell T. Pancoast, George L. Pfeiffer, Edwin L. Robertson, and Robert Law Weed.21 Like Gleave’s transformed, crossshaped Columbus Lighthouse, the Miami fair proposal alluded to a known ecclesiastical icon—the basilica— designed in a Modern style.22 The fair’s organizers had high hopes they would receive Public Works Administration funding, especially after President Roosevelt publicly endorsed the project in 1939.

When the Miami fair project resurfaced in 1940 as the Pan-American Trade Mart, the main building’s tower, referred to as the “Pan-American beacon,” was designed to represent hemispheric unification. Also called the Tower of Eternal Peace, it was expressed with varying symbolic elements: a torch at its top, spewing smoke, or with lights shining in all directions, reminiscent of some of the Columbus Lighthouse design entries. This beacon was supposed to visually connect the fairgrounds to downtown Miami and symbolically connect greater Miami to the foreign lands represented at the fair. Such acknowledgment could not conceal the fact that the fairgrounds continued to reinforce the asymmetrical U.S.–Latin American relationship. That hierarchy was unmistakable in the way in which the strong vertical emphasis of the main building confronted the passive crescent layout of the Latin American pavilions meant to house consular offices.23 At the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940, a similarly auspicious gesture was made with the Pan-American Union pavilion built to represent the Washington organization (Fig. 4.8). There, a U.S. flag was included with the other flags of the American republics in the steel arch display at the building’s entrance. This structure was located in the fair’s Pan-American Wing, where the Latin American pavilions were also located. It served as a background for important addresses and events staged to assure solidarity with Latin American nations during times of crisis. Instead of the one tower of hope, however, six solid columns affirmed stability and unity with no other direct national associations or hierarchies present. The Pan-American Union’s pavilion presented a significant turning point in this architectural history: PanAmericanism was presented there in non-historicist architectural terms. Regional associations were introduced with symbols—flags, coats-of-arms, and maps— and there were no pre-Columbian, Columbian, Spanish Colonial, New World, or tropical references expressed in the architecture of the building. Instead, its Modern design suggested a neutral backdrop for the staged events. Looking at Latin America through this architecture meant looking to the future.24 One can imagine how the Columbus Lighthouse diorama displayed

Fig. 4.7. Bird’s-eye view of Pan-American Trade Mart, Miami, Florida,

1940. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida)

Fig. 4.8. Pan-American Union Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940. (Copyright © Bill Cotter)

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within clashed with this exterior. The New York Times considered it an important diplomatic backdrop, making note of the steel arch with the twenty-one flags silhouetted against the austere façade.25 Technologically sophisticated presentations of Latin America were also noted in the press, including “a large animated relief map of the American Continent” that illustrated the interrelationships of the hemisphere with a complex animated light display. One wonders whether the Washington organization, in anticipation of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brazilian Pavilion, responded with a Modernist structure. Such modern interpretations of Pan-America at the New York fair may have prompted the Miami fair organizers to rethink their exposition. The Miami fair organizers sought assistance from Pan-American Airlines, which helped them promote the fair. Their strategy was to claim the fair as an adjunct to the airline’s expanding passenger and mail routes. In a promotional booklet, the airline declared the fair “a practical way” of demonstrating “a ‘Good Neighbor’ policy,” and hailed it as “an Institution to Fully Reveal and Develop the Resources of the Americas,” one that deserved the full support of the federal government.26 The fair was renamed again,

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this time as the Pan-American Exposition and Industrial Merchandising Mart. A refined Modern structure was illustrated in the booklet (Fig. 4.9).27 When the Public Works Administration denied Miami’s application, the project experienced a long impasse, leading city officials to rethink the fair’s mission.28 This was a turning point for the project, as fair organizers began to make an effort to connect it to Miami’s identity. Near the end of the Second World War, Miami’s City Planning Board took control of the project. One board member, Frank F. Stearns, led the challenge. Stearns repackaged the project as a Pan-American city and proposed renaming Causeway Island the Centro de Pan Americano (Center of the Pan-American), as he called it in bungled Spanish. This ambitious scheme illuminated the city’s desire to see the entirety of Miami transformed, or at least reconceptualized, to serve the Pan-American mission. From the island, a network of highways would radiate in all directions, including the Pan-American Concourse, a Paseo de las Américas, and a Pan-American Overseas Highway.29 They would connect the fairgrounds to new Fig. 4.9. Pan-American Exposition and Industrial Merchandising

Mart. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida)

and existing nodes: a Pan-American Building, an International House and Club, the Villa Vizcaya, the PanAmerican Airport and Pan-American Airways offices, the Inter-American Affairs offices, the Pan-American League headquarters, and the University of Miami’s International House. The ease with which institutions were renamed and conceived in this hypothetical PanAmerican city is a testament to the superficiality of the proposed fair and its architectural expression. Stearns was quick to imagine a Pan-American city emerging from Miami. But what was at the core of the enterprise, beyond interests in trade and tourism, had not been identified. It is unlikely that Stearns was thinking in terms of a Pan-American subject. But his proposal inadvertently clarified the concept. Miamians were promised an opening date of 1950, and the industrial designer Raymond Loewy elevated expectations when he claimed he could generate air-conditioning for the entire fairgrounds with atomic energy. Different architects continuously worked with Miami’s City Planning Board on plans over the years, proposing a strikingly different version in the Miami Daily News in 1944, shortly after Stearns’ proposal was made public (Fig. 4.10).30 A rendering notes a “Committee of Architects” without naming names. The scheme’s symmetrical arrangement resembled the New York fair, although the buildings surrounded a massive auditorium and exposition hall rather than a set of iconic theme structures. Introduced as a place “Where the Americas Shake Hands,” it represented Latin America with twenty-three modestly sized pavilions surrounding the main building.31 Once again, the United States was positioned as the adult at the head of the table. In contrast to this, and with no single nation in a dominant position, an educational flower garden at the opposite end of the island was offered as a model of hemispheric unity. Here, every American republic—from the United States’ Territory of Alaska to Chile—was to be represented in floral form in a large map of the Western Hemisphere. The garden suggested an organic framework within which Pan-Americanism might evolve. One could imagine the natural tapestry growing freely, with geopolitical borders blurred as plants proliferated. This scheme

Fig. 4.10. Pan-American Trade Mart, Miami Island, 1940. (Miami

Daily News, December 1944)

was not developed in greater detail, but it depicted the Western Hemisphere free of hierarchies and stereotypes. When the fair proposal was revived after World War II, it would not be confined to this island site. In 1948, the Miami Herald reported that City Manager R. G. Danner had been given the directive to develop the trade mart. Concerns over the city’s ownership of Causeway Island led to plans to move it elsewhere. Seeing that statewide support was necessary, a group of local businessmen helped revive the project and worked to establish a state agency in 1951, the Inter-American Center Authority, to oversee the project through 1975, which they did. When Ferriss came to Miami to work on the fair in 1950, the authority’s proposed plans to relocate the exposition to a remote city-owned marshland,

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group’s final proposal. Among the proposals, Pancoast’s “Scheme B” was chosen for further development. Ferriss, however, played the role of visionary in its resolution. He had been introduced in the press as the leader of the “secret” design collaborations taking place in Miami and was given authority over the final expression.34 The themes explored in these collaborations were the creation of a “tropical park” and a “model of world peace.” The Miami architects were likely the first to introduce the tropical theme.35 One reporter referred to it as the “winter capital of the U.N.”36 Ferriss published the Inter-American project in his Power in Buildings, placing it after a rendering of the United Nations Headquarters, perhaps indicating that the “winter capital” was his idea:

Fig. 4.11. Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center, Hugh Ferriss rendering. (Miami Herald, May 1950)

known as the Graves Tract, were being finalized. In February 1950, Ferriss and a team of Miami architects began to plan an exposition site of lush gardens, lakes, and interconnected lagoons that opened to Biscayne Bay. There was an attempt in their designs to bring meaning and form to this tabula rasa. The architects explored the concept of Pan-Americanism abstractly through symbolic and numerical references and some questionable architectural citations. Although collaboration with earlier team members Russell Pancoast, Robert Law Weed, and other Miami architects perhaps brought a degree of knowledge of the city to the project, Ferriss imposed his own ideas on the team.32 The centrality of the Pan-American concept was not part of the team’s discussions. One team member, the Miami architect Alfred Browning Parker, recalled that the designers were asked to envision an Americanthemed world’s fair—not one with a Pan-American theme—with educational, amusement, and historical components.33 This explains the marginal placement of the area devoted to the American republics in the

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To leave a site on New York’s East River, one wintry February morning, after hearing a group of American and European architects discussing a headquarters for the nations of the world, and to arrive, four hours later, one balmy February afternoon, at a site on Biscayne Bay, where a group of American architects were discussing a center for the nations of the Western Hemisphere: this was a change of climate, of architectural conception, and of approach to world problems.37

Ferriss understood the complexities of interhemispheric diplomacy, but his final designs were caught up in this wintry/balmy dichotomy. The team’s first published proposal, called the Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center, was presented in a bird’s-eye rendering illustrating the project’s dramatic union of land and water (Fig. 4.11).38 The design’s main feature was an Sshaped promenade. The fairground’s multiple program requirements were organized along the curve. A pedestrian way was integrated with an artificial lagoon on the mainland and a curving coastline opening onto the bay. The strategy brings to mind Le Corbusier’s urban proposals for Rio de Janeiro, especially his effort to complement Rio’s natural, tropical topography with bold, curving profiles, which Fernando Pérez Oyarzún also noted in Le Corbusier’s “Plan Obus” project in Algiers.39

At the nexus of two sweeping arcs, two icons acted as visual anchors: a half-domed building, called the Hemisphere Hanging Gardens, and a towered Spire (Fig. 4.12). They were derived from the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, designed by Wallace K. Harrison, one of the ten finalists of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition (Fig. 4.13). With his famous Conte crayons, Ferriss had etched the New York icons into public memory as well as Harrison’s United Nations Headquarters. His connection to both projects helps decipher his method as he constructed the fair’s Pan-American symbols. Fig. 4.12. View of Hemisphere Hanging Gardens and the Spire, Hugh Ferriss rendering. (Miami Daily News, 1953) Fig. 4.13. Trylon and Perisphere, New York World’s Fair. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Fig. 4.14. Revised scheme, the Center of the Americas, with new central

structure, Hugh Ferriss rendering. (Ferriss Collection, Avery Library and Archives, Columbia University)

Fig. 4.15. Bird’s-eye view of the Center of the Americas, Hugh Ferriss

rendering. (Ferriss Collection, Avery Library and Archives, Columbia University)

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In some respects, the Pan-American theme was marginalized: the large areas devoted to Industry, Art, and Science surrounded the central theme area and the American Nations were combined with Recreation and Sports and located in the outermost sections of the fair. Taking his cue from the United Nations Headquarters, Ferriss envisioned the two icons as symbols of multinational unity. The buildings’ architectural expression revealed his desire to match the imageability of the Trylon and Perisphere. This was how Ferriss resolved this part world’s fair, part peace union. The central theme structures may have abstractly communicated ideas about the ideological constructs, but they conveyed little about the fair’s connection to Miami. With Ferriss in the lead, the architectural team continued to rely on iconic symbols, clever nomenclature, and numerology, especially the favored twenty-one and three, to represent the American republics and continents respectively. The main building served a symbolic purpose with its Babylonian-named hanging gardens, implying a coming together of different languages and cultures. The gardens were designed to be accessible from all directions, underscoring a centrifugal theme echoed in the adjacent Spire, with a ramp at its base. This recalled the New York World’s Fair’s Helicline, the curving ramp that led to the Perisphere, and numerous Columbus Lighthouse schemes. When the fairgrounds were redesigned as a smaller, circular lagoon, the new Hemisphere Hanging Gardens building was transformed into a dome constructed of twenty-one radiating bays (Figs. 4.14 and 4.15).40 A number of subsequent proposals explored alternate configurations, with one appearing to be the last explored under Ferriss’ direction. This design was published in Florida Architect magazine in February 1956 and presented an ensemble of three massive intertwined arches (Figs. 4.16 and 4.17).41 With these arches positioned randomly over the fairground’s gridded blocks, it was clear that the neutrality of the gridded layout was intended to frame their iconic status. A case of poetic reinterpretation, however, was again in play. Although a distillation of the Hemisphere Hanging Gardens, the arches also resembled Eero Saarinen’s winning scheme for the Jef-

Fig. 4.16. Interama, Hugh Ferriss rendering, 1956. (Florida Architect, February 1956) Fig. 4.17. Watercolor rendering of Interama site, featuring Hemisphere

with three arches, Hugh Ferriss, ca. 1955–1956. (Courtesy of Spillis Candela and Partners)

ferson National Expansion Memorial Competition (the St. Louis Gateway Arch), which was published widely in 1947.42 They also bring to mind one of Bruno Ferrati’s Columbus Lighthouse entries.43 The tripartite theme was further invoked by a three-legged tower (a Space Needle precursor) and three larger-than-life figures in the foreground. The design may have lacked resolution, but Interama was covered extensively in architectural journals as additional architects, including Pietro Belluschi and Paul Rudolph, joined the team as members

and consultants.44 To sustain local interest, Florida architects were assured that the fairground’s “flexible layout” would require the distribution of projects to many architects, but this never occurred. In the summer of 1956, the Inter-American Center Authority failed to obtain a $35 million Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan from the Eisenhower administration. President Truman had signed a presidential proclamation supporting the project in 1952, but Eisenhower abolished the program after he came into office in 1953.

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In 1955, the project was renamed Interama, alluding to the General Motors Corporation’s Futurama exhibition at the New York World’s Fair, which itself had alluded to the panoramas and dioramas of nineteenth-century fairs. Like these historical precedents, Interama was meant to provide the world with what Timothy Mitchell described as the lens through which a select part of the world could be seen.45 The challenge of the hemispheric project, however, was to capture the diversity and vastness of the people and places of the Americas. Yet, as architectural historian Zeynep Çelik and others has argued, such cases of exotic, reductive worldviews, designed to appeal to curious spectators, reinforced colonial representations of the Other.46 Despite the streamlining of the name to Interama, achieving the mission of Pan-American unity in Miami did not advance. For over two decades one ambitious proposal after another had failed to respond to the design challenges of a hemispheric fair in ways that did not seem derivative of recent expositions, although design originality would not have necessarily assured realization. The constructions of Pan-Americanism at earlier hemispheric fairs had been weakened by the contradictory and imposed hierarchies of world’s fair design conventions. Yet, even when these were not an issue and an unencumbered site was presented, the concept was not explored architecturally in unconventional ways. Ferriss’ expressions of a previous era did not help Miami assert itself as a gateway city. After visiting the New York fair in 1939, the Dominican Republic’s dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, was inspired by the Trylon and Perisphere. References to these icons appeared at the world’s fair he staged in 1956 in an effort to improve his own image, the Feria de la Paz y la Confraternidad del Mundo Libre (Fair of Peace and Brotherhood in the Free World).47 Reconceptualized by the Dominican architect Guillermo González Sánchez, the mimetic forms were painted in tropical colors. Their futuristic appeal gave Trujillo’s fair the feeling of a forward-looking, modern event, but this was not an attempt to claim hemispheric centrality. In these two contemporaneous cases of appropriation, efforts were made to improve relations between

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the United States and Latin America. But in both cases, superficial messages and derivative design fell short. When Cuba-U.S. tensions tested Miami’s commitment to Pan-America, it would require more than architectural recycling to keep the idea alive. In 1957, a proposal by the architecture firm Steward and Skinner for Miami’s hemispheric fair set the project on a more promising track. Steward and Skinner’s Pan-American Peace and Industrial Fair took the form of a long building presenting an architecturally animated façade on Bayfront Park. Their goal was to embrace Miami’s principal shoreline boulevard. Steward criticized the choice of the Graves Tract, stating that a downtown site was more appropriate. In 1958, however, the City of Miami deeded the Graves Tract to the Inter-American Center Authority and an opening date was set for 1960. In 1959, on the eve of Interama’s design, the Cuban Revolution occurred. Thousands of Cuban refugees transformed Miami, generating far more press than Interama. Miami was entering a new relationship with Cuba that would test the city’s commitment to be the “Gateway to the Americas.” The city had long enjoyed Pan-American Day events with local Anglo-Americans in full Spanish and Latin American regalia. A new Cuban immigrant population, however, would not only share the stage but might perhaps assume the role of spokesperson. Under the leadership of Miami architect Robert Bradford Browne, a new design for the fairgrounds was begun, but this new reality was kept at a distance. A team of Miami architects was assembled in 1961 to work under Browne’s leadership. Tellingly, this team included three landscape architects, William Lyman Phillips, Sanford Sevel, and Edward Stone, Jr., who worked with the central lagoon scheme, which required extensive dredging and filling.48 A new theme for Interama was introduced in conjunction with President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Alliance for Progress speech. A proposal carrying the subtitle “Progress with Freedom” was presented to the city with plans to establish a University of the Americas in Miami on the Interama site. The university was presented as an opportunity to attract Latin American elites to Miami. Flag-waving descriptions, like “Interama—the Ameri-

can Way of Life” and “Interama, the All But Cuba Fair,” captured the spirit of the times and indicated that the hemispheric fair was being positioned amid current international tensions and, more importantly, stressful local conditions.49 The revised Interama strategy was the work of plastics tycoon Irving Elkin Muskat, who was appointed chairman of the authority in 1961, five months after Kennedy’s speech. Muskat had served as the manager of the Hall of Science at the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition, a building designed by Paul Philippe Cret. The first Interama schemes under his directorship were fantastical attention-grabbing designs. But the rhetoric that accompanied them already presented an alternative to the U.S.–Latin American framework that made this next stage significant.50 One of the early schemes included a Freedom Tower, composed of three vertical shafts in ascending heights rising from Biscayne Bay, which was to be entered through a transparent underwater tunnel. The rocket-shaped pods, which would lift the passengers, stemmed from Muskat’s popular exhibitions in Chicago, in which Auguste Piccard had ascended in a balloon and spherical gondola into the stratosphere. The designs that accompanied this brief futuristic period in Interama’s history were largely the work of Ferriss’ replacement, commercial illustrator James Bingham.51 He illustrated the fair in four sections, the Cultural, Festival, Industrial, and International areas. It was in this last section, devoted to the American republics, that Muskat engaged a team of outstanding architects to develop Interama’s most interesting feature. With the dredging and filling of the site now in progress, the fair seemed like a real possibility and Miami was promised an opening date of 1968. Under Browne’s direction, the design proposals had proliferated. But eventually Muskat’s big idea helped frame Interama, not as a “gateway” site, but as a site for developing the ideal Inter-American subject. From the outset, Muskat’s proposal hinged on a transformative experience for Latin Americans, symbolized in the awkward name he gave it: the “Peace Corps in Reverse” program. Muskat proposed inviting Latin Americans to reside temporarily in the United States on the fair-

grounds. One cannot help but think that the song “I Want to Live in America” from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, released as a film in 1961, was playing in Muskat’s head. The extent to which Muskat’s “Midway of Diplomacy” would feature the Other depended on whether the United States would participate in all the activities. Or was this a developmentalist improvement scheme that only targeted Latin Americans? In his descriptions, Muskat discussed a minicity with some 5,000 to 6,000 Latin Americans serving as “caretakers” and “diplomats” for their respective pavilions and living on the fairgrounds for six-month periods. He described the pavilions as “test tubes of the future” and prototype living environments where Latin Americans could learn the “American Way of Life.” They would attend the University of Miami part-time while fulfilling other duties. In Muskat’s plan, if they weren’t assembling cars on-site in exchange for scholarships from the major automobile manufacturers, they were publishing newspapers in four different languages.52 The lifestyle envisioned for these “Pan-Americans in the making” would produce ideal hemispheric subjects and, ultimately, perfect diplomats, businessmen, or even Latin American heads of state. It was not clear whether this minicity was also meant to enlist U.S. citizens to learn the “Inter-American Way of Life.” A U.S. Pavilion was developed to house U.S. “student tour leaders,” as they were called. Interama might have attained the status of a model had it addressed the urban developments taking place in Miami with the influx of Cuban refugees. However, it did not respond to Miami’s swift transformation from a southern U.S. city with Anglo and African American residents into a multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual city, with the name Little Havana already affixed to a sprawling neighborhood west of downtown Miami. Muskat had not forgotten that the Pan-American Highway was a two-way street; he simply envisioned entrance into the United States through the fair’s institutional gateway. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Interama’s progress was momentarily impeded. The national press turned its attention to San Antonio’s HemisFair ’68, planned for 1968. The proposed Tower of the Ameri-

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cas, designed by O’Neil Ford as the tallest concrete structure in the world, commanded attention, coming on the heels of the Space Needle at the Century 21 Exposition of 1962 in Seattle. These may have prompted Muskat and the Inter-American Center Authority to pursue Minoru Yamasaki.53 Muskat spent most of his time, however, making a case for federal aid. The Cuban refugee problem had worsened, as had Miami’s “Negro problem,” heightening unemployment among workingclass residents, which was blamed on the 3,000 to 4,000 Cubans entering Miami each month.54 Muskat promised federal officials that Interama would help get Cuban refugees off public assistance, and he applied for a $21 million Area Relief Fund (ARF) grant. The refugees would be employed by Interama and they would help get Interama funded. But they would not be featured in or integrated into the fair’s thematic conception, despite Cuban-American efforts to do so. Though Muskat contended that Kennedy had approved the appropriation five days before his assassination, when he had toured

the Interama site by helicopter, federal funds never became available. Muskat later applied for a Community Facilities Administration (CFA) loan of up to $18.5 million, which was promised by President Johnson after he, too, toured the site by helicopter.55 When the CFA application was finally approved, the authority hired Breuer, Kahn, Rudolph, Sert, Stone, and Weese in March and April of 1965 (Fig. 4.18).56 The authority hired Yamasaki in 1967 and he was commissioned to design the tower that would connect the International Area to the other areas of the fairground. When President Johnson finally signed the bill to approve the loan, the authority ordered a complete model for public inspection (Fig. 4.19).57 The team of architects collectively recharged the Pan-American mission, giving it for the first time an architecture not derived from previous expositions. They hoped to provide architectural forms that materialized the human dynamics of diplomacy. They proposed an idyllic collection of residences and national and institutional buildings that were linked by meandering waterways and paseos overgrown with flowering plants. The notion of a Pan-American subject as the privileged occupant of the International Area undoubtedly led to their urban design approach. The architects considered their collaborative approach a key contribution. Drawings illustrate how, through careful elision of nationalist expression, the six architects introduced an alternative to the world’s fair genre. In order to emphasize the whole, the notion of Latin American national identity was essentially erased. To further deemphasize nationality, the architects employed design tactics that relied on foregrounding the programmatic elements of each pavilion complex. By emphasizing these communal structures, outdoor spaces, and garden areas and features, the architects allowed the national components of the buildings to recede into the background. The team also maintained an adherence to what might Fig. 4.18. Interama architects and managers, from left to right: Edward Durell Stone, Josep Lluís Sert, Marcel Breuer, Louis I. Kahn, Robert B. Browne, Irving E. Muskat, Harry M. Weese, and Paul Rudolph, February 23, 1967. (Courtesy of Marcel Breuer Papers, 1920–1986, Archive of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)

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Fig. 4.19. Interama preliminary model showing the six architects’ ear-

liest design proposals combined with the Tower of Freedom (Minoru Yamasaki would later join the team). (Courtesy of Marcel Breuer Papers, 1920–1986, Archive of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)

Fig. 4.20. Interama International Area site plan. (The Florida Photo-

graphic Collection, State Archives of Florida)

be called a neutral Modernism, which consisted of an identifiably Modernist architecture with a number of abstract forms introduced to register regional and cultural identity. Articulation was left to each architect. As they tackled the Pan-American concept, the landscape they collectively created teetered on the edge of fantasy. Their new model of cultural exchange, however, would almost deflect the Latin/Anglo dichotomy. The authority had settled on four theme areas, and the architects brought their designs for the International Area to an advanced level of completion, although their designs were never finalized. The authority approved a C-shaped fairground layout composed of a number of floating, wedge-shaped peninsulas pointing to a centrally located tower and island (Fig. 4.20). Yamasaki later designed a tower that visually and physically connected

the International Area to the rest of the fairgrounds. A crescent-shaped outer road fed the fairgrounds with numerous perimeter parking lots, allowing visitors access to specific theme areas. General circulation moved inward from this road to the parking lot to the peninsulas, each exposition zone leading to the tower. The floatingpeninsula scheme provided for boat and foot traffic, and the fair was described as occupying a subtropical park. As the site plan indicates, the International Area was located at one end of the C shape, and the Cultural Area was located directly across it on the other side of the marina. Visitors would travel by bridge to the tower to gain access to the Cultural Area or the Industrial Area, the third theme zone, which was located between the two. The architects located the fourth area, devoted to Sports and Leisure, behind the Industrial Area.

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Fig. 4.21. Aerial view of model showing entrance from the parking area to Rudolph’s International Bazaar. The bridge leads to Stone’s U.S. Pavilion. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida) Fig. 4.22. The bridge leading to the U.S. Pavilion, which housed an exhibition hall, a theater, and residential facilities for fifty students. Note the tropical gardens at the center. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida)

As the project developed, numerous plans illustrated multiple points of entry into the International Area from two parking lots. One entry point, however, was repeatedly shown as the main entrance. This led to two structures: first, Rudolph’s International Bazaar, which featured all the American republics with a market, restaurants, and a night club (Fig. 4.21). Visitors could then cross a bridge to Stone’s U.S. Pavilion (Fig. 4.22). The other four pavilion complexes contained residences for participants from four to six countries. Consistency of color and materials was meant to neutralize differences. Breuer stated that Interama was designed as “one architectural form—one coherent composition, instead of a group of buildings.” He elaborated: “This would facilitate the solution of the problem: whose building is bigger and how much bigger, Brazil’s or Paraguay’s. The demarcated lines between sections representing each country can be flexible, if existing at all.”58 This approach applied to Latin America but not to the United States. With the United States as the sole exception, the architects successfully avoided proposing national structures by representing the Latin American countries as regional sectors, with national differentiation appearing only in the residences and exhibition spaces within each pavilion.

Fig. 4.23. View of Weese’s Caribbean Pavilion connecting the U.S. Pavilion to the Ceremonial Plaza. This would have housed visitors from Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Trinidad-Tobago. Note Weese’s proposed star-shaped theater. (The Florida Photographic Collection, Florida State Archives)

The U.S. Pavilion’s isolation was emphasized. It was typically illustrated as an autonomous structure on its own island. Its special position was underscored by its location at the outermost tip of the peninsula. After visiting this structure, visitors would travel along the peninsula inland, experiencing the contributions of Weese, Kahn, Breuer, and finally Sert. There was a logic to the overall arrangement. First, the U.S. Pavilion served as the gatekeeper, metaphorically positioning the United States as Gateway to the Americas. Here visitors would be greeted and invited to view films about U.S. history, Latin America, and the Pan-American movement. The next zone was the core of the International Area at the center of the peninsula. If approaching from the U.S. Pavilion, visitors would gain access to this area by passing Weese’s pavilion, which was dedicated to the Caribbean nations and “Free Cuba” (Fig. 4.23). Kahn designed the Ceremonial Plaza at the core of this zone.

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Fig. 4.24. Aerial view of Ceremonial Plaza by Kahn. Note the Y-shaped

residential units in the foreground provided for the seven Central American nations. (The Florida Photographic Collection, Florida State Archives)

Fig. 4.25. Aerial view of a developmental model showing Stone’s second U.S. Pavilion proposal and an earlier International Bazaar design roofing system. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida)

Fig. 4.26. This view shows the bridge leading from the International Bazaar to Breuer’s complex, with its three-part Parliamentary Meeting Center on the left and the U-shaped restaurant building on the right, featuring the cuisines of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Note the four residential blocks in the foreground. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida) Fig. 4.27. Sert’s pavilion complex included a Special Projection Theater area (right) and residential units (left) for six South American nations: Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida)

The plaza was formed with structures dedicated to the central Latin American nations (Figs. 4.24 and 4.25). An arbor extending from Weese’s structure formed one of the plaza’s sides. When Yamasaki’s tower was introduced, the star-shaped theater Weese had designed was abandoned, as this part of the fairgrounds became the entrance into the International Area. This indicates the ambiguous status accorded the Caribbean nations, vacillating between one of importance, if the building is seen as a billboard, or unimportance, if it is seen as a backdrop. Its asymmetrical placement suggests the latter. The Central American and Caribbean nations symbolically represented the geographic center of the Americas, and Kahn’s triangular plaza referenced the three Americas. Beyond the Ceremonial Plaza, one encountered a third zone, greeted first by Breuer’s pavilion, representing the eastern Latin American nations, and then Sert’s pavilion, representing the western Latin American nations (Figs. 4.26 and 4.27). This distinctive urban layout set in place an urban model for the ideal Inter-American subject, with its central plaza; market and restaurants; and residential, institutional, and government areas located at the perimeter. A sense of connectedness was encouraged with unifying materials, colors, and landscape features. The architects repeatedly discussed methods for tackling urban design problems. They also noted their desire to create an integrated center, a stage for the ideal Inter-American subject that Muskat and the authority envisioned. A sense of the project’s unprecedented nature is gleaned from the way it was announced in the March 1967 issue of Architectural Record, which hailed

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it as a “full-scale experiment in urban design.”59 It noted the architects’ problems in addressing the typical American city because of lack of planning. The architects’ rhetoric did not delve into the specifics of social amelioration, however, but remained centered on architectural and urban design proposals. For Rudolph, the “typical unbearable incoherence” of the American city was avoided at Interama because the buildings were not “thought of as a series of structures, but as a whole.” For Sert, Interama illustrated a “distillation of the designs and open spaces so they all fit together,” and it also featured “sequels, spaces and a variety of buildings that [could] serve as the true-scaled experiment in what is today called urban design.”60 This spatial balance, which grew out of the orchestration of movement through a carefully choreographed urban framework, is a testament to the architects’ ability to transcend PanAmerican clichés. Yet they must have acknowledged that an institutional framework and a specific type of user animated their design work. In Kahn’s description of the projects as “a new institution of man” there was an implied reference to a new personal subject type. Kahn’s reference was likely more about architecture’s collective embodiment of community, a subject he explored on a larger scale with his National Assembly building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962–1974). Geometric purity governed the design of Kahn’s plaza, which was located on a body of water in a tabula rasa landscape. Urban experimentation and geometrical obsession, while reflective of Kahn’s commitment to architectural design, further emphasized Interama’s disassociation from Miami’s evolving urban reality. Urban identity in this ideal, introspective minicity hinged on a carefully choreographed progression through programmatic nodes. This approach transcended previous spatial experiences that had been crafted to reinforce presumptions about the PanAmerican subject, as in the Pan-American Union’s “Latin patio.” Interama’s urban spaces showcased technologically based and multifunctional environments. In Kahn’s design, the Ceremonial Plaza was “served” by the central Latin American residence halls. Similarly, Breuer’s Parliamentary Meeting Center eclipsed the

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residential component, and Sert’s residential block was hidden behind the Special Projection Theater Area. Weese concentrated on the tree-lined promenade that brought visitors from the U.S. Pavilion to the Ceremonial Plaza.61 The civic and urban language suggested by these components resulted in a cadence that ritualized the process of becoming the ideal Inter-American subject. This process involved spending time in Weese’s promenade, Kahn’s plaza, and Sert’s theater. Visitors to the fairground would have explored this Pan-American landscape as a series of activities tied to programmatic elements devoid of hierarchies and biases. The public would never encounter a sequence of buildings that represented the entire Western Hemisphere in a defined order. This contrasted with the designs of earlier hemispheric fairs, where national, industrial, cultural, and institutional pavilions dominated and ordered all major public spaces. The architects represented the Pan-American concept with Modern architecture that combined regional associations and a subtropical environment. The three landscape architects initiated this approach, yet the tropical theme had been introduced before the 1960s schemes. Rudolph envisioned white buildings and green landscape as a “lush, sub-tropical park.”62 His pavilion was perhaps the most compatible with a form attuned to Florida’s climate, given his experience designing openair structures in Sarasota before he moved his practice to New York (Fig. 4.28). At the core of the International Area’s network of circulation, Rudolph’s pavilion exploited the flow of the site with its linearity and position. He reinterpreted the marketplace with abstract references to terraces, tarpaulin flapping in the wind and bins overflowing with agricultural produce. The subtropical theme, however, emphasized the outdoors, the celebration of the pedestrian meander that allowed the fair’s live-in subjects to take center stage. To support this, the architects had tucked their buildings into the made-to-order natural setting, allowing human activity to prevail in the main public space. In the last model, Kahn’s buildings disappeared behind a single row of trees: the national residences in his section were placed behind the foliage so as not to distract from the plaza.

Fig. 4.28. International Bazaar, Paul Rudolph rendering. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

This was unlike Kahn, whose buildings often stood as monumental objects clearly juxtaposed with their landscape settings, as at the Salk Institute, which he had recently completed in La Jolla, California. Kahn’s design provided a stepped perimeter that responded affirmatively to Rudolph’s pavilion. Kahn tucked the functional spaces of his building behind stepped forms that faced the plaza. In his residential structures, Kahn responded to the climatic implications of Miami. The Kahn archives are filled with studies for shaded porches with circular and half-circle cutouts like the deep porches he

introduced in Dhaka to provide protection from the sun and rain. His Y-shaped buildings also resemble the Erdman Dormitories he completed in 1965 at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. The architects’ presumptions and projections of Latin America were not free of stereotypes (Figs. 4.29 a–e). Over the course of Interama’s design, Stone introduced references with contrived pre-Columbian citations. His design started out with pyramidal forms (October 1965),63 then became a round, submerged structure (May 1966), and ended up as a rectangular building with a central pyramidal skylight (November 1966), which was transformed into a tropical conservatory.64 His screens and wall surfaces bring to mind

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Fig. 4.29, a–e. Aerial views of Interama model. (The Florida Photo-

graphic Collection, State Archives of Florida)

tropical designs he had developed in Latin America, India and Pakistan, and the Middle East.65 Kahn’s geometric plaza recalled Aztec frontón courts and earthworks with its sloping forms. His geomorphic forms could reference Mesoamerican structures or the indigenous mounds of the United States. But they were so abstract that regional associations were not critical.66 Breuer’s pavilion teetered on the edge of cliché. He placed a pyramidal form in the home of eastern South American nations, where such structures were not indigenous. Had Interama been built, visitors would not have remembered it as a lush garden of ethnocultural stereotypes, tropical references, and colonialist associations. But because it was not built, it is difficult to project what the team’s final resolution of Interama would have been. One of the places where Interama’s design failed conceptually was the U.S. Pavilion. As the model and plan illustrate, visitors would have experienced the Latin American sections consecutively and then faced the autonomous U.S. Pavilion. The building was originally conceived as an independent structure for the purposes of ensuring federal funding. Other accounts suggest that Stone was the most difficult team member to work

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Fig. 4.30a. Model of Interama with Minoru Yamasaki’s Freedom Tower shows how the other parts of the fairgrounds were not designed to the same level of detail. (The Florida Photographic Collection, State Archives of Florida) Fig. 4.30b. View of International Area from Yamasaki’s Freedom Tower. Drawing by Erik Sundquist, with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. (Copyright © Robert Alexander González)

with, and that he was given the building because he had grown accustomed to designing with a certain level of independence. In contrast to the pre-Interama schemes and past hemispheric fairs, the U.S. Pavilion’s potential dominance was cleverly deflected. Visitors entering from the parking lot on the other side of the International Bazaar, for example, would not have perceived its dominance. The same would have been true for visitors approaching the fairgrounds from the other theme areas via Yamasaki’s tower. Visitors would have been led to Weese’s pavilion and given the option of going to the U.S. Pavilion or the Ceremonial Plaza (Figs. 4.30a, b). One can surmise that the team was aware of this ambiguity. However, because the general public would have become aware of national distinctions only upon entering exhibition spaces in each sector, a visual scan of the fairgrounds would cause the U.S. Pavilion to stand out as distinctive. The simple solution would have been to replace the U.S. Pavilion with one that housed North America: Canada, Mexico, and the United States. This would have paralleled the other regional pavilions. As had been the case with so many previous hemispheric projects, however, Canada was excluded. Aside from Rudolph’s International Bazaar, the only place where the Americas were collectively showcased was Yamasaki’s tower. The tower symbolized the three Americas with a massive structure composed of three spanning supports (Fig. 4.31).67 Twenty-one colored lights were supposed to illuminate the night sky from the base of the tower, recalling some of the Columbus Lighthouse design entries.68 In some of the schemes that followed Interama (which often kept its name but not its commitment to the Western Hemispherical focus), Yamasaki’s tower was reworked and renamed.

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In comparison to the early hemispheric fairs, the architectural expression of cultural exchange was Interama’s greatest contribution, especially since it grew out of its architects’ concern with contemporary urban conditions. Yet this concern did not address conditions in Miami. The city was viewed as a gateway but not as a Latin American city. The motivation for this idealization of community did not evolve entirely from a developmental point of view, although Muskat’s coldwar program was sufficiently transparent with its rhetorical emphasis on the “American Way of Life.” This generation of architects, however, had a more global view of Latin America and a number of the participants had long-lasting connections with Latin America.69 In assessing the final design, the most successful spatial moment at Interama occurred in the central zone created by the Weese, Kahn, and Rudolph designs. Here spatial interaction occurred, and the theater of urban life would have prevailed. The project was innovative in its exploration of the authority’s programmatic components. It did so with Modern architecture that rejected geocultural scenography. Iconographic clichés were largely absent and, unlike the Pan-American Union a half century earlier, the expectations of visitors and inhabitants were not preformulated. In this space, the imagined Pan-American subject was projected into the future. Although the program was not entirely free of imperious associations and did not engage the new ethnic Miami, this unrealized design presented a sophisticated way of framing a new Pan-America. In its complete and advanced state, however, Interama faced intense media scrutiny in Miami. When one journalist described it as a “combination of Disneyland, New Orleans International House, New York World’s Fair and Lincoln Center,” the absence of Miami was clear.70 In Washington, politicians questioned the fairness of expending federal funds on one city’s civic buildings, especially when the escalating cost of

the Vietnam War put such projects as Interama low on the list of national priorities. The authority was finding it difficult to secure subscriptions from U.S. industries, which Muskat blamed on the failed New York World’s Fair of 1964–1965. Even more problematic was the lack of international participation. Even after $120,000 was spent on Latin America consultants and trips to South America, not a single Latin American country had signed a contract. In Miami, local controversy also boiled over when Cuban exiles formed a Cuban Committee for Interama to promote a Cuba exhibit dedicated to “Free Cuba and the Cuban Colony in the country.” In 1965, Cuban Freedom Flights began to bring thousands of refugees to Miami on a weekly basis (Fig. 4.32). By 1973, over 265,000 Cubans had been brought to the United States. The authority did not pursue the Cuban exhibit as a serious component of the fairgrounds, and the idea of engaging a “Cuban Colony” at the fair was dismissed.71 Although a group of exiled Cuban doctors were able to establish the Pan-American Hospital in Miami in 1963, members of the Cuban community were not invited to participate in Interama.

Fig. 4.31. Plan showing Yamasaki’s Tower of the Americas connecting

the International Area to the rest of the fairground, June 10, 1967. Note reconfigured U.S. Pavilion and its pronounced entry bridge. (Courtesy of Yamasaki and Associates)

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Florida’s political landscape was changing, causing the Democratic presidential administration to reconsider its approval of the project. When Governor Claude Kirk took office in 1967, he was Florida’s first Republican governor in ninety years. It was no secret that the governor had alternate plans for Interama, and he compelled Muskat to resign. The project was over $11 million in debt, the authority needed to sell land to stay afloat, and Interama became increasingly entangled with Miami’s plan to build a state university with a focus on the Americas. Architectural drawings were once again shelved, and over half of the architects’ fees went unpaid. Yamasaki was the only architect retained, and the fair’s organizers tried to raise funds and interest in the project by promoting his tower. After taking office in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon turned his attention to the national Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. Like previous presidents, Nixon

flew over the Interama site by helicopter while at his “Florida White House” on nearby Key Biscayne.72 Nixon visited Key Biscayne more than fifty times between 1969 and 1973, and he chose Interama as one of five national sites for special events planned for the Bicentennial celebrations.73 In 1975, however, the authority was dissolved after a refashioned Interama did not gain sufficient support. Interama succumbed to pressures that had challenged its organizers from the beginning: failure to secure necessary funds; new competition for tourism, such as Disney World in Orlando; and most important, the lack of participation of Latin American countries and U.S. industries. Even so, a number of new proposals emerged after Muskat resigned. In 1983, when the artist Christo wrapped eleven islands at the northern end of Biscayne Bay in thousands of yards of bright pink canvas, the Interama locale finally received the international attention the city had desired. By this time, the site hosted a modest university campus, a public parkland, and a toxic landfill. For more than four decades, the promoters of Interama and its predecessors and their architects made every effort to solicit the support of six presidential administrations, from Roosevelt to Nixon.74 Yet this was done at the expense of demonstrating how this hemispheric fair would connect to Miami. As these decades saw the nation’s cultural makeup change, new conceptions of the Americas expanded narrowly defined national identities, and Pan-Americanism was ripe for ideological reinvention. Miami presented a landscape that invited creative invention, and the architects who participated in its designs explored this terrain with fervor. Interama’s organizers were perhaps too transfixed by the seductive excursions that Pan-American Airways advertised, and not in touch with a city quickly being transformed by Cubans. Had it been built, Interama would have joined the ranks of landmark fairs in London, Chicago, Paris, New York, Brussels, and Barcelona, if only because of the reputations of its architects. In considering Interama’s Fig. 4.32. Cuban Freedom Flight, 1960s. (Courtesy of the Cuban Heri-

tage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida)

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to use. Would they have designed Interama any differently if Miami had already become a major U.S. ethnic city, as it eventually did? In the 1990s, Latinos represented over 50 percent of the city’s population. Would it have resembled Miami’s Little Havana, a modern Midway, or a sanitized international institution, a Latinized EPCOT center? Even as Miami’s Calle Ocho in Little Havana emerged as an important cultural nexus, the city continued to position itself as an international stage for hemispheric affairs (Fig. 4.33). Although Muskat elevated the Inter-American ideal with a much larger application in mind, the architects reached for the same aspirations. In Kahn’s words: “I saw it also in my mind as a united American nation or industry. I see it as non-political and where enterprise, research and imagination could be constant elements throughout the whole life of this new institution.”75 The kind of unity Kahn described is certainly the goal of any intergovernmental effort, but in the 1960s, shifting local conditions throughout the United States’ major cities tugged at the edges of the nation’s postwar image of a homogeneous middle-class society. Ultimately, Interama’s abstraction, separation from Miami, and internationalist scope prevented it from repeating the Pan-American architectural formulas that characterized the Gateway to the Americas rhetoric of preceding generations.

Fig. 4.33. Calle Ocho Festival in Little Havana, Miami. (Courtesy of

the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida)

history, it is important to distinguish the architects’ desire to promote exchange and collaboration among its visitors and residents from the organizers’ rhetoric, which tied the fair to a legacy of cultural and political imperialism and to Cuban Americans’ entrance into the city. Interama failed for reasons outside the architects’ control. The architects explored the complexities of hemispheric cultural exchange. They presented the most insightful effort to represent Pan-America during a century of attempts. Muskat had hoped to see a model environment in their designs but not a guide for the city

HemisFair ’68 and New Liaisons with Las Américas HemisFair ’68 could not present a greater contrast to the history of Interama. HemisFair attained strong and consistent financial support at the federal, state, and local levels. It evolved over a relatively short period of time and opened on schedule. And it was conceived as a catalyst to redevelop downtown San Antonio. More important, every nation of the world was invited to participate. HemisFair was designed in adherence to the guidelines of the Paris-based Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) rules. The bureau’s governing board was established in 1928 to regulate world’s fair standards and ensure equal representation among nations. HemisFair’s most drastic distinction, however, is that

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Fig. 4.34. Architectural perspective of La Villita, published in San Antonio Light, August 25, 1939, “Plans for Villita Project Complete/ Hispano-American Museum and Library Costing $100,000 Will Be Added to Plans.” (UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures)

from the outset it was envisioned as a showcase of San Antonio’s Pan-American identity: Latinos and Anglos and other cultural groups living in a distinctive Mexican American cultural landscape. Since the late 1930s, the city had been committed to maintaining a touristoriented civic identification, with its preservation of La Villita, construction of the River Walk, and production of downtown festivities (Figs. 4.34, 4.35, and 4.36). This Anglo-initiated narrative was challenged,

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however, when Mexican Americans began to question the city’s commitment to their participation in city affairs in the 1960s. HemisFair was developed over the course of six years in three distinct phases. The original presentation of ethnic diversity and unity was carefully negotiated as fair organizers addressed the bureau’s requirements and as they responded to local pressure to increase Mexican American representation. Paralleling the intensity of design activity that Interama’s architects brought to Pan-American architecture, HemisFair presents an equally intense cultural discourse on the notion of the hemispheric subject. The San Antonio fair exposed the contrived construction of Pan-Americanism in an ethnically mixed U.S. city.

While Miami was dealing with increasing numbers of Cuban refugees, San Antonio was rekindling its connection to Mexico, which had only strengthened after statehood was granted to Texas. The city was part of a broad network of Texas cities that maintained strong ties to Mexico. In 1881, the International and Great North railroad (I&GN), which ran from San Antonio to St. Louis and Chicago, connected the city to Laredo. The following year, the Mexican National Railway (Ferrocarril Nacional Mexicano) further extended this connection from Laredo to Monterrey, Mexico, and eventually to Mexico City in 1888. The cultural geographer Daniel D. Arreola observes how “the railroad line that brought Mexicans to the Rio Grande and beyond into San Antonio allowed them to retain ties to their homeland and kinsfolk.”76 San Antonio’s large Mexican American population eventually made this city the Mexican American cultural capital of the United States, and the city, ranking as the seventh-largest city in the United States in 2010, stands out as the only one of the ten largest cities that is ethnically predominantly Mexican. Although Arreola cites two references that refer to San Antonio as “the old capital city of Mexican life and influence” and “the capital of the Mexico that lies within the United States,” it is important to note that Anglo-Americans and other ethnic immigrants marginalized and outnumbered San Antonio’s Mexican Americans by the turn of the twentieth century.77 Anglo-Americans in San Antonio actively engaged the Pan-American movement as the city’s business elite conceptualized their city’s position in the Western Hemisphere.78 By the 1940s, Mexican Americans had formed the Pan-American League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, known by its acronym, LULAC (Figs. 4.37 and 4.38). These groups stood in contrast to the portrayal of Mexican life seen at the Fig. 4.35. The 1937 Battle of Flowers parade passing before the Alamo, photographed in San Antonio, Texas, April 23, 1937. (UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures) Fig. 4.36. Billie Hill poses with booklet titled “Old Villita.” Published

in San Antonio Light, September 21, 1939. (UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures)

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Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition of 1937, where interpretations of Texas culture were represented by stereotypes and clichés (Fig. 4.39). The Ford Motor Co. exhibition building, for example, was “Mayanized” with paint and renamed the Palacio Pan-Americano, the Pan-American Exhibit Building (Fig. 4.40). The Dallas fair officials decided to hire “Latin type” brunettes, or “Texanitas” (tejanitas), to serve as official hostesses, causing blonde women to protest.79 Dallas’ distance from the U.S.-Mexico border was accentuated by this type of superficial identification. HemisFair was planned to coincide with San Antonio’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of its founding, when Spain established the Misión de San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) in 1718. The city’s historic downtown offered the perfect backdrop, although the fairground’s location nearby would present complications, especially as it emerged out of a process of ethnic erasure and urban cleansing. The federally funded urban renewal project that facilitated the acquisition and development of the HemisFair fairgrounds would have exposed local ethnic tensions regardless of the fair’s theme. But themes of confluence and migration proposed for HemisFair were ironic in a public project that promised to unify a fractured city. The 92-acre fair site on the southeast edge of downtown San Antonio housed 2,300 residents, who were displaced when most of the nineteenth-century neighborhood was razed. This ethnically diverse neighborhood was represented at the fairgrounds by twenty-two preserved structures (some served as restaurants; others as offices or museums) that catalogued the house types of mid- and lateFig. 4.37. Pan American League (PAL) members plan fund drive. Pub-

lished in San Antonio Light, January 16, 1949. The newspaper noted, “Fund raising is planned by the Pan American League to provide shoes for school children. Entertainers from Mexico will appear at a benefit at the San Fernando School. All proceeds will go into the school fund.” (UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures)

Fig. 4.38. “More than 150 Lulacs and their families left Tuesday morn-

ing in chartered buses to attend the national convention of the League of United Latin-American Citizens at Santa Fe, N.M., scheduled for June 14.” Published in San Antonio Light, June 10, 1947. (UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures)

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Fig. 4.39. The Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, Dallas, Texas, 1937. (From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library) Fig. 4.40. The Palacio Pan-Americano, 1937. Architect George L. Dahl

designed the original Art Deco fairgrounds to capture a sense of Texas pride. The fairgrounds were reenvisioned for the Pan-American extension fair, as this postcard demonstrates. (From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library)

nineteenth-century San Antonio.80 It seemed an empty gesture to many locals when the fair’s organizers proceeded to commemorate the city’s ethnic diversity with a Migration Fountain and Plaza in front of the U.S. Pavilion complex. San Antonio’s Mexican American population gained political clout during the postwar period, a fact that influenced the fair’s first phase of development. In 1958, a local merchant, Jerome K. Harris, proposed hosting “a Hemis-Fair” in downtown San Antonio that would focus on Latin America. The Good Government League (GGL), a local political party run by prominent AngloAmerican businessmen, supported him. This was at the time when the Ferriss-led Interama designs were gaining national attention, and this might have influenced their decision to invest in downtown renewal. When U.S. Congressman Henry B. González endorsed the proposal in 1962, the same year San Antonio Fair, Inc., was formed to oversee the fair, the concept was publicly portrayed in connection with his political aspirations in Washington, D.C. Accounts in the media often represented the HemisFair as González’ idea.81 González was appointed co-chair of the San Antonio Fair, Inc.’s Executive Committee, along with Mayor Walter W. McAllister. In its early stages, with the support of the Good Government League, the fair board was able to raise $7.6 million in local support with the promise that revitalization of the city’s Central Business District would generate economic development. When fair organizers needed to gain Mexican American support for the project in January 1964, literature was mailed to West Side residents stating: “Support González and HemisFair.”82 After a $300 million city bond sale won approval, the fair’s newly appointed executive director, Ewen C.

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Dingwall, encouraged local ethnic participation, at one point asking: “Do you people feel that the present relationship . . . between Anglos and Latin Americans in this community will be something that will be perceived by your visitors from Latin America in good grace?”83 The fair was envisioned as a downtown complex of buildings that would bring valuable resources to the city. The organizers hoped Dingwall would bring some of the magic of the Seattle world’s fair to San Antonio, as he had served as director of the Century 21 Exposition in 1962. Getting right to work, in preparation for a campaign to support a $30 million bond sale, Dingwall prepared a promotional film, “Meet Me at the Fair,” in which a design was presented. The fair was composed of a convention center, a theater, a free-trade zone called an Inter-American Bazaar, and an Inter-American Institute. Similarities to Interama’s development are visible throughout HemisFair’s development. Four months after the bond was approved in April 1964, O’Neil Ford and Allison B. Peery were named coordinating and site-planning architects.84 Two months later, however, historian Henry A. Guerra, Jr., sought Congressman González’ approval when he introduced his own design strategy for the fair. González encouraged Guerra to develop his idea and prompted other groups of San Antonio Latinos to get involved. Guerra, a respected local historian and broadcast journalist, had participated in local politics. He was one of a number of Mexican American politicos who were gaining ground in San Antonio. Guerra had a heroic interpretation of the Pan-American theme. On June 18, 1964, in a letter to González, to whom he gave credit for initiating the fair, Guerra shared his vision for a Plaza de Libertad (Liberty Plaza). His idea had been triggered by a statue of Mexico’s liberator, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, formerly located in Bolívar Plaza in La Villita. Guerra’s idea was to design a plaza that included statues of “the great liberators of the Americas.” Guerra proposed an open-air replica of the Pan-American Union’s Gallery of Portraits and Flags. In his letter, he claimed that he had been asked to approach González to see if he thought the governments of the Americas would be interested in participating in such a plan.85 González re-

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sponded by stating that he thought this was a fine idea. He felt it would “remind Fair visitors of the mutual love of liberty which so strongly binds the countries of this hemisphere together.”86 Guerra continued to develop his design strategy, informing Dingwall that he would “draw up a verbal description of the idea to be submitted along with the drawings.” He added that “our thinking now includes the possibility of a series of Jardines de Libertad [Liberty Gardens].”87 Dingwall responded by stating that “the architects,” referring to Ford and Peery, were beginning to develop their architectural concept. Guerra continued with his plan, proposing liberty as the theme for the entire fair and as the name of the tower that Ford was designing, which Guerra described as a “towering Torch of Liberty.”88 Guerra’s descriptions of a plaza of meandering garden pathways that would bring the nations together at the base of the proposed liberty tower was a familiar idea, recalling Gleave’s twenty-one roads and other spiraling projects. Guerra’s plaza description must have made an impression. Guerra went into extensive detail in his description, mentioning a “Shrine of Freedom” with a “great winding garden (actually a series of gardens) offering inspiring vistas formed by gently curving and irregular turnings.”89 These descriptions bring to mind the gardens of the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, whose involvement was later sought. Guerra also described an official repository of the Americas, a place that could be used as a research institution and a museum. His proposed center would offer films, photographic slides, a library, and permanent displays of historic objects (e.g., Simón Bolívar’s sword, Ben Franklin’s pen, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s standard), including paintings, dioramas, and animated re-creations of famous battles (e.g., Lexington, Concord, Yorktown, Guanajuato, Ayacucho, and Soyaca). Guerra was promoted to a new role of “international department liaison” for the fair. Such participation was considered important with Latinos representing about 48 percent of San Antonio’s population. Responding to complaints about “hiring inequities,” HemisFair officials formed a Latin American Committee to organize Latinos in what was described as liaison activities.

One of the HemisFair’s officers raised the point that the HemisFair organization had “never requested their cooperation, and that we believe it is the proper time to have all San Antonio’s cooperation in developing this City’s project.” Carlos Freymann, director of the fair’s Visitor and Exhibitor Relations Department, stated that it was “advisable and advantageous” to form such a committee.90 This led to the Pan-American Public Relations Association (PAPRA), which included two representatives from each of the twelve major “Latin” civic organizations; Judge Mike Machado was elected its chairman.91 Members of the association were asked to guide Mexican visitors and increase the effectiveness of HemisFair’s image in Mexico and Latin America.92 González was invited to the association’s first meeting, held on August 31, 1964, to discuss ideas and suggestions for the improvement of HemisFair’s image of goodwill among San Antonians.93 The members of the public relations association were asked to devise ways that Mexican culture could be incorporated into the fair. Guerra suggested collaborating with the Mexican Consulate to bring several Mexican spectacles. He also recommended that a documentary motion picture of the fair be made and reported on his proposed Plaza de Libertad. At the meeting, the group also established a Mexican American Friendship Committee.94 HemisFair officials sought to hire Mexican architects, following the recommendation of Mario F. Gonzales, the chairman of San Antonio’s Fine Arts Commission. Lead architects Ford and Peery were notified of the possibility, to which they responded with caution. They were told that “possibly, but not necessarily, on the basis of commissioned works—but in the form of, perhaps, a symposium to gain their ideas and greatest sense of participation and involvement possible.”95 Ford and Peery were assured that “there may be an alternative therefore that would have the effect of making these outstanding architects feel that they are participants in our venture and not just onlookers.”96 The architects mentioned included Luis Barragán, Félix Candela, Juan Sordo Madaleno, Manuel Parra, and Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. The artists Feliciano Béjar, Mathias Goeritz, and Juan O’Gorman were also men-

tioned.97 O’Gorman and Goeritz had collaborated on architectural projects in Mexico. Peery seemed receptive and immediately responded that he knew Candela and Parra, and that he had just met Vázquez. He also recommended Burle Marx.98 In a report sent to the bureau, it was mentioned that José Gómez-Sicre, the chief of the Pan-American Union’s Visual Arts Division, was touring South America and would confer with the “noted Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx on the creation of a Sculpture Garden for the Exposition. The works in this showing would be original, commissioned especially for HemisFair and created from indigenous American materials around the theme.”99 Marx had designed the Park of the Americas in Santiago, Chile, in 1962. The fair organizers also expressed interest in collaborations with U.S. architects, including The Architects’ Collaborative, Edward L. Barnes, Pietro Belluschi, Charles Eames, William P. Katavolos, and Charles W. Moore. Two architects working on Interama were mentioned: Kahn and Weese.100 There was also an attempt to involve New York’s master builder Robert Moses in the exposition’s planning, specifically with regard to HemisFair’s potential role in the completion of the Pan-American Highway. No roads in the United States or Canada had been considered a part of the highway until San Antonio renamed its Interstate 35 the Pan-American Expressway. Moses was controversial among urban planners because of his love of the highway and automobile at the expense of the city, and he had been criticized for the failures of New York’s World’s Fair of 1964–1965. Interestingly, the New York fair had featured the Avis-sponsored PanAmerican Highway Gardens, which were set up like a tiny racetrack with a miniature golf–style tour of the Americas. HemisFair’s executive vice-president, James M. Gaines wrote to Moses: “Our ambition will highlight the commonality of the people of the Western Hemisphere and call attention to ‘el Pueblo de San Antonio,’ a city bisected by the Pan American Highway in the State astride the Americas.”101 He went on to describe the mission of the fair and how it could coincide with Moses’ interest in seeing the Pan-American Highway’s completion, proposing that, with his guidance, the fair

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could be used to achieve this: “As the greatest builder of our time—you should do it. Can HemisFair 1968 serve as a launching pad for such a project under your guidance?”102 Moses replied with a very short note, expressing no response to Gaines’ flattery, “I have your letter of March 7th and suggest you or Martin Stone talk to Federal Highway Commissioner Rex Whitton about the completion of the Pan-American Highway in 1968.”103 These unsolicited recommendations and potential influences did not distract Ford and Peery from their fairground planning.104 Although Ford’s influence was cut short when he was fired over disagreements with the fair’s organizers, his hand can be noted in some of the fair’s most interesting characteristics. After working on La Villita, in the 1930s Ford was involved with a number of projects that shaped him into what may have appeared to be the perfect hemispheric architect.

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He had agreed with the central components of Mayor Maverick’s efforts to assert the city’s historic past as San Antonio’s official backdrop. The mayor had convinced prominent Anglo-Americans in the 1930s that this type of ethnic-themed tourism was good for the city, claiming that it “would ennoble the lower-class Mexican barrio.”105 Ford’s interest in and preoccupation with historic preservation consumed much of his time and energy. When the federally funded Urban Renewal Project 5, as it was named, was announced, which would entail razing 92  acres, Ford prepared a master plan illustrating his effort to save as many buildings Fig. 4.41. Aerial view of partial HemisFair ’68 model showing section with preserved trees and historic structures interspersed with the national pavilions. (San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, Archives and Special Collections, University of Texas at San Antonio Library)

and trees as possible. The integration of new construction with the structures and trees that were saved was one of Ford’s most distinctive contributions (Fig. 4.41). In contrast to Ford’s efforts to preserve the local scale, however, Ford and his associates proposed a tower that was described as the tallest concrete structure in the world. The tower’s original design resembled a giant tree with a distinct taper at the base and crown, a feature that was later eliminated (Figs. 4.42 and 4.43). On August 8, 1965, the San Antonio Express News invited locals to name the tower. Some of the names submitted capture the spirit of the times and people’s response to the theme in general.106 These proposals resulted in the tower being called the Tower of the Americas. Ford’s visions lingered when the time came to process HemisFair through the Bureau of International Expositions’ complex requirements and guidelines. On April 6, 1965, the official rules and regulations

Fig. 4.42. HemisFair Tower rendering that appeared in the Naming Contest. (San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, Archives and Special Collections, University of Texas at San Antonio Library) Fig. 4.43. Aerial view of the Tower of the Americas and the Convention Center in the background, rendering by Boone Powell. (Courtesy of Ford, Powell, and Carson)

conforming to the bureau’s standards were adopted. William W. Phillips had been appointed HemisFair European Coordinator, and from his post in Paris, he served as liaison to the bureau. A film prepared for the bureau captures the atmosphere that emerged during the fair’s second phase of development, and it stands in stark contrast to earlier efforts to include the Mexican American community. The film was carefully edited so as not to offend Latin Americans who would be present. Thus they deleted images of the Alamo, a boy on a burro, and a Mexican village. New text, reporting on the

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valued partnership with Latinos, was instead added, stating: “The Honorable Henry B. González, U.S. Representative of San Antonio, inspired the community to undertake the project ‘HemisFair ’68’, and ably led the legislation through the House of Representatives, establishing U.S. recognition of HemisFair.”107 Phillips presented the film to the bureau in Paris in mid-May of 1965, around the time when the Texas State Senate passed a HemisFair bill appropriating $7.5 million. Not long after, at the request of Governor John Connally, a Texas House of Representatives bill authorizing $4.5 million in support was passed. Throughout this period, HemisFair officials manipulated cultural representations of Latinos and Mexicans, revising images and language whenever they feared cultural depictions might compromise their efforts.108 Making a case to the bureau for the Western Hemisphere’s need for its own fair was the main goal. HemisFair planners anticipated a world audience but were committed to showcasing the Western Hemisphere. They proceeded to frame the hemispheric fair as a global celebration of the Americas. As Phillips described it, “Our Exposition is basically a cultural exposition to make our Hemisphere background better known to us and to the World . . . we hope to accomplish a better understanding among ourselves and the rest of the World and to improve our Hemisphere’s political, economical and social conditions.”109 The city did not hide its main agenda, and even the Washington Daily News announced, “San Antonio Is Planning Halfa-World’s Fair.”110 Meeting this goal and pleasing nearly half a city of Mexican Americans was another story. Dingwall worked closely with Phillips, who offered guidance as the theme was reconceived to work with the bureau’s approved classifications.111 Dingwall selected the theme “Confluence of Civilizations,” suggesting two possible additions to it: “in the Western Hemisphere” or “in the West.” He remained concerned about the flexibility HemisFair planners would have in developing additional subthemes, and he proceeded to propose four sections.112 Two sections harked back to the Pan-American heritage themes introduced in the first hemispheric fairs with their emphasis on the Spanish colonial legacy, but the others offered new lenses with

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which to view the Americas. They emphasized post– World War II economic development and future developments in Latin America. The complicated part of the classification process, however, was whether each exhibit category would be seen as central to the fair or as just another exhibit. Dingwall confirmed: “The total would still constitute a Special Category, dealing only with Pan America, if I read you correctly.”113 He later elaborated the main theme as the “Confluence of Major Civilizations in the American Hemisphere,” and this was accompanied by ten major subthemes.114 The four proposed exhibits were expanded to include other PanAmerican heritage themes. This proposal reflected the teleological theme of “before, during, and after conquest,” and four traditional themes of material progress (raw materials, machinery, mechanical arts, and fine arts) of the standard world’s fair, but cast in twentiethcentury terms. The fair’s subthemes were recast in more poetic rhetoric, and this became the official thematic narrative of the fair: The Legacy, The Harvest, The Promise, and The Folklore. Officials sent this proposal to the bureau for final approval, and four designated areas were identified on the fairgrounds. The Legacy would be the main theme exhibit, the one in which participating governments would showcase “the very finest from their past.”115 It would encompass the base of the Tower of the Americas. The plan was to illustrate the experience of becoming a citizen of the Western Hemisphere through the process of immigration. Multiple human and cultural experiences would be illustrated in a subterranean museum at the base of the tower, with entrances spiraling downward from the ground level. Each path would re-create the immigration experience of a different national group, following the ethnic pattern of the group as it entered the Western Hemisphere. This was a brilliant way of engaging the cultures of the world (with the exception of the indigenous peoples) in this showcase of the Americas. Nationalism was reduced to the human experience of crossing borders, and it would focus on the connections between nations rather than on the autonomy of nations. In his letter to Robert Moses, Gaines stated: “Our City is the most logical meet-

ing ground for the peoples of the Americas, all of whom sprang from the same common heritage—‘immigration.’ We too often forget that no one met the boat.”116 (Interestingly, the pan-native theme fell out of use here.) The three remaining subthemes were located in other sections. The Harvest, the second major area, would showcase the Western Hemisphere’s current production, and the Promise, its future. The Folklore would be an area set aside for “theme-controlled food, merchandise, handicrafts, entertainment, and amusement activities.”117 The designers proposed to use color codes and graphics to guide visitors. Every element—“lighting, water, uniforms, directional signs”—would be tied to the theme.118 When officials met with O’Neil Ford’s partner, Boone Powell, who took over the tower design, to discuss the forthcoming presentation to the Bureau of International Expositions, they discussed the Legacy area in depth but also mentioned the Plaza of Liberators and the Garden Area that Guerra proposed.119

HemisFair was considered a special exposition by the Bureau of International Expositions, with its focus on “Civilizations.” One of the requirements was that national exhibits could only appear within the theme areas in support of the theme, making HemisFair the first thematic world’s fair in the United States.120 Phillips recommended that foreign governments could and should participate in as many areas as possible. By early August, there was a plan to designate an area in the fairgrounds as the Foreign Participation Area, where nations could rent exhibition pavilions.121 The Organization of American States (OAS) and numerous Latin American countries participated in this section (Fig. 4.44). Foreign governments were eventually offered 3,000 square feet (48 feet by 64 feet) of free “Standard Fig. 4.44. The OAS Pavilion at the HemisFair ’68, located next to the

Italian Pavilion. (San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963-1995, Archives and Special Collections, University of Texas at San Antonio Library)

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Fig. 4.45. The official HemisFair ’68 logo, Richard Wilson, designer. (UTSA’s Institute of Texas Cultures)

Closed Space.” These spaces were located in the International Sector of the fairgrounds. The buildings were constructed of structural steel framing and steel-bar joist roof supports. The ceiling height of these spaces was 12 feet in front and 24 feet at the rear. Front façades were open and floor space was unobstructed, which allowed participants to use the space as they wanted.122 In light of a long history of national pavilions appearing at world’s fairs to reflect national wealth and status, this was a clever way to impose a level playing field and spare nations the expense of constructing individual pavilions. The Bureau of International Expositions approved HemisFair on November 17, 1965. Shortly thereafter, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk invited 114 countries to participate. HemisFair’s symbol was developed and adopted around this time. The fair’s organizers commissioned a logo for the fair from Richard Wilson that illustrated the “Confluence of Civilizations” theme. Departing from the silhouette of the two continents, the HemisFair ideogram represented cultural encounter as a dynamic process of movement into the Americas (Fig. 4.45). The logo’s spiraling motion, which represented a confluence

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of immigrants from all over the world into the Western Hemisphere, was reminiscent of the forms that Ferriss and some of the subsequent Interama architects had proposed. Had the tower’s subterranean museum been built, visitors would have experienced this dynamic human process, with each descending ramp representing a story of national immigration. HemisFair organizers also represented the Western Hemisphere as a contiguous cultural entity. Fair officials discussed the possibility of showcasing a map of the Western Hemisphere in this museum of the immigrants to drive home the point. By depicting “the hemisphere without boundaries as it was before any conquerors,” it would reflect the “same aspect in present time with no language barriers and easy communication, from Texas to the tip of South America.”123 This unusual hemispheric model not only erased the U.S.-Mexican border, it reinforced the strong connection between the southwestern United States and Mexico. The organizers wanted to emphasize Latin American expansion into the United States, and they pointed to markets, economic growth information, and tourism to make their case. When HemisFair ’68 opened, the fairgrounds had evolved into an amorphously shaped plan that fit like a puzzle piece into the mosaiclike urban form of downtown San Antonio (Fig. 4.46). This was mirrored in

Fig. 4.46. Map showing HemisFair ’68 fairgrounds and San Antonio’s landmarks. (UTSA’s Institute of Texas Cultures) Fig. 4.47. Postcard view of monorail and main HemisFair ’68 promenade. (San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, Archives and Special Collections, University of Texas at San Antonio Library) Fig. 4.48. Postcard view of the United States Confluence Theater. (San

Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, Archives and Special Collections, University of Texas at San Antonio Library)

the pinwheel form of a monorail people mover, which snaked overhead to connect the many features below. This sky-ride was one of the fair’s most popular attractions. Surrounded by water and accessible by bridges, a central section called “Fiesta Island” dominated the fairgrounds, with the Tower of the Americas at its center. Visitors could go up 630  feet to the sky-level revolving restaurant. The island’s name connected the fairgrounds to San Antonio’s annual Fiesta celebration, first celebrated in 1891 as the Battle of Flowers. San Antonio’s traditions merged with the fairgrounds. HemisFair’s reserved architecture served as stage and backdrop. Fiesta Island, in particular, lured visitors with games, boat rides, food, and other activities along its perimeter. It also connected the fair to the River Walk, reinforcing the city’s historic heritage and urban continuity. The River Walk had been extended into the new Convention Center complex on the island’s northeast side. HemisFair’s main organizing promenade, called HemisFair Plaza Way today, passed in front of the island and extended from the Institute of Texan Cultures on the southeast end, near the Pan-American Expressway, all the way to Las Plazas del Mundo, the site of the international exhibits (Fig. 4.47). This is where the twenty-two preserved historic structures were located. This area was directly across from La Villita. The fairground’s organizing structure was formed by this main spine and two diagonal walks, which extended toward the Tower of the Americas. This reinforced the fair’s three distinct nodes: Texas, the Plaza, and the Tower. The United States Confluence Theater and its Migration Fountain and Plaza were located across from the tower, opposing HemisFair’s longest public face on E. Durango Boulevard (Judge H.  F. García Memorial Boulevard today; Fig. 4.48). Acting as the fair’s main

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entrance, the U.S. Pavilion served as the site of the inaugural celebration ceremonies and other important public events. The round structure resembled Ferriss’ central buildings, with its perimeter piers denoting the confluence of peoples from all directions. The heart of the fair was beyond this point, however, where visitors could partake in a unique Southwestern theme park, bringing together the feeling of a Los Angeles Knott’s Berry Farm and Olvera Street Market (the organizers had visited these sites in preparation for the fair).124 Guerra’s Plaza of Liberators and Garden Area were not part of the final design. Instead, the structures of the International Sector faced onto plazas, which encircled an International Market where foreign governments could rent space to display and sell handicrafts. HemisFair’s organizers had anticipated the participation of forty-six nations, but only eighteen took part.125 Fig. 4.49. Juan O’Gorman’s mural, The Confluence of Civilizations.

(Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States)

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Mexico dominated the fairgrounds with its numerous exhibits, folklore spectacles, and diplomatic visits. Mexican architect and artist Juan O’Gorman, considered the father of Mexican Modern architecture, was invited to install an exterior mural on the convention center (Fig. 4.49). The stone-formed mural, called The Confluence of Civilizations, depicted two figures, male and female, representing the coming together of the Anglo and Latin races. This presented the Latin-Anglo division in one of its most colonializing forms, the lesson being that the Latino and Latin American participation did not guarantee an elevated hemispheric discourse. Guerra’s plaza proposal would have replicated the male-hero narratives celebrated in the Pan-American Union Building, and O’Gorman reinforced the division in the Union building’s main façade with statues representing North and South America.126 O’Gorman’s compatriot Diego Rivera had introduced a similarly themed mural at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939–1940 (Fig. 4.50).127 A number of exhibits and institutions developed for

Fig. 4.50. Detail showing Coatlicue in Rivera’s Pan-American Unity mural, 1940. (All rights reserved. Unauthorized public performance, broadcasting, transmission, or copying, mechanical or electronic, is a violation of applicable laws. Copyright © City College of San Francisco. www.riveramural.com)

HemisFair were designed to establish the fair’s hemispheric theme on a permanent basis. A $10.5 million School for Tomorrow that presented “revolutionary educational techniques” at the fair was supposed to be converted into a permanent Inter-American Education Center when HemisFair closed. Located in the U.S. Pavilion, this was going to include an Inter-American Institute and Institute of Planned Change, which would establish San Antonio “as the gathering place of social and educational exchange throughout the Americas.”128 Programs for the Inter-American Education Center, however, were absorbed into the Institute of Texan Cultures, where a sprawling permanent exhibition would trace the cultural growth of Texas from prehistoric times to the present.129 One of the lasting outcomes of the fair was the establishment of a satellite campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) on the fairgrounds after the fair closed. The fair’s activity areas left lasting impressions, too, providing San Antonians with a combination of Texas, Mexico, and a taste of the 1960s. This included El Teatro de Pantomima (an open-air theater), the performances of Los Voladores de Papantla, The People-Actuated Music (musical bridge), and architect John Kriken’s six-month “happening” called “¡Gozar!” [To Enjoy] or “Project Y,” which emphasized youth participation. ¡Gozar! had its own multilingual daily newspaper called El Diario Alegre, and an earlier newsletter called El Abrazo had been published to announce the fair’s development.130 HemisFair produced other publications with Spanish titles, such as “¿Qué Será?” (What Will It Be?) for distribution at the fair. Alexander Girard’s exhibit “El Encanto de un Pueblo,” an extensive display of folk art, captivated HemisFair visitors with the curiosities of Latin America. The fair surpassed the Dallas fair of 1937 with its rich depiction of hemispheric life, and it even presented real señoritas as hostesses, although

Image unavailable for electronic edition.

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Fig. 4.51. An official HemisFair ’68 hostess presenting a model of the

fairgrounds. (UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures)

it largely aimed to attract Anglo-American patrons, as most of its literature illustrated (Fig. 4.51). Unlike New Orleans in the 1880s and Miami, HemisFair produced literature acclaiming San Antonio, not as the center of the hemisphere but as a location where hemispheric activity reached a new level of intensification. As far as the HemisFair planners were concerned, Pan-American unity was already present in the city’s population, something Interama’s planners never managed to incorporate into their designs. In San Antonio, there was no need to replicate Pan-Americanism with buildings or to anticipate the emergence of a new kind of hemispheric subject. Advertisements for HemisFair broadcast this sentiment, although Mexican Americans did not serve as the fair’s official spokespeople. This message was instructive, however, given the history of the hemispheric project. Wilson’s spiral logo suggested people coming together. But it could also be read in reverse, as the hemispheric ideal evolving out of a place. The fact that González spearheaded and supported HemisFair and that Guerra played an active role in its design makes this one of the few hemispheric

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projects to emerge from a U.S. Latino cultural milieu. González’ moderate ideology was not always consistent with the attitudes of Chicano activists in the late 1960s and 1970s, and this reflected the city’s diverse Latino population. The fair was not warmly welcomed by all, as was seen during the HemisFair’s opening ceremonies. Discontent was partly due to the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis two days earlier, although Chicanos and members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who picketed and boycotted the fair harbored resentments stemming from the city’s urban renewal plans. Upon entering the grounds, visitors might have encountered protesters with signs stating: “After HemisFair Visit West Side San Antonio, Confluence of Poverty.”131 In the end, class-based disparities in the city were more often at the core of the problems. It is understandable that many could not weigh HemisFair’s preservation efforts against the poverty that still persists on the city’s West Side. As with Interama, HemisFair’s organizers did not attempt to carry the weight of the city’s ethnic disparities. At least the HemisFair’s organizers were in a position to orchestrate and recast established visions of their city’s ethnic identity, and they did so eagerly.

The Last Hemispheric Fairs With their clever names, Interama and HemisFair ’68 illustrate the extent to which a well-known concept in the United States entered into a new era of hemispheric consciousness in the 1960s. The Pan-American concept evolved into two distinct interpretations in Miami and San Antonio, reflecting a complex cultural urbanity that was transforming each city as the fairs were being planned. This occurred as Latinos in each city negotiated their cultural identities and associations with respect to their homeland nations. It occurred with varying degrees of intensity, determined by infrastructural connections, governmental policies, and generational

developments. Local Anglo-American boosters who promoted the fairs faced this changing terrain as they imagined their cities attaining hemispheric centrality, and as they dealt with new ethnic realities. With the two popular nineteenth-century slogans “Remember the Maine” and “Remember the Alamo” resonating in the background, each city’s conflicted history with Latin America had also been captured and frozen in time. Even in the mid-twentieth century, these slogans were ever-present as the fairs were being developed. Although an increasingly powerful Mexican American community influenced HemisFair’s outcome, Interama’s organizers deflected Cuban American interests in participating in that fair’s development, and instead offered a model city that did not represent Miami’s rapidly shifting ethnic makeup. San Antonio’s efforts were full of compromises, but Miami simply ignored its Cuban population. Interama and HemisFair demonstrate the extent to which each city’s trans-American immigrant population forced a reframing of the “Gateway to the Americas” claim, causing city visionaries to rethink their cultural tourism programs, but more important, the concept itself. San Antonio’s Anglo-American newcomers had originally hoped to construct a northern U.S.–style built environment, but they embraced the city’s Spanish and Latin American past when HemisFair presented itself as an opportunity for the city. Conversely, Miami’s northern newcomers had constructed a fictitious Spanish Mediterranean past with a mythic tropical landscape, hoping to attract developers and tourists. In the 1960s, Interama’s architects rejected such blatant historicism as they constructed an international utopia in the name of diplomacy. As each city negotiated local forces and visionary goals, city officials hoped to gain tourist dollars with assertions of hemispheric status. HemisFair’s success was undoubtedly due to the fair’s connection to downtown San Antonio, with the inverse being the case for Interama. Both fairs demonstrate that it was not a city’s claim to being a hemispheric center that counted as much as a city’s commitment to making the hemispheric vision last beyond the scope of an ephemeral event. San Antonians

continued with this aim, especially under Mayor Henry Cisneros, elected in 1981, the first Mexican American to head a major U.S. city, although Miami had elected its first Latino mayor in 1973, Maurice A. Ferre, the first U.S. mayor born in Puerto Rico. In the decades to come, designs reflecting PanAmerica would not match the level of commitment seen with these two hemispheric fairs. These fairs were the high points of Pan-American design, and they are the conclusion to this history. As architectural history, the fairs were important because they spatially captured emerging interests in preservation, urban design, and alternative living systems. HemisFair’s architect, O’Neil Ford, attempted to have preservation goals set the design guidelines for HemisFair, an effort that lost him his job. Conversely, Interama’s architects were not interested in utopic projections. Their interests in seeing how a planned community could function as a minicity were conscientious, and they seemingly enjoyed the opportunity to pursue this exposition. To a certain extent, their idealism deflected the realities of Miami and allowed them to maintain intellectual rapport with the fair’s organizers. Their quest for a model city had also been visible in Kelsey’s attempts to exhibit one at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 and his eventual display at the St. Louis Fair of 1904. The development of the world’s fair genre in the 1960s, which increasingly centered on themes of technology and consumerism, introduced new ways of addressing national representation that reinforced the notion of the imagined hemispheric subject. Interama was designed to present a partitioning of the Americas that deflected Latin-Anglo divisions with regionally, rather than nationally, focused pavilions. The complexes presented alternative activities and technologically oriented structures as their main focal points. The new hemispheric subject was also imagined as existing in a regionally familiar, subtropical park, and these faux-tropical design efforts resembled Kelsey’s tropicalization of the Pan-American Union Building. HemisFair’s design sidestepped hierarchies altogether with its generic pavilion design system, which neutralized national distinctions. This fair celebrated con-

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Fig. 4.52. “Viva HemisFair” ’68 poster. (San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records,

1963–1995, Archives and Special Collections, University of Texas at San Antonio Library)

Fig. 4.53. (facing page) Model showing Festival of the Cities of the New

World Pavilion proposal, Pershing Square, Washington, D.C., 1965; Philip Johnson, architect, in collaboration with Charles Eames. (Courtesy of the Kennedy Archives)

Fig. 4.54. (facing page) Plan and section of the Festival of the Cities of the New World Pavilion, Pershing Square, Washington, D.C., 1965. Philip Johnson, architect, in collaboration with Charles Eames. (Courtesy of the Kennedy Archives)

sumer culture. Major corporations received greater attention with their prominently located pavilions. It was no surprise that HemisFair’s central focus was Texas (Fig. 4.52). Activities with Mexican American, Mexican, and Texan themes served as the fair’s main events. San Antonio’s hemispheric subject logically grew out of the city’s rich urban fabric, with its Spanish colonial plazas and Misión San Antonio de Valero, the Alamo nearby. The restored historic structures of La Villita, originally the site of an Indian village and a Spanish mestizo settlement, had inspired Mayor Maverick and others to capitalize on this idea. With the Pan-American Highway’s eventual completion alongside the fairgrounds, the pieces came together. The

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nonarchitectural space that resulted, which emphasized the lifeways of the locals, stood in contrast to the subtropical, parklike fair that Miamians envisioned in the marshlands far from that city’s core. The San Antonio fair was perceived as a success for this very reason (although it was a financial failure), because it did not overreach in its themes or try to imagine a Pan-American space that did not already exist in the city. Conversely, Miami failed in its effort to construct a PanAmerica of spectacular Modern architecture. Philip Johnson formulated a workable solution when he designed a pavilion for the proposed “Festival of the Cities of the New World” in 1965, a coda to this long history (Figs. 4.53 and 4.54). Planned for Pershing Square in Washington, D.C., with the Kennedy administration’s support, Johnson’s design included an inner chamber where films prepared in collaboration with Charles Eames would allow visitors to experience in full surround sound the cities of the Americas. There was no attempt to interpret the Western Hemisphere with Johnson’s architectural design. The four towers supporting the cantilevered superstructure did not reference anything Latin. In the inner space, terraced platforms formed the open-air internal court. The battered perimeter wall system was an ordering feature, although one might compare its form to mounds or the frontón courts. This transporting device located in the nation’s capital was a significant improvement on earlier efforts to bring the tropics to the north, especially as it relied on the transcendent effect that films could bring to one’s experience.

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EPILOGUE ENTER HERE: THE GREAT PAN-AMERICAN WAY

A

S SUSIE AND MIKE VARGAS TAKE AN EVE-

ning stroll across the U.S.-Mexican border in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), the carefully staged continuity of urban textures highlighting the similarities between the two imaginary towns is captured by the uninterrupted movement of this famous opening long shot (Fig. E.1). Like a premonition of things to come, a car that has weaved in and out of view, and that crosses the border alongside the couple, brings this scene to a close: the car explodes the moment it reaches the U.S. side. Having witnessed a ticking bomb being placed in the car’s trunk on the Mexican side earlier, the viewer feels compelled to question the safety of this open border and perhaps the young couple’s safety as well. The Anglo-American wife’s innocence is made vulnerable by her husband’s slick appearance. Mike is a Mexican police captain who has brought his wife to his country for their honeymoon. Janet Leigh portrayed the new wife, and Charlton Heston, in brown face, played Mike, the chief investigator for the Pan-American Narcotics Investigatory Commission (PANIC). Over the course of the movie, Welles cleverly turns stereotypes on their head, when Vargas emerges as the movie’s hero and the U.S. police captain, Hank Quinlan (played by Welles), turns out to be the dirty cop. Killed in one of the last scenes, his body seen floating in a ditch, Quinlan is symbolically transformed into the wetback, as historian Donald Pease has noted.1 The borderland imbroglio in which Susie and Mike Vargas are entangled contrasts sharply with Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s domestic PanAmerican idyll (Fig. E.2). As U.S. Latinos appropriated the Pan-American concept and identity, such images as Fig. E.1. Film still from Touch of Evil (1958), directed by Orson Welles.

(Courtesy of Universal International Pictures)

Fig. E.2. Lucy, Ricky, and Little Ricky Ricardo. December 25, 1956,

cover of LOOK Magazine. Robert Vose, creator. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Fig. E.3. (facing page) “The Great Wall” proposed for the U.S.-Mexico border, by Eric Owen Moss. (Courtesy of Eric Owen Moss, Architects)

these from the 1950s propelled tensions and rebuffed antiquated visions of superficial unity, especially in the context of the U.S.-Mexico border and the rapid demographic growth of U.S. Latinos nationwide. As the U.S.-Mexico borderland narrative continues to unfold, a project of hemispheric proportions gained media attention following the estimate given by Tom Ridge, U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, in 2003 that 8 to 12 million illegal aliens resided in the United States: the Great Wall along the border, the Southwest Border Fence. The congressional bill to build a 2,000-milelong, 15-foot-high security fence, constructed of concrete and steel, was passed in September 2006. This construction feat sheds light on some of the visionary infrastructural projects discussed in this book: the Three Americas Railway, the Pan-American Highway, and Pan-American Airways. If Pan-America’s history hinged for so long on visions of connecting networks aimed at bringing the Americas together by train, auto, and plane, what does America’s Great Wall say about Pan-America’s current status as a unifying vision? Pan-America’s grandiosity does not work any longer; hemispheric relations have grown more attuned to local conditions. Precisely because of the grand narrative, U.S. Americans since the mid-nineteenth century have appropriated the Pan-American trope to advance any number of ambitious projects involving trade, commercial partnerships, diplomatic relations, and civic and educational programs. Pan-America also inspired cultural, recreational, and social rituals. The border fence’s enormity, however, is what causes it to fail today as an acceptable intercultural solution, especially when one considers the towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, where Pan-America is negotiated and formed on a daily basis.2 Various associations across the Americas have challenged the notion of the grand Pan-American enterprise as the defining form of hemispheric relations. When the Pan-American Union reconfigured itself as the Organization of American States in 1948, it continued its work serving the Americas from its Washington headquarters. But its network of activities expanded throughout the Americas as the Latin American presence grew in

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Washington. The visions of improved trade and commerce that inspired the Pan-American movement in the early nineteenth century have inspired a fractal landscape of multinational partnerships. This culminated in numerous trade-bloc agreements that recast the Americas in various combinations: CARICOM (1973) between fifteen Caribbean nations and dependencies; Mercosur (1991) between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay; NAFTA (1994) between Canada, Mexico, and the United States; CCRFTA (2001) between Canada and Costa Rica; and DR-CAFTA (2004) between Central America, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. The practicality of these regional associations, which can monitor and maintain interhemispheric relations, sheds light on past hemispheric operations. These relationships also emphasize closer connections between countries, many built upon historical relations. The perceived need for militarization and security enforcement at such a large scale has brought architects together once again to see how Latins and Anglos might share a common territory. When the New York Times commissioned hypothetical designs for the border wall in 2006, only five of the thirteen architects, landscape architects, and planners who were invited to participate dared to take the challenge: James Corner, Eric Owen Moss, Enrique Norten, Antoine Predock, and Calvin Tsao.3 Some of their design proposals resonate with earlier attempts to create hemispheric synthesis. The proposal most in line with past projects came from Corner, who envisioned the border as a site that brought together the industry of the North and the employment of the South in a “productive, sustainable enterprise zone,” with a plan for massive solar collection. Norton’s suggestion to use the funds to build new highways instead of a wall and embrace Mexico’s economy countered Corner’s perspective and revealed his own Mexican identity. Moss’ and Tsao’s proposals disturbingly reflected the conservative mantra to “light up” the border that was then making the headlines by installing massive lights. Moss’ design summoned up the tunnel systems that for decades served illegal alien and drug trafficking, while it also acknowledged the

manner in which existing cities have historically come together along the border. He proposed a shared public space, a street-level paseo of illuminated columns that would bring light to tunnels filled with cultural exhibits and art (Figs. E.3 and E.4). Moss’ theory that the meeting of two cultures creates a third reflects his own experiences as a native of Los Angeles. Conversely, Tsao’s linear enterprise zone points to the development of small cities—his scheme was meant to light up the border to the point that it could be seen from outer space. Reflecting a different southern experience, New Mexican architect Predock presented a cynical and theatrical design, raising fundamental questions, like Norten, about the geopolitical line itself. His proposal resembled the U.S. government’s approach, in that it incorporated Mexicans in the building process. Pre-

Fig. E.4. Evening illumination map showing “The Great Wall,” by Eric

Owen Moss. (Courtesy of Eric Owen Moss, Architects)

dock proposed that Mexican day laborers build a tilted rammed-earth wall with an inner core of crushed rocks, which would then be heated to create an optical illusion. He imagined a desertlike mirage with heat rising from within that would dematerialize the wall, perhaps symbolically making the problem go away. All of the proposals envisioned the wall as a site of crossing. It was treated as a final destination, as a gateway into a future hemispheric state, in some odd way bringing William Jennings Bryan’s idea of Pan-American universities across the southern states to life. Even as this border militarization project cast its 2,000-mile shadow on hemispheric discourse, cities—

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many located along this wall—will continue to claim their status as “Gateways to the Americas,” although, since 2004, they have yet to do this creatively, as the claim to the name has also entered the territorializing realm. In the 1960s, New Orleans claimed the title with its “Gateway to the Americas” sign at Moisant International Airport, which was later changed to “New Orleans: Linking the Americas to the Globe.”4 In its bid to claim the name, Florida trademarked “Gateway to the Americas” (and “Gateway of the Americas”) in 2004 for Miami’s exclusive use. If the study of these Pan-American ideological constructs points to the complacent presumptions and projections of each project’s time, it also reveals the consistent human motivation to claim territories and define relationships. Reflecting on how Amerigo Vespucci came to be the namesake of the New World, the historian Christine R. Johnson discusses the discovery of America as a mental process whereby “‘America’ is seen as a concept, rather than a self-evident object.”5 It is for this reason, she and others have noted, that credit was given to Vespucci, for he helped the Old World visualize the New World with his writings. After all, Columbus was transfixed by Asia. The name “America” first appeared on the map produced by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, and understandably, the americanos in the south were the first to claim it. Waldseemüller used the name to identify only the southern continent in his map, and the northern section was left nameless. The “United States ‘of America’” was a later geographical/conceptual claim. The hemispheric concept continues to inspire programs of unity and cross-cultural exploration, often by people who enjoy its open-ended interpretations. In 2006, the performance artist Pablo Helguera revisited Pan-America’s potential with his project “The School of Panamerican Unrest.” He traversed the Americas by car in order to discuss and perform “hemispheric discourse,” hoping to arrive at some form of hemispheric reconciliation. His performance involved playing an official Pan-American anthem, which he composed, and erecting a collapsible structure resembling an old schoolhouse. The quasi-evangelical personality Hel-

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guera assumed for his performances painted him as a contemporary hemispheric subject. He staged crosscultural performances, documented them, and displayed them along the way, artistically and discursively knitting the Americas together. Through performance, he offered a new formulation of Pan-Americanism, that of a heuristic and artistic panacea. Latinos in the United States, however, have been the most active in the appropriation of the Las Américas concept in all its variations (Inter-American, of the Americas, Las Américas, Hemispheric), as new institutions and place-names throughout the U.S. Southwest demonstrate.6 As Mark Hinton notes in Historic Houston Streets, Latino presence has at times been framed in diplomatic terms as seen when “consuls from every Central and South American country in Houston” tried to change Post Oak Boulevard, the principal thoroughfare of the Galleria, to Avenida de las Américas.7 A compromise led instead to the christening of the new street in front of the George R. Brown Convention Center the Avenida de las Américas in 1992. The same sentiment is also found in the multipurpose Pan-American Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a structure that many have come to consider an important regional multipurpose venue. This building serves large events and is the home of the self-identified “Panamaniacs,” who cheer on the local team when the building is not hosting rock groups and national conventions. In nearby El Paso, Texas, driving the Highway of the Americas, the ring road that marks the city’s outer edges, is one of the city’s defining experiences. The road leads to the International Bridge of the Americas, which leads to the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Moving westward, the Shops at Las Americas in San Diego, California, are advertised as “straddling the San Diego–Tijuana border.” This complex was built to overlook the actual border zone. Other examples include institutions and cultural projects like the Museo de las Americas (Denver), Cine Las Américas (Austin), Amigos de las Américas (Houston), Las Américas Museum of Art (St. Augustine), Centro Cultural de las Americas (Tucson), Miami Dade InterAmerican Campus, the Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade (Laredo), and Galería

Las Américas (Santa Monica). The journal AULA: Arquitecture and Urbanism in Las Américas, founded in 1998 by Robert A. González and Rafael Longoria, also falls under this category. As many of these institutions indicate, when expressed in the United States, the term “Las Américas” has presented a distinct hemispheric view seen through a U.S. Latino lens. Latinos continue to position themselves as both embodiments of hemisphericism and liaisons of the Americas, casting an associative net across the Western Hemisphere. Images of Columbus, Bolívar, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas continue to dominate new hemispherically themed projects. Making sense of these references today remains a complicated task, particularly in the case of Bolívar and his strong connection to the Pan-American concept. Because Pan-Americanism, as defined in this book, has come to mean the promise of a unified Western Hemisphere, the U.S.-initiated movement has served as this study’s point of departure. Bolívar’s call for unification was in reaction to U.S. imperialism; it was never a call to absorb the Other, even if the United States was invited to his congress. Bolívar asserted his vision of America knowing that his antiU.S. sentiment was reciprocated by the United States. As Castro-Klarén states, “The discursive genealogies of both . . . were born out of a shared desire for isolating sovereignties. Bolívar also shared with people like [James] Monroe and John Quincy Adams the perception of irreconcilable differences between the English, Protestant North America, and the ‘Latin’ Catholic South America.”8 In 1891, José Martí echoed the same sentiment with his landmark text Nuestra América (Our America). Conversely, U.S. Pan-Americanism projected a concerted effort to find commonality and promote exchange in the Americas, however superficial this may have been at the outset. The concept had significantly evolved by the time HemisFair ’68 officials proposed a

model of the Western Hemisphere without boundaries to illustrate what was described as the “same aspect in present time with no language barriers and easy communication, from Texas to the tip of South America.”9 A pessimistic view of Pan-America’s history would suggest that the concept has been rife with contradictions from its inception, but institutions working to “unify” the Americas, such as the Organization of American States and the Pan-American Health Organization, shed a positive light on this movement’s legacy. Certainly, built explorations that claimed to represent the American nations fell prey to stereotypes and biases time and time again. Like the declarative and much-contested phrase “All men are created equal,” however, the call for a U.S. Pan-Americanism of unity projected an intercontinental contract with which the United States will eventually have to reconcile. The aim of this book has been to examine the extent to which the contradictions present at the birth and deployment of calls for Pan-American unity were negotiated in built form. This negotiation began to occur with the restructuring of the Organization of American States in 1948 and when Latinos revived the Pan-American concept during the civil rights movement. The built environment began to reflect an emerging contemporary understanding of Pan-American unity with the Modern movement in architecture and when the two expositions were planned in southern cities in the 1960s. Recent statistics project that U.S. Latinos will make up a third of the U.S. population by 2050. Taking the hemispheric subject who was projected with HemisFair ’68 into account, and specifically the model that extended from Texas to the tip of South America, what model should one expect to see in 2050? The answer to this question should shed light on our continued interest in building American institutions, landmarks, public spaces, and, most important, walls.

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NOTES Preface 1. The bridge is also known as the Convent Street Bridge, Laredo International Bridge, Bridge Number One, Old Bridge, Laredo–Nuevo Laredo Bridge 1, Puente Nuevo Laredo, Puente Laredo 1, and Puente Viejo. TxDOT Transportation Planning, Border Crossings, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_to_the _Americas_International_Bridge. 2. The first George Washington’s Birthday celebration was held in 1870. A grand meeting was even planned between presidents Porfirio Díaz and Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, but this never materialized. 3. Pan-American sentiments have emerged from lived existences, a state of in-betweenness that Gloria Anzaldúa most notably and intimately elaborated in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). In this book, Anzaldúa does not claim to be a Pan-American per se, but she identifies her own reality as one that is at once tied to the land and devoid of nationalist categories. Her cosmography distinctly reflects the Americas. She describes her almost spiritual connection to territory as stemming from a new mestiza consciousness that resonates with José Vasconcelos’ La raza cósmica. Translated as “the cosmic race,” this theory posits that mestizos contain the blood of the “red, white, black, and yellow cultures,” and that they transcend territorial specificity. Anzaldúa’s America evolved from her own site-specific existence—she was also a product of the borderlands and, coincidentally, a graduate of Pan-American University in Edinburg, Texas. Anzaldúa extends the notion of “pan” to the same universal associations found in Vasconcelos’ La raza cósmica, which she uses as a launching point for her discussion in the chapter “La conciencia de la mestiza; Towards a New Consciousness,” where she states: “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover.” Her affirmation that this “pan” activity is a creative endeavor is captured when she writes: “I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious malederived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet, I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (Anzaldúa, 102–103). 4. I first explored Jarvis’ renaming of the streets as part of a study that examined the parade routes of the GWB celebration and its impact on the streets of Laredo. The presentation was

ironic. We had been told that my grandmother was Jarvis’ illegitimate granddaughter, and I presented this work at the Bastards of Imperialism Conference at Stanford University in April 1998. 5. One may wonder how the Mexican American mestizo fits into this ethnic equation. As I remember it, we cynically thought of the parade as a street party that brought the private and public school kids together: the former represented the colonists while the latter were typically recruited to portray the Indians. 6. John Barrett, director-general of the Pan-American Union (1907–1910, 1910–1920), founded the Pan-American Society in 1912, and this led to the various societies and high-school PanAmerican Clubs later formed throughout the nation. 7. Frantz, “Pan American Round Table,” 34–35. See also Marchbanks, The Pan American Round Table. 8. “U.S. American” is used here to refer to people living or residing in the United States, and is a reciprocal term that stands in contrast to the equally general and contested “Latin American.” Its use is meant to draw attention to the continuous use of “American” across the Western Hemisphere, in one form or another. 9. In the magazine, the concept of Western living was framed with this reconceptualized domestic icon at its core, and I considered how its emblematic position as a Pan-American heritage icon was directly linked to the architect Cliff May. May was often represented as the all-American frontier builder, and he never revealed his own Latino roots.

Introduction 1. The Pan-American Union was initially established as the Commercial Bureau of American Republics, but the name was later changed. 2. When the fair reopened for its second season, on May 11, 1940, Argentina abandoned its pavilion, and it was then used as the “Inter-America House.” Rowe spoke at its inauguration, mentioning the increasing need to consider American unity in a wartorn world. 3. This included the independent structures of Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. The other nations were featured in the Hall of Nations or in the Pan-American Wing. Bulletin of the Pan-American Union (July 1939): 387–412. 4. New York Times, May 31, 1938, 22.

5. In Antonello Gerbi’s Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, the author discusses notions of inferiority associated with the perceived tropical lands and the “animal species of America.” Some of these theories are also expressed in the chapter, “The Tropicalization of the White Man.” 6. This includes the Monroe Palace in Rio de Janeiro, the name given to the reassembled Brazilian pavilion originally constructed for the St. Louis exposition of 1904. Other sites worthy of further investigation include the Inter-American University in San Germán, Puerto Rico (1912); the Pan-American University in Panama (1917; proposed but never built); the Pan-American Hotel in Guatemala City, Guatemala (1942); the Parque de las Américas in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico (1942–1946); the Universidad Pan­ americana in Guadalajara, Mexico (1967); and the Pan-American Village in Havana, Cuba (1991). 7. Whitaker, Western Hemisphere Idea, 1–2. 8. Bolívar died in 1830. Three more congresses were organized, including two in Peru (1847, 1864–1865) and one in Chile (1856). 9. See Samuel Guy Inman’s Inter-American Conferences, 1824– 1954: History and Problems. 10. This conference was organized by Secretary of State James G. Blaine. President Cleveland had invited participants in 1888. Eighteen countries were represented at the 1889–1890 conference, sponsored by the International Union of American Republics, which in turn created the Commercial Bureau of American Republics. The conferences that followed were held in numerous Latin American cities. See Table I.1 for the complete list. 11. El Heraldo de Brownsville, June 22, 1939, 3. (This was the Spanish-language version of the Brownsville Herald.) 12. As historian Sebastiaan Faber has pointed out, “It is useful to distinguish between forms of official, state-sponsored PanAmericanism and others that are much more spontaneous and informal” (“Learning from the Latins,” 260). 13. See Ron T. Robin’s Enclaves of America (1992) and Jane C. Loeffler’s The Architecture of Diplomacy (1998). 14. “Actress Mona Maris Given Pan-American Citizen Award,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1941, 13. 15. Compare Said’s Orientalism (1978) with the theories of resistance he later explored in Culture and Imperialism (1993). 16. See Belnap and Fernández’ José Martí’s “Our America” (1998) and Joseph, Legrand, and Salvatore’s Close Encounters of Empire (1998). 17. Salvatore, “The Enterprise of Knowledge.” 18. Salvatore, “Imperial Mechanics.” 19. Castro-Klarén, “Framing Pan-Americanism,” 47. 20. Joseph Lockey, G. Pope Atkins, and other scholars are in agreement that “Pan-Americanism” was introduced as a term by the United States in direct relation to the First International Conference of the American States, which took place in Wash-

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ington, D.C., in 1889–1890. It began to appear in the popular press in the 1880s. 21. Castro-Klarén, “Framing Pan-Americanism,” 30–32. 22. Ibid., 31–32. 23. Although they did not share the same fame, the writers, journalists, and poets who sustained this latinidad were near contemporaries of Bolívar. Many were Latinos of Mexican descent, but some were dislocated Cuban and Mexican exiles living in the cosmopolitan centers of Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York. It is no surprise that the majority of the Pan-American projects examined in this book are found in these cities. It is also no surprise that in the city where Pan-American architecture first emerges, New Orleans, we also find the United States’ first Spanish-language newspaper, El Misisipí, in 1808. 24. New York Times, September 18, 1927, B1. 25. This museum shares its name with the Museo de América in Madrid (1941), which holds artistic, archaeological, and ethnographic collections, and also excludes the United States. 26. See Lee, with Cohen and Morales, A Pan-American Life (2004). 27. See Livingstone, America’s Backyard (2009). 28. The Pan-American Sports Organization was formed in 1932. 29. The original list excluded Belize, Canada, French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname, and from the Caribbean, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. When the Commercial Bureau of American Republics was first formed, it comprised eighteen republics, preceding Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Panama joining the organization. 30. See Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum and Antoni Gaudí’s proposed but unbuilt New York skyscraper, which was designed to represent the world, with numerous floors representing the continents. 31. The hemispheric theme appears in another military enterprise of the same period, the U.S. Army Caribbean Training Center, which was also referred to as the School of the Americas. This training center, founded in Panama in 1946–1949, was moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1963 amid much controversy.

Chapter One 1. Although early visitors saw no more than “a spectacle of mud . . . devoid of promised lush, tropical flora,” this swampy wilderness was on its way to becoming a rich tapestry of tree-lined promenades and paths, shaded by live oaks draped in Spanish moss (Friends of the Cabildo, New Orleans Architecture, 43). 2. Hammond, “The Cotton Industry,” 3.

3. Ragan, Transactions of the American Horticultural Society, 265. 4. Salvatore, “Imperial Mechanics,” 664. 5. One newspaper compared New Orleans’ heaviest day of attendance during Mardi Gras, at 36,000 visitors, with Pennsylvania Day at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, which attracted some 274,000 visitors. “The New Orleans Exhibition,” 99. 6. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 102. 7. Huber, New Orleans, 240. Supervising Architect, G. M. Torgerson (1840–1902), a Swedish immigrant from Mississippi, won the architectural competition to design the Main Building. The press panned his shabby wooden structures for their poor stylistic composition, one critic lambasting the Main Building’s mock towers and “gingerbread attempts to make an Italian Renaissance out of notched and beaded siding and galvanized iron” (“The World’s Cotton Exposition at New Orleans,” 118). Torgerson later redeemed himself with some structures he designed in Oxford, Mississippi. According to Thomas S. Hines, Torgerson designed a number of residences of note, including some that featured the Carpenter Gothic style. Hines, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past, 89. 8. At the Exposition Universelle of 1867, the elliptically shaped main building spatially ordered the narrative for the user by presenting the categories in sequential form. The palace represented the world, and each nation was invited to exhibit itself in its own slice of the pie. If one traveled inward, from the perimeter of the building to the central garden courtyard, one would experience a single nation’s material progress, from its raw materials to its fine arts. If one circled around the elliptical ring, one could compare the products of all the participating nations in any given category. 9. See Fernández, “In the Image of the Other,” and TenorioTrillo, Mexico at the World’s Fair (1996). 10. “The New Orleans Exhibition,” 99. 11. The Logical Point was part of the Great Markets of America series, published by the Publicity Committee of the World’s Panama Exposition, 50. Following the Battle of New Orleans of 1815, the city was considered the great commercial center of the South, and numerous publications were produced to promote it, including: New Orleans: Chief Commercial City of the South (1834); Guide to the West Indies, Madeira, Mexico, New Orleans and Northern South America (1846); and Pen Illustrations of New Orleans, 1881–82: Trade, Commerce, Manufacture (1882). 12. Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fair, 38–40. 13. New York Herald, November 19, 1884. 14. Smalley, “New Orleans Exposition,” 3–4. 15. New York Herald, November 19, 1884. 16. The previous expositions took place in New York (1853), Philadelphia (1876), Atlanta (1881), Boston (1883), Louisville (1883), and New York (1883).

17. Belize (British Honduras) and Jamaica had also accepted the exposition president’s formal invitation to participate (Smalley, “New Orleans Exposition,” 3–14). Independent companies informally represented Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Venezuela (Buck, North, Central and South American Exposition, 6). The square footage below reflects the space in the Main Building actually occupied either by the governments or private exhibitors of each country: Mexico (41,852 sq. ft.), Honduras (2,184 sq. ft.), Guatemala (1,440 sq. ft.), Costa Rica (627 sq. ft.), Venezuela (576 sq. ft.), and El Salvador (288 sq. ft.). 18. Nixon, “World Exposition at New Orleans,” 312–313. 19. Smalley, “New Orleans Exposition,” 4. 20. Yeager, “Porfirian Commercial Propaganda,” 239. 21. New York Herald, November 19, 1884. Congress was also considering a Nicaraguan canal that would open trade routes between southern ports and Asia. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 91. 22. In the Art Exhibition Building, the Mexican school of painting was featured with the works of José Obregón, Santiago Rebull, Gonzalo Carrasco, and José María Velasco. TenorioTrillo, Mexico at the World’s Fair, 41. 23. Kendall, History of New Orleans, 466. 24. The New York Times followed this development with articles titled “Buying Exposition Building” (July 14, 1885, 1); “The American Exposition: Active Steps in Progress to Make the Exhibition a Success” (July 22, 1885, 2); and “New-Orleans’s New Exposition” (July 27, 1885, 1). 25. A fair held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1882 had referenced the South American continent with its name, Exposición Continental Sud-Americana, and a Boston exposition the following year referenced “The American Exposition” to designate the United States. 26. One month before the opening of the second exposition on October 21, 1885, the New York Times announced that a mass meeting was held at the Grand Opera House to present the report made by the new company. The Asian, European and Latin American countries set to participate were mentioned. The 33 acres of the Main Building were also reported as being almost completely filled. 27. New York Times, November 11, 1885, 2. 28. Daily Picayune, November 12, 1885. 29. The original drawing of the fairgrounds, published in a guide, was altered to indicate the final placement of the two Mexican structures. 30. Before the exposition closed on March 31, 1886, a report was sent to Congress stating that the “policy” propagated by the fair’s organizers was beginning to make a difference, or at least was being reinforced by other initiatives. The report asked that the U.S. president “invite the co-operation of the Governments of American nations in securing the establishment of free commer-

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cial intercourse among those nations, and an American customs union” (McCreary, “American Customs Union,” 50). 31. Buck, North, Central and South American Exposition, 4. 32. Ibid., 5–6. 33. At the Exposición Continental Sud-Americana of 1882, the prominent European presence was evident in the fairground’s configuration, which associated European countries, by virtue of their proximity, with highly advanced machinery and industrial exhibits. 34. “Map of North, Central and South America, Showing Lines of Communication with New Orleans, La., U.S.A., Prepared for the North, Central and South American Exposition,” BL, University of California, Berkeley. 35. In 1898, a “floating exposition” took place when a group of U.S. manufacturers traveled from New York to Central and South America under the general management of the tourist agent Armand de Potter. Pocket Tourist Guide and Pre-announcement of De Potter’s Tours of 1897 (New York: De Potter’s Tourist Office, 1897), UWA. 36. Buck, North, Central and South American Exposition, 8. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 12. 39. Buck, North, Central and South American Exposition, 6–7. 40. To remedy the situation, a million circulars were reportedly published and placed in every Pullman Car to advertise the exposition. The circular’s claims, however, bordered on false advertising: “The great Exposition now open in New Orleans has little in common with the Cotton Centennial Exposition of last year, except that it is held in the same buildings and on the same grounds. . . . For the first time in the history of the New World the representative men from Nova Scotia to Chili [sic] are coming together” (Daily Picayune, February 25, 1886). 41. Kendall, History of New Orleans, 466. 42. Ibid., 467. The two pertinent New York Times articles were published May 1, 1886, 1, and May 18, 1886, 4. The Government Building was purchased by a dealer as second-hand building material for $4,100. The Main Building was sold for $9,050. 43. Kendall, History of New Orleans, 467. 44. Costa Rica prepared for its first national exposition in 1886. The New York Times announced that “Peru Will Show Her Minerals” in a Minerals Exposition, inaugurated in Lima on June 1, 1887. Two more national expositions followed Peru’s: Ecuador’s exposition in 1891 and Honduras’ exposition in 1897. In comparison, between 1883 and 1894, the United States held the following expositions: Boston (1883–1884), Buffalo (1889 and 1901), Chicago (1893, 1897, 1901), New York City (1829, 1853–1854, 1893– 1894), Philadelphia (1876, 1899), and St. Louis (1894). 45. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 92. The organizers of future expositions also encouraged this, as they, too, sought Latin Amer-

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ican participation. U.S. General Isaac W. Avery, one of three special commissioners of Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition, had traveled to South America to seek commitment from Chile and Argentina. New York Times, March 15, 1895. 46. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 88–90. 47. Daily Picayune, November 11, 1885. 48. Buck, North, Central and South American Exposition, 8. 49. From Stokes, Arguments for the City of New York, 2. The arguments were read on October 7, 1889, when the Committee for the International Exposition of 1892 met. 50. Alexander D. Anderson was one of Washington’s strongest proponents. See the following two documents by Anderson: Arguments before the quadri-centennial committee . . ., published in 1890, and Greater Washington. 51. See Van Aken’s Pan-Hispanicism. 52. In 1881, Helper published The Three Americas Railway, a volume of essays and poems that were responses to a competition he organized calling for visionary arguments to help support his project. Helper’s enthusiasm was eventually deflated, and he grew suspicious and territorial when Congress and others began promoting the railway. Some of his later controversial publications, which earned him the title of abolitionist-racist, also cast a shadow on his motives. He stuck stubbornly to his crusade until his death by suicide in 1909. Caruso, “Pan-American Railway,” 608. Some accounts claim that the Three Americas Railway was conceived in the 1860s, and by 1890 a “ground breaking” was reported for a Pan-American Railway in Corpus Christi, Texas, but Helper is not mentioned. The next year, a more extensive system was proposed from Victoria, Texas, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 53. Badger, Great American Fair, 44–45. Zaremba served as a delegate for Chicago’s Sixth Annual Inter-State and International Commercial Convention in 1878. In 1882, he visited the Cooper Institution in New York to propose a quadricentennial in Mexico City. His work as a special agent of the Mexican government resulted in three publications: Stone Implements of the Southern Indians (1880), The Merchants’ and Travelers’ Guide to Mexico (1883), and List of Collection of Aztec Hieroglyphics (1899). Zaremba promoted the fair in Washington, D.C., in 1884, and Walton claims he promoted it in 1886 at an American Historical Society meeting. The society’s meeting notes indicate that General James Grant Wilson proposed a Columbus monument at the meeting. Papers of the American Historical Association, 15–19 (Walton, Art and Architecture, 10). In the 1930s, the Polish-American labor union newspaper, Dodatek na Niedziele, published in Chicago, presented a retrospective article on Zaremba criticizing the fair’s organizers for not inviting him to the exposition’s inaugural events (Polish-American Genealogical Society), May 13, 1930. 54. Chicago Tribune, November 25, 1885, 6. 55. Badger, Great American Fair, 12.

56. Chicago Tribune, November 25, 1885. 57. New York Herald, November 19, 1884. The Inter-American celebration was scheduled to take place between May 1 and October 31, 1892. The bill requested that a permanent exposition be established under the auspices of an Advisory Board of sixty-two members composed of forty-six members representing “States and Territories” and sixteen members representing “independent nations of the American continent.” The latter included Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. 58. In this early plan, the Caribbean nations were not included, and the original document mentions fifteen American republics, with Brazil and Canada being mentioned separately. 59. New York Times, November 19, 1884. A resolution was introduced for the appointment of a joint congressional committee to consider the advisability of holding such a dual fair. The reclamation of the Potomac flats had begun in 1882, and two years later, the mud flats from the Washington Monument to the presentday Potomac shoreline were reclaimed to form what is presently known as East and West Potomac Parks. A map dated May 17, 1894, indicates that the exposition pathways were part of a landscaping scheme that was later presented to the Washington Board of Trade. The sections where five buildings and a statue were to be located correspond to this system of pathways and lakes. In 1851, Andrew Jackson Downing landscaped an adjacent site that faced the White House, but his work did not reach as far as the reclaimed flats because they did not exist at the time of his design. 60. The lithograph was printed by A. Hoen & Co., Baltimore. Lithograph and collotype, 23 5/8 × 34 5/8 in. (60 × 87.9 cm). Library of Congress. John W. Reps points out that this lithograph is also useful because it shows the development of the Capitol grounds. Reps, Washington in View, 224. 61. New York Times, December 9, 1886, 1. 62. Anglin, “United States Opposition,” 2. 63. A letter from Anderson, included in the bill, mentioned that this museum and the “Important American Inventions” building were not part of the exposition project, and were only “thrown in as a suggestion” (Anderson in “Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas,” June 16, 1888). Interestingly, The “Three Americas Museum” building was also referred to as a “Continental Museum.” This building precedes the DAR’s Memorial Continental Hall, but the DAR’s later use of the word “Continental” referenced the United States, as had the earlier reference to the Continental Army. 64. New York Times, December 9, 1886, 4. 65. Belmont, “Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas,” 15. 66. New York Times, June 18, 1888, 4.

67. The American Architect and Building News 25, no. 702 (June 8, 1889): 265, reported on the proposed exposition but mainly considered the scheme with regard to the development of Potomac Park. 68. Toelken, “New Awareness,” 247. 69. Powell, quoted in “Three Americas Permanent Exhibition,” 303–305. 70. William Earl Dodge Stokes, who owned real estate around Central Park, presented this idea on January 11, 1890. 71. New York Times, October 24, 1889, 2. 72. Wilson, paper presented in Papers, 18. 73. Knudson, “National Botanical Gardens,” January 1890. 74. With its global, regional, national, and local references, Knudson’s proposal bears a striking resemblance to Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, Scotland, which it preceded, as Geddes did not purchase and refurbish his building until 1892. The Outlook Tower was meant to be experienced from the top down. Upon entering, one is guided to the top floor, where a camera obscura was used to project a virtual tour of the city, and where one could enjoy a panoramic view of Edinburgh. As one descends, one experiences the museum’s exhibitions in descending order: Edinburgh, Scotland, Language, and Europe. Finally, on the ground floor, the exhibit focuses on the World. Similarly, Knudson reversed the telescoping effect with ties to the city and Central Park at the ground level, the colonies and the tropics in the middle, North America’s natural wonder above that, and the globe at the top. 75. Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1889. 76. The city guaranteed $5,000,000, but New Yorkers were outraged over the park’s inclusion in the plans. Scientific American, January 4, 1890, vol. 62, 8. 77. An article, which referred to “the protest against perverting the upper part of Central Park,” appeared in Harper’s Weekly on October 5, 1889 (vol. 33, no. 1711). 78. Scientific American, January 18, 1890, vol. 62, 38–39. 79. Ibid. 80. See Badger’s Great American Fair for details about the debate. For an account of the three ballot counts, see the New York Times, February 25, 1890. 81. New York Times, February 26, 1890, 1. 82. Jay, “Taller Than Eiffel’s Tower,” 146. 83. New York Times, March 6, 1890. 84. Chicago Tribune, March 9, 1890. 85. It was also noted that an anonymous scheme by a “Florida Man” also proposed a pyramid with a 1,200-foot-square base, 1,200 feet high, constructed of steel, glass, and iron (Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1890). 86. Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1890. 87. Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1890. For more on David

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Proctor and the Columbian Tower Company, see Jay, “Taller Than Eiffel’s Tower.” 88. This included the exterior structure of Atocha Station, Estación de Mediodía (or Ferroviaria). Scientific American, October 25, 1890, vol. 63, no. 17, 260. De Palacio later built the suspended bridge in Portugalete, Bilbao, in 1893. 89. Scientific American, October 25, 1890, vol. 63, no. 17, 260. 90. This occurred on January 9, 1891. The Spanish government organized and managed the whole event, which was paid for by the public treasury. There is also mention of another quadricentennial in Genoa, Italy, the Exposizione Italo-Americana, that was going to take place in 1892. 91. This neoclassical structure was built by Francisco Jareño y Alarcón and completed after the exposition by Antonio Ruiz de Salces in 1896. This building presently houses the National Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Archaeology Museum. Jareño y Alarcón died the year of the inauguration. In the Spanish literature, this exposition is commonly referred to as the Exposición del IV Centenario del Descubrimiento de América. The building was especially identified with Queen Isabella II of Spain, who initiated the project and laid the building’s cornerstone in 1866. New York Times, July 7, 1892. The event was planned for September 12–December 31. The celebration also extended to the adjacent grounds and buildings of the Parque de Madrid. 92. New York Times, August 16, 1887. 93. New York Times, March 23, 1888. 94. Warner, “Columbus in Madrid,” 138. 95. See Ferree, “Historical American Exhibition,” 487. 96. The Nation, December 24, 1891. For an overview of the exhibits, see Curtis’ Report of Wm. E. Curtis. Other reports on the Madrid exposition include Stephen Bleecker Luce’s History of the Participation of the United States in the Columbian Historical Exposition at Madrid and Charles Hercules Read’s Report on the Historical Exhibition at Madrid on the Occasion of the Fourth Centenary of Columbus in 1892. Two catalogs were published in Madrid that provide visual material on the exposition: Bosquejo de la Exposición Histórico-Europea en el día de su apertura and Plano de la Exposición Histórico-Americana de Madrid. There was also a catalog published in Madrid in 1891 illustrating the objects presented by Spain at the exposition. Other sources include Spain, Junta Directiva, Conmemoración del cuarto centenario del descubrimiento de América; Fayolle, Coup d’oeil sur l’Exposition rétrospective de Madrid; and United States Commission to the Madrid Exposition’s Report of the United States Commission to the Columbian Historical Exposition at Madrid, 1892–93 with special papers. 97. New York Tribune, November 25, 1892. This exhibit presented objects from Spain’s palaces, museums, libraries, churches, monasteries, armories, and art galleries. It also contained collec-

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tions from France and the Vatican. The United States was present through the wealth of its extensive collections, which came from the Smithsonian and National Museums in Washington, D.C., the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and the Harvard University Peabody Museum and the Hemenway Collection of Boston. See Fewkes, Catalogue of the Hemenway Collection in the Historico-American Exposition of Madrid (Warner, “Columbus in Madrid,” 138). Some visitors criticized the emphasis on the institutions, which could have been arranged in a “geographical plan” (Brinton, Report Upon the Collections, 23). 98. The Nation, November 10, 1892. This article was signed D. D. 99. Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” 107–108. 100. The Times, London, November 12, 1892. 101. The list of nations included Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Germany, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Sweden, United States, and Uruguay. The other nations present probably included Argentina, Bolivia, and Denmark. 102. New York Tribune, November 25, 1892. 103. At the time of the New Orleans exposition, Curtis had organized an expedition to South America that was authorized by President Chester A. Arthur to “ascertain and report upon the best modes of securing more intimate international and commercial relations between the United States and the several countries of Central and South America” (Fifer, United States Perceptions, 137–138). He later published his findings in two important books, The Capitals of Spanish America (1888) and Trade and Transportation between the United States and Spanish America (1889). The second book coincided with his post as executive officer for the First International Conference of the American Republics in 1889–1890, the first assembly to bring all the Americas together in Washington, D.C. During his term as director-general of the International Bureau of American Republics, he published the first Hand Book of the American Republics (as the monthly Bulletin was originally known). 104. New York Tribune, November 25, 1892. 105. It was John Boyd Thatcher who protested a month later at a World’s Columbian Commissioners meeting. New York Times, November 24, 1890, 1. 106. New York Times, April 29, 1894, 17. 107. Curtis, “United States to Dominate the Western Hemisphere.” 108. New York Times, May 24, 1890, 3. In another article, published in the Chicago Tribune, August 15, 1890, it is noted that Olmsted recommended six separate fairground areas but that Jackson Park was chosen. 109. Bolotin and Laing, World’s Columbian Exposition, 122– 125. Colombia built a 45-foot-by-45-foot building. In addition to

these seven Latin American countries and Canada, fifteen other countries participated, including: Australia, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, New South Wales, Russia, Sandwich Islands, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. 110. Chicago Daily Tribune, July 28, 1891, 5. 111. New York Times, July 14, 1892, 6. 112. See Tenorio-Trillo’s account in Mexico at the World’s Fairs of how President Porfirio Díaz insisted on fair and accurate depictions of Mexicans at the world’s fairs. 113. G. Davis, World’s Columbian Exposition, 18. 114. Badger, Great American Fair, 43. 115. Hines, Burnham of Chicago, 95–96. 116. New York Times, October 10, 1893, 4. 117. Curtis continued to work as a journalist in Washington, D.C., until his death in 1911. 118. Kimball was the architect of the Trinity and United States Realty Buildings; the City Investing Building; the Manhattan Life Building; the Trust Company of America’s structure; the Empire Building; and the Casino, Garrick, and Fifth Avenue Theatres. 119. All consuls from the Latin American countries would have offices in this building, and several floors would be dedicated to a permanent exhibition of their products. The building was estimated to cost $5,000,000. New York Times, July 16, 1913, 7. 120. Located on busy Broadway, the tower was surmounted by a female figure. New York Times, January 1, 1914, 17. The cost eventually more than doubled, making it an almost impossible venture. 121. It was decided early on to place statues of José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar at either end of the Sixth Avenue. Reynolds, “Equestrian Monument,” 120–122. Sally James Farnham, the sculptor of the Churrigueresque bronze friezes in the Pan-American Union’s board room, produced the statue of Bolívar. The dean of Cornell University’s School of Architecture, Gilmore D. Clarke, designed the formal terminus at the southern end of Sixth Avenue. 122. American Journal of Progress (1895), 30–31. 123. Ibid. 124. Irwin, The New Niagara, 50. William Irwin explores Niagara Falls’ cultural importance as an icon of progress and technology in The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology, and the Landscape of Niagara Falls, 1776–1917. He also explores the cultural uses of Niagara as a national symbol in the United States, and he explains how the Pan-American Exposition was dominated by the extravagant imagery of the “New Niagara.” The spirit of these times was exemplified in the title given to the monthly that was published by Buffalo’s nineteenth-century industrialists, Greater Buffalo: A Monthly Publication Devoted to Promoting the Prosperity of the Power City of America. 125. Greater Buffalo 1, no. 1 (April 15, 1897), 11.

126. Greater Buffalo 1, no. 4 (July 20, 1897), 3. 127. Ibid. Joann Marie Thompson discusses criticism of the Chicago fair that was addressed by the architects of the Buffalo exposition. Thompson, “Art and Architecture,” 8–9. 128. Cayuga Island’s natural beauty motivated the designers to take a nonclassical approach and design a recreational and informal fairground for the “common-people.” It was to be a “paradise rather than an artist’s classical dreamland” (Greater Buffalo 1, no. 5 [1897], 1). This approach inspired a Pan-American athletic concourse called The Arena, which was surrounded by a Recreation Reserve and a natural 300-foot-wide avenue created with two existing “magnificent groves” (ibid.). The introduction of sports foreshadowed the creation of the Pan-American Sports Organization, founded in 1932. This eventually led to the Pan-American Games, which were initiated in 1951 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 129. Greater Buffalo 1, no. 4 (July 20, 1897), 5. 130. Ibid. 131. Greater Buffalo 1, no. 5 (1897). 132. Thompson, “Art and Architecture,” 274. 133. Ibid., 10. 134. New York Times, November 28, 1897, 2. 135. An architectural journal reported that a “considerable amount of interest [was] being taken in Canada over the coming [exposition]. . . . Canada’s exhibit will be an ‘eye opener’ to many. . . . Jealousy between the two countries is dying out and the Buffalo Exhibition will foster friendly feelings . . .” (The American Architect and Building News 65, no. 1230 [July 22, 1899]). 136. Greater Buffalo 1, no. 4 (July 20, 1897), 6. 137. Greater Buffalo 1, no. 5 (October 1897). After the visit, the party would leave the island by trolley car for Niagara Falls. The excursion included a visit to the Power House of the Niagara Electric Co. Letter from R. C. Hill, Secretary of the Pan-American Exposition (1899) sent to J. A. Porter, Secretary to the President, August 12, 1897. A presidential party embarked on the steam yacht Enquirer for a run down Niagara River, stopping at Cayuga Island. There was also mention that a statue of La Salle would be erected in this area. The detail about La Salle was mentioned in the American Journal of Progress (1895), 30–31. In Greater Buffalo 1, no. 10 (February 1898), it was announced that other official visitors included the president of the Hawaiian Republic, Sanford B. Dole. 138. Greater Buffalo 1, no. 10 (February 1898). 139. It was believed that if war broke out, “all commerce between the United States and South American countries would virtually be destroyed” (Greater Buffalo 1, no. 11 [March 1898], 2). 140. American Journal of Progress (1895), 31. The Congreso de Americanistas was also suspended until 1902, when it met in New York. 141. See Peterson, Diplomat of the Americas.

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142. At first, the team rejected a site called Rumsey Farm, which was located in Buffalo’s northern suburbs and included a portion of Delaware Park, in favor of The Front, a site located near downtown Buffalo and on the edge of Lake Erie. In the end, however, The Front was rejected because a summertime invasion of “Canadian,” or “sand,” flies made the waterfront site unbearable (Thompson, “Art and Architecture,” 276). 143. New York Times, May 15, 1899, 7. 144. Thompson, “Art and Architecture,” 46–47. 145. New York Times, January 6, 1901, 16. 146. Ibid., February 3, 1901, 23. 147. Ibid., April 21, 1901, 23. 148. Thompson, “Art and Architecture,” 31. 149. Ibid., 29. 150. White, “Aspects,” 87. 151. Historian Joann M. Thompson has pointed out that Carrère probably suggested the Spanish Renaissance because of his previous experience with the hotels he built in St. Augustine, Florida, for Henry Flagler. Thompson, “Art and Architecture,” 16. The interest in a Spanish-derived architectural form had been seen in the United States, especially in California, since the 1880s and 1890s, as well as at Stanford University in 1886. Also see Thompson, “Art and Architecture,” 40–41. The hotels were the Ponce de León Hotel of 1885–1887 and the Alcázar Hotel of 1886–1888. 152. White, “Aspects,” 88. 153. New York Times, April 21, 1901, 23. 154. White, “Aspects,” 89. 155. New York Times, April 28, 1901, 7. 156. Zueblin, Decade of Civic Development, 50. 157. Goldman, High Hopes, 8. 158. Ibid., 3–4. 159. The New York Times, February 3, 1901, 23, had reported, shortly before opening day, that the Pan-American Exposition would offer the best opportunity to examine commercial interchange, and that representative citizens of all the republics would attend the exposition.. 160. As Rydell notes, organizers had planned to present their “possessions” and “opportunities” with the incorporation of the Philippine Islands, and there was an interest in showcasing Alaska, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Hawaiian Islands (Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 139). In the end, Hawaii was showcased in the Midway, and Cuba and Puerto Rico were found in the State and Foreign Exhibitions area. 161. New York Times, May 2, 1901, 5. 162. The same type of marginalization was evident in the design of the so-called Pan-American flag. Professor Edward S. Holden of Columbia University, an authority on the symbolism of flags, interpreted the flag’s colors and patterns and stated that

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because “the independence of all the States of North and South America was founded on revolution against the rule of Europe . . . the colors red, white and blue have been adopted for the inclined bands” (“The Pan-American Flag,” in Gray, Art Hand-Book, 96). Here the fourth common American heritage theme of the American republics’ struggle for independence is seen, despite the blatant, dominant reference to the United States. 163. These countries were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guadaloupe, Guatemala, Haiti, Martinique, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Peru. 164. The Latin American countries that were indicated are Cuba, Ecuador, and Honduras. The nations that built pavilions, but are not shown on the map, include Chile, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. There is an indication that there was a pavilion near the Mexican pavilion that was called Guatemala Restaurant. The states were Kansas, New England States, New York, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The state pavilions that were built later were Alaska, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania. 165. Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fair, 85. Mexico’s Midway spectacle was widely featured in two additional publications: A Few Things One May Expect to See in the “Streets of Mexico” at the Pan-American Exposition and Mexico Old & New, A Colony from Mexico Transplanted upon the Banks of the Niagara: A Souvenir of the “Streets of Mexico” on the Midway (Grand Rapids, MI: James Bayne Co., 1901). Pamphlets found in BECA. 166. Fess, “Exposition Extravaganza,” 32. 167. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 147–148. 168. To report on the country’s representation at the fair and perhaps to secure the nation’s respectability, the Mexican delegation prepared a special publication called Modern Mexico. In it, Mexican journalist José de Olivares focused on the contents of the other Mexican pavilion. His description of the collection of five other Latin American pavilions, which he likened to “the petals of a variegated begonia,” is reminiscent of the Mexican Alhambra (De Olivares, “Mexico at the Pan-American Exposition,” 13). 169. Ibid., 128. 170. Thompson, “Art and Architecture,” 2. 171. White, “Aspects,” 86. 172. New York Times, April 21, 1901, 23. 173. White, “Aspects,” 86. 174. Fleming, Around the “Pan” with Uncle Hank, 55.

Chapter Two 1. Barrett, Pan American Union, 119. 2. Cited from Price, “Pan American Union,” 455. 3. Bulletin 5, no. 10 (1909), 76.

4. The contract between Kelsey and Cret and the International Bureau of American Republics (IBAR) was signed in June 1907. After that, six to seven months of revisions took place. The cornerstone was laid on May 11, 1908, and the inaugural celebration with the Peace Tree took place on April 26, 1910. 5. In 1886, at the time of New Orleans’ North, Central, and South American Exposition, U.S. Senator James B. McCreary of Kentucky had proposed a Customs Union for the purpose of formalizing inter-American trade policies. By 1890, Carlos Martínez Silva, Colombia’s delegate to the First International Conference of American States, proposed the idea of a Commercial Bureau of the American Republics (CBAR), and introduced the Congressional resolution that led to its creation that year. 6. Barrett, Pan American Union, 97. 7. “Presentation of Pan-American Gold Medal to Andrew Carnegie,” 727. 8. Barrett, Pan American Union, 91. The U.S. contribution was used at the outset to purchase a five-acre site, called Van Ness Park, from George Washington University. 9. Monthly Bulletin, 811. 10. Chee Kien Lai, “Tropical Tropes,” 4. 11. Barrett continued as the director-general until 1920. Leo S. Rowe was the next director-general (1920–1946). When the Pan-American Union (PAU) was transformed into the Organization of American States, its first secretary-general was Alberto Lleras Camargo (1948–1954), who later became president of Colombia. 12. Upon the completion of his term, Curtis worked with the Madrid exposition and then served as chief of the Latin American Department at the Chicago exposition. The six directors were William Eleroy Curtis (1890–1893), Clinton Furbish (1893–1897), Joseph P. Smith (1897–1898), Frederic Emory (1898–1899), William Woodville Rockhill (1899–1905), and William C. Fox (1905– 1907). The U.S. secretary of state served as the chairman ex officio of the governing board. The secretaries were James G. Blaine (1889–1892), William F. Wharton (1892, 1893), John W. Foster (1892–93), Walter Q. Gresham (1893–95), Edwin F. Uhl (1895), Richard Olney (1895–1897), John Sherman (1897–1898), Alvey A. Adee (1898), John Hay (1898–1905), Francis B. Loomis (1905), Elihu Root (1905–1909), Robert Bacon (1909), Philander C. Knox (1909–1913), and Wiliam Jennings Bryan (1913–1915). 13. Grossman, Civic Architecture, 226. 14. Anonymous letter to Felipe Pardo, March 30, 1907, CML. 15. Ibid. 16. The senators represented California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming. 17. Kelsey to Cret, April 8, 1907, PPCP.

18. There is mention in a letter dated May 16, 1907, of a Circular No. 2 that modified the original program, but this document is not located in the CMLA. 19. “Programme and Conditions,” 815. 20. Barrett, Pan American Union, 94. 21. Some reports say seventy-eight (mentioned in Architectural Record, November 1913), and Grossman claims there were sixty-five, which was also mentioned in a letter from Kelsey to Cret dated June 22, 1907, CML. 22. The architects who were invited were Carrère and Hastings; Eames and Young; Cass Gilbert; Hornblower and Marshall; Thomas R. Kimball; Peabody and Stearns; Whitfield and King; and Wood, Donn, and Deming. 23. The registrants represented fifteen states: New York (69), Pennsylvania (12), Washington, D.C. (12), Massachusetts (9), Maryland (8), Ohio (5), Illinois (4), Connecticut (2), California, (2), New Jersey (2), Georgia (1), Kentucky (1), Rhode Island (1), Washington State (1), and West Virginia (1). 24. Casey designed the Pan-American Union’s neighboring structure, the Daughter of the American Revolution’s Memorial Continental Hall (built 1904–1910). Pope would later design the addition to this structure in 1929, which is known as Constitution Hall. 25. Grossman, Civic Architecture, 32. 26. One of these buildings was known as Burn’s Cottage, and the other, the Van Ness Mansion, was designed by the Capitol’s architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Hale, “Romance of the New Buildings,” 711. 27. Grossman, Civic Architecture, 41. 28. Barrett, Pan American Union, 106. 29. Ibid., 99. 30. Price, “Pan American Union,” 386. 31. Barrett, Pan American Union, 99. 32. Ibid., 91. 33. Kelsey, Yucatecan Scenes and Sounds, 11. 34. In an early letter that Kelsey wrote to Cret in France, Kelsey stated, “I can manage everything until we get down to the actual contract drawings, for until that stage is reached it will always be possible to make any changes you desire. I shall defer to your good judgement after you return and feel that we have an opportunity to produce a more interesting building” (July 6, 1907). In later correspondences, Kelsey took a greater lead, as he begins to describe to Cret that he is “re-spacing” ornaments and experimenting with different motives. He even writes, “It is beginning to be really Latin” (July 7, 1909). Throughout their relationship, there is a lot of tension; in a few letters and correspondences, Kelsey repeatedly complains that Cret is not coming into the office regularly (February 3, 1908). PPCP. 35. Price, “Pan American Union,” 444.

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36. Ibid., 440. 37. Barrett, Pan American Union, 108–110. 38. Ibid., 110. 39. Ibid., 112. 40. Ibid. 41. This is reminiscent of the way the Pan-American flag was designed for Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition of 1901. The flag’s designer incorporated symbols common to various nations, combined to attain multinational resonance. By combining multiple sets of common elements, every country was sure to be represented somewhere in the overall design. 42. Price, “Pan American Union,” 390. 43. Near the time of the canal’s inauguration in 1914, William E. Pulliam, the receiver general of U.S. Customs in the Dominican Republic, began to promote the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, to be built in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 44. Herrera, “III. Evolution of Equality of State.” See also Corrales and Feinberg, “Regimes of Cooperation.” 45. Herrera, “III. Evolution of Equality of State.” See also Tulchin, “The United States and Latin America.” Tulchin states that “the nations of the hemisphere began to use the forum of the Pan American Union to curb the interventionist arrogance of the United States. Beginning at the hemispheric meeting in Havana in 1928, the Latin Americans hammered away on two issues: limiting intervention in the international affairs of other nations, and the adaptation of trade and investment for the greater benefit of the peoples of the hemisphere” (ibid., 5). 46. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint. 47. Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman, Tropicalizations, 1. 48. Kelsey, “Street Pagentry,” The Architectural Annual (Philadelphia, PA, 1900): 233–240. 49. Barrett, Pan American Union, 124. 50. Kelsey to Cret, November 19, 1915, PPCP. 51. The library, in turn, was directly located over the building’s basement, where the bureau’s mailroom also gathered and disseminated information. 52. Barrett, Pan American Union, 101–102. 53. Ibid. 54. Price, “Pan American Union,” 390. 55. In 1912, Kelsey was invited to design another Carnegiesponsored building for the Brotherhood of North American Indians. Kelsey hoped to address the pan-native theme with greater accuracy this time, and he acknowledged that the Pan-American Union design failed to accomplish this. He proposed a structure that was a mirror image of the Pan-American Union Building, proportionally exact, but in a Spanish Mission style that would have been iconographically inappropriate for the Native American population. He hoped to explore the pan-native theme throughout the building’s interior. The organization that would be repre-

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sented with this structure was reconfigured as the League of Nations of Pan-American Indians in 1935. Native Americans did not control the organization at the time of Kelsey’s involvement. In 1990, the First Intercontinental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas took place in Quito, Ecuador. 56. Washington Post, January 23, 1912, 3. 57. Ibid. 58. Price, “Pan American Union,” 390. This text appeared in Architectural Record. Price’s additions to Barrett’s original text are in italics. 59. Ibid., 455. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 121. 63. Ibid., 131. 64. Ibid. 65. Barrett, Pan American Union, 139. 66. Hale, “International Bureau,” 729. 67. In 1960, when the room was converted into a new Council Chamber, it was transformed into a wood-paneled space dominated by a large Organization of American States seal at the center of the room. This modern design contained individual microphones, booths and equipment for simultaneous translations, and a space for the media and visitors. Communications were now in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. This Council Chamber represents the evolution of the bureau. 68. Hale, “International Bureau,” 747. 69. Price, “Pan American Union,” 416–422. 70. Adjustments to the original design eventually eliminated the French and favored the Spanish; the Portuguese and English references were also kept to a minimum. The Spanish references occurred with multiple architectural citations: decorations from a fountain of the Salto del Agua from Mexico City; a balustrade design from the Cathedral of Chihuahua; grillwork from the Cathedral of Saragoza in Spain; ornamental designs from the Chapel of the Well at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City; a cornice from the Municipal Palace at Barcelona; and elaborately designed Plateresque doors. Price, “Pan-American Union.” 71. If he had indeed accepted, an interesting lineage would have been documented, given his association with Cret. Mora to Kahn, November 11, 1965, LIKC. 72. Fifty-eight entries were received for the competition (more than 400 applications were originally received). Second prize was awarded to Mexican architect José Luis Benlliure, and third prize was awarded to Uruguayan architect Adolfo F. Pozzi Guelfi. The entries came from the Western Hemisphere and represented the following countries: the United States (34), Mexico (7), Uruguay (5), Bolivia (2), Argentina (1), Brazil (1), Canada (1), Colombia (1), Peru (1), and El Salvador (1). There were four unidentified entries.

73. I use the term “Nuestra Pan-América” as an imaginary topos that may be seen ironically as an answer to Martí’s concerns about the United States and, more specifically, the organization’s early work. 74. A Pan-American monument was proposed at the First International Conference of American States in 1890: “Señor [Salvador de] Mendonça, delegate of Brazil to the Pan-American Congress, proposes that the delegates from Central and South America inaugurate a movement for the erection in the city of Washington, as a gift to the people of the United States, of a monument to commemorate the gathering of the first congress of all the nations on the Western hemisphere” (“A Pan-American Monument,” The Sun, March 17, 1890, 6). 75. In 1950, a proposed Sesquicentennial Freedom Fair would have introduced another structure. In 1960, Francisco Mujica, who had proposed a Pan-American skyscraper for New York City, also proposed a Pan-American monument for Washington (the year that Simón Bolívar Park was dedicated). In 1965, Philip Johnson, in collaboration with Charles Eames, designed a pavilion on Pershing Square for the Festival of the Cities of the New World. This exposition is discussed in Chapter 4. 76. The Daughters of the American Revolution disseminated Americanist propaganda from their Continental Hall adjacent to the Pan-American Union Building. 77. New York Times, November 16, 1919, 20. 78. Ibid. Similar goals extended to the formation of the Journal of the Inter-American Planning Society in 1967. 79. “Pan-American Committee,” New York Times, January 25, 1925, RE9. 80. Hemispheric enthusiasts proposed a Pan-American Union counterpart in Paris. Ramón López Lomba, the consul general of Uruguay, proposed an institution called the American House. The mission of this new organization would be to “spread the knowledge of American life, conditions, people, and opportunities throughout Europe” (New York Times, June 28, 1914, 2). The institution would also include a Pan-American museum and an American University. The twenty-one American republics would join forces in establishing this institution, along with Canada and the French and Dutch possessions in the hemisphere. New York Times, April 16, 1917, 12. Following the Panama Canal’s completion in 1914, Pan-American universities were planned in Miami and Panama City, and proposals to establish “hemispheric currency” also emerged. Linked to San Diego’s Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915–1917, an All-American $5 coin was proposed to help popularize the dollar in South American trade. An “InterAmerican” coin and bank had been proposed twenty-five years earlier at the First International Conference of American States. See E.  W. Kemmerer, “A Proposal for Pan-American Monetary Unit,” 1916. The San Diego coin would begin as a souvenir gold

piece produced in connection with the exposition’s opening, but it would later become a form of currency throughout the Western Hemisphere. The coin would depict male and female symbolic figures, a “forceful Inca head” (male) and a “refined Columbia head” (female). The design also included twenty-one stars. As with the European Union’s currency, the Pan-American plan was to reserve one side of the coin for the special designs of each country. New York Times, December 19, 1914, 17. 81. Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright (1993).

Chapter Three 1. In 1988, delegates from twenty-two Latin American countries, Spain, and Portugal had met in Caracas to start planning the quincentenary celebrations of Columbus’ voyage for 1992. Spain had initiated its planning in 1981, including a proposal for the Universal Exposition of Seville. Signs that Pan-America would not be featured surfaced when tensions arose after the United States asked to join the planning. The planners felt this would weaken the Hispanic-American alliance being formed, which included a permanent Ibero-American community after 1992. The Columbian quincentenary was regarded as having little to do with either the United States or, surprisingly, indigenous populations. The Venezuelan Council of Indian Nations protested, stating: “Our existence as the first inhabitants of the continent is denied. We reject the festive character that Spain and other governments want to give to these 500 years of domination of our people.” At the inauguration in Santo Domingo, protesters would also note how Columbus’ arrival led to the near extinction of Hispaniola’s indigenous population. Sganga, “American Quincentenary Plans,” 5. 2. Davis, Planet of Slums, 95. 3. Atkins, Latin America, 4. 4. Ibid., 89. 5. See Knight’s Americans in Santo Domingo (1928). 6. Kelsey, Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 10. Pulliam promoted his vision in a series of articles published throughout the Americas, and he made a case before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. In 1914, Rowe and the Dominican minister of foreign affairs, Francisco J. Peynado, organized a meeting to discuss the possibility of building a Columbus Memorial Lighthouse. The Canal’s completion also triggered numerous projects and expositions. See Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco. 7. Pulliam to Rowe, 1922, CML. 8. Pulliam to Sumner Welles, October 20, 1922, Correspondence 1922–1926, CML. 9. Pulliam to Rowe, January 19, 1922, Correspondence 1922– 1926, CML.

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10. Atkins, Latin America, 68. 11. As part of the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898, an agreement was signed between the United States and the Dominican Republic in 1905 providing for the appointment of a receiver of Dominican customs. On November 26, 1916, a military government of the republic was declared by the United States, and the collection of all customs and control of the entire country were taken over by U.S. Marines. Negotiations were begun in 1922 for the removal of U.S. forces, and a commissioner was appointed by the U.S. Department of State to work out a plan with prominent representatives of the Dominican people. Withdrawals were begun early in 1924, and with the inauguration of General Horacio Vásquez as president on July 12, the final evacuation of the U.S. occupation troops was effected. The customs receivership, which had been in existence under various conventions between the Dominican Republic and the United States since 1905, was finally withdrawn in 1941. Dominican Republic, A Bulletin of the Dominican Embassy, No. 32, February 24, 1947, 4, CML, 148. 12. This was a momentary opposition, however, as Columbus Day has been celebrated as a U.S. national holiday since 1934, while other nations recognized the day as the Day of Indigenous Resistance (Venezuela) and the Day of the Americas (Uruguay). 13. See Solomonson’s Chicago Tribune Tower Competition (2001) and Tigerman’s Chicago Tribune Tower competition (1980). 14. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, a landmark structure built on the eve of the lighthouse competition in 1929, would come to be seen as the epitome of another strain of Modern architecture. In 1932, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson categorized this form of Modern architecture, along with the Bauhaus and other Rationalist structures, as the International style at their Museum of Modern Art exhibition in New York City. This is noted to clarify the fact that Kelsey’s repeated mention of “internationalism” in the competition programs did not refer to Modern Rationalism, although his terminology conveyed the belief that universal tendencies in the built environment were emerging. 15. Santo Domingo contains numerous relics and sites that prompted its residents to give it this title, including the ceiba tree upon which Columbus moored his caravel. The city also boasts the first mint of America, the Royal Mint (1502–1509); the first college, Gorjón (1530); and the first cathedral of the Americas. 16. A number of preservation programs were initiated by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in 1972, activating the rhetoric of primacía. City officials remapped the old downtown zone as a series of “first” sites. El Plan del Gran Caribe para los Monumentos y los Sitios (CARIMOS) followed suit, as Eugenio Pérez Montás discusses it in De Patrimonio Cultural (1994). He also mentions that El Plan Cuna de América was initiated in 1987 as part of the revitalization projects for Santo Domingo’s Colonial Zone (8).

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17. See Irigoyen’s “Frank Lloyd Wright in Brazil,” Waldheim and Santos-Munné’s “Landscape as Monument,” and Roorda’s “Cult of the Airplane.” 18. Pulliam to Rowe, October 13, 1926, Correspondence 1922– 1926, CML. 19. Pulliam to Adams, October 25, 1926, Correspondence 1922–1926, CML. 20. Rowe to Cret, May 19, 1927, PPC. The architects that Cret recommended were Charles Butler, William Emerson, William A. Delano, Benjamin Wistar Morris, Arthur Meeks, Harvey W. Corbett, and Harold Van Buren Magonigle. 21. Del Monte y Tejada, Historia de Santo Domingo, 319. Pulliam described the monument’s physical form to specialists that he enlisted to help him realize the project, beginning with George Putnam, director of the United States Lighthouse Service. 22. Ibid., 318. The author’s recommended location for this lighthouse was “Cape Isabela on the island ‘Hispaniola,’ because there the first city in America was founded.” 23. Kelsey, Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 9. 24. One side of the argument believed that Columbus’ remains were exhumed from the Santo Domingo Cathedral on December 20, 1795, by Archbishop Portillo and Gabriel de Aristizábal and transferred to Havana. The other side claimed that Columbus’ remains had been exhumed in Santo Domingo in 1877 from an incorrectly marked tomb. St. Elmo to Rowe, December 4, 1928, CML, 148. 25. Pulliam to Adams, February 17, 1922, Correspondence 1922–26, CML. Pulliam used his position to gather support for the project from the archbishop of Santo Domingo; the Knights of Columbus organization in the United States; and Sumner Welles, the American commissioner in Santo Domingo. He wrote: “Santo Domingo has not enjoyed a good reputation in the past. The general idea prevailing in South America is that it is a backward country, devoted to internal disorders.” The letter had warned of Cuba’s possible opposition to the memorial, because of the claim that Havana’s cathedral had held Columbus’ remains for more than one hundred years, between 1796 and 1899. Pulliam’s only real concern was that Spain might be critical of the project or even oppose it, even though the Spanish consul had witnessed the unearthing of Columbus’ remains in Santo Domingo. Pulliam to Sumner Welles, October 20, 1922, Correspondence 1922–1926, CML. Ex-director John Barrett reentered the picture when he contacted Pulliam with a double lighthouse scheme. His idea was to install a second lighthouse, not in Spain, but in New York City, presumably reinforcing the North and South American theme. Barrett claimed to have formed a Christopher Columbus Memorial Association in 1916, which he had recently revived. He strongly urged Pulliam to let him help with its development, causing Pulliam to send Barrett’s letter to Ad-

ams with a hand-scribbled note stating: “The pot appears to be boiling” (Barrett to Pulliam, February 20, 1922, Correspondence 1922–1926, CML). 26. Adams to Pulliam, May 9, 1922; and Pulliam to Adams, July 1926, Correspondence 1922–1926, CML. 27. Kelsey, Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 13. 28. When the twenty-one ambassadors and ministers could not agree on who should be invited, the Pan-American Union decided on the two-stage open international competition format to avoid favoritism. Kelsey to Hood, February 4, 1928, Box 3, 1943– 1949, Lighthouse Correspondence, CML. 29. Pulliam to Adams, February 17, 1922, Correspondence 1922–1926, CML. 30. Cranford Citizen and Chronicle, March 26, 1925. 31. Kelsey, Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 14. 32. The original Permanent Committee was composed of Miguel Cruchaga Tocornal (Chile), Carlos Izaguirre (Honduras), and Ángel Morales (Dominican Republic). The committee’s composition changed several times over the course of the competition. WAC to Alejandro Padilla y Bell, Ambassador of Spain, (no date), Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 33. Kelsey to Andrés Pastoriza, Secretario de Estado de Fomento y Comunicaciones, Dominican Republic, December 6, 1927, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 34. Document “Statement by the Chairman of the Governing Board of the Pan American Union,” Hon. Frank B. Kellogg, (no date), Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 35. Kelsey, “Second and Most Important Bulletin,” December 1, 1928, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 36. Kelsey, “First Bulletin,” September 15, 1928, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. Kelsey prepared an earlier “First Bulletin” on September 12, 1928 (Correspondence 1927–1931, CML). 37. Ibid. 38. Hood to Kelsey, February 9, 1928, and December 18, 1928, Box 3, 1943–1949 Lighthouse Correspondence, CML. 39. Kelsey, “Second and Most Important Bulletin,” December 1, 1928, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 40. H. Van Buren Magonigle to Kelsey, September 5, 1928, Correspondence from Architectural Societies, 1928, CML. 41. Kelsey to the Editor, March 16, 1928, CML, 148. 42. Key publications that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century were Henry Drummond’s Tropical Africa (1888), Isaac Nelson Ford’s Tropical America (1893), and Alleyne Ireland’s Tropical Colonization (1899). One of the earliest texts to address building practices is M. D’Albaret’s Différens Projets Relatifs au Climat; et la maniére la plus convenable de bâtir dans les pays chauds, el plus particuliérement dans les Indes Occidentales (1776). A sporadic range of publications and essays emerged in the early twentieth century, including William T. Comstock’s

Bungalows, Camps and Mountain Houses (1908); E.  F. Bartholomew’s “Porto Rican Building,” published in Architecture (1919); and John S. Humphreys’ Bermuda Houses (1923). Antonin Nechodoma also includes a chapter in El libro de Puerto Rico (1923) called “Arquitectura y Arquitectos en Puerto Rico.” This genre continued to evolve in the 1930s, following the period of the competition. The first publication of this sort was produced in Latin America, Luis E. Osorio’s Los destinos del Trópico, which was published in Quito in 1933. The topic was undertaken worldwide, including Donald B. Blacklock’s Empire Problem: The House and the Village in the Tropics (1932) and L’Urbanisme aux Colonies et dans les Pays Tropicaux (1932). In 1938, “Habitation dans les Pays Tropicaux et Sub-Tropicaux” was published following the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning meeting in Mexico, and Friedrich Vick published The Effect of Tropical Climates on the Design and Construction of Buildings (1938). The next year, E. Weithas published “La construcción en países cálidos” in Edificación (1940). The decade saw a number of general texts, such as Alec Waugh’s Hot Countries, published in 1930, and Archibald Price’s White Settlers in the Tropics, published in 1939. This type of text proliferated, culminating in 1964 with Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones by British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, a book based on the authors’ experiences in Africa and India. For a more extensive bibliography, see Rivera de Figueroa’s Architecture for the Tropics, which contains an annotated bibliography entitled “Arquitectura para el Trópico.” The text contains more than five hundred entries and covers a period from 1776 to 1972. 43. A “Second and Most Important Bulletin” was mailed out on December 1, 1928. Kelsey informed the competitors that a reduction of the competitor’s cost had been considered, that the scale of certain drawings could be reduced, and that trace paper could be mounted on linen. Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 44. Drew and Fry, Tropical Architecture, 5. Lai makes this observation in “Tropical Tropes.” 45. Kelsey to Rowe, October 14, 1927, Correspondence Kelsey/ Dr. Rowe/Ludwig, 1927–1928, CML. 46. Kelsey, Program and Rules, 34–37. 47. See Kelsey, Program and Rules (1928). 48. Kelsey, Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 64– 66. 49. Ibid., 17. 50. Kelsey to Rowe, April 20, 1928. The number of copies printed is mentioned in a letter to Kelsey from Rowe, April 21, 1928, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. An earlier plan to publish in Portuguese was abandoned. There was an oversupply of the programs, and after the competition, Kelsey and Rowe decided to sell them to raise funds for the monument; many were eventually donated to U.S. public libraries.

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51. “Calls for Designs for Columbus Lighthouse,” New York Times, January 2, 1928, 14. 52. Kelsey, “Second and Most Important Bulletin,” Question no. 8, December 1, 1928, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 53. Ibid. 54. Kelsey to Rowe, February 21, 1929, Correspondence 1928– 1929, CML. The three jurors that were chosen would receive $2,500 if they served twice and $1,000 if they served once. 55. Kelsey to Rowe, September 12, 1928, Correspondence 1927–1931, CML. 56. Hood’s schedule determined the date of the Madrid jury, and he would have to depart early and miss the festivities. Kelsey grew concerned that the Spanish Permanent Committee would be disappointed by his “indecent haste.” Kelsey, “Diary of Time Spent in Madrid,” Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929– 1933, CML. 57. Sevilla: Exposición Ibero-Americana. The Barcelona Pavilion was dismantled in January 1930, when the exposition closed, and the Seville exposition closed in June of the same year. 58. Kelsey to Rowe, marked “Confidential,” February 26, 1929, Jury Suggestions 1928–1948, CML. 59. Kelsey to Rowe, April 5, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 60. Memorandum Submitted to the Permanent Committee of the Governing Board of the Pan American Union on the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse by the Technical Advisor, Mr. Albert Kelsey, (no date), Correspondence with Prize Winners and Governing Board, 1929–1930. The reference to the steamer is mentioned in Kelsey to Rowe, April 13, 1929, Correspondence 1928– 1929, CML. 61. Minutes of the Permanent Committee to the Governing Board on the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, July 13, 1928, Minutes of Committee Meetings, 1927–1932, CML. 62. Kelsey, “Diary of Time Spent in Madrid,” Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 63. Kelsey to Rowe, April 13, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 64. Ibid.; also see Kelsey to Rowe, April 5, 1929. 65. St. Elmo to Rowe, December 4, 1928, CML, 148. 66. Incidentally, St. Elmo was also wrong, for in 2006, Spanish geneticists used DNA to prove that Columbus was buried in Seville. The Dominican government refutes the claim but will not allow the remains in Santo Domingo to be tested. 67. Ludewig to Manger, April 17, 1929, Correspondence Kelsey 1927–1931, CML. 68. Kelsey to Rowe, April 13, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 69. Minutes of the Permanent Committee to the Governing

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Board on the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, March 30, 1928, Minutes of Committee Meetings, 1927–1932, CML. 70. The Fédération des Sociétés Françaises d’Architectes to Kelsey, July 9, 1928, Correspondence from Architectural Societies, 1928, CML. 71. The Permanent Committee reached out to the architects in Latin America with letters. The competition yielded 138 Latin American registrants by July 18, 1928 (Adams to Pulliam, July 18, 1928, CML, 148), and eventually 196 Latin American registrants (9 percent) of the 1,970 total applications. The final tabulation was made on May 5, 1929 (the earlier count was March 5). The table indicates 1,926, but 1,970 registrants were reported. 72. Early on, Moscow’s U.S.S.R. Society of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries and the Soviet architectural group ASNOVA had requested registration material. F. Linde and A. Esuhukoff to Kelsey, July 3, 1928, CML, 148. ASNOVA had been founded in 1923 to unite architects “who opposed the method of rationalistic architecture to the academic method” (Manger to Kelsey, August 30, 1928, CML, 148). 73. See S. Frederick Starr’s Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (1978). 74. The Vesnin brothers registered but did not submit designs to the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse competition. 75. Kelsey to Linde, June 12, 1928, CML, 148. 76. Rowe to Kelsey, April 21, 1928, Correspondence 1928– 1929, CML. 77. Kelsey, “Diary of Time Spent in Madrid,” April 17th, Wednesday, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 78. Ibid., April 19th, Friday, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 79. Ibid., April 20th, Saturday, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 80. The U.S. architect Wallace K. Harrison participated in the construction of the Rockefeller Center and served as the director of planning for the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. He had developed a close relationship with Hood, and historian Mardges Bacon, in Le Corbusier in America, draws our attention to the way Harrison was influenced by Hood’s visionary designs. Bacon, Le Corbusier in America, 191–192. The Russian architect, W. K. Oltar-Jevsky (Wiacheslav Konstantinovich Oltarzhevsky, 1880–1966), had studied under Otto Wagner in Vienna in 1905. He wrote Contemporary Babylon in 1933, with an introduction by Harvey Wiley Corbett, establishing himself as one of the first Soviet experts on skyscraper construction. He lived in the United States from 1924 to 1934. 81. The honorable mentions were: John Thomas Grisdale (United States); Norris I. Crandall, Donald C. Kline, and George

C. Riggs (United States); Nicolas Lanceray (U.S.S.R.); Abram Garfield (United States); Nicholas Vassilieve (United States); Enrico Miniati and Giovanni Masini (Italy); Kamil Roskot (Czechoslovakia); Maurice Gogois and C.  A. Dory (France); Roger Kohn (France); and Jean Szelechowski and Marcel Janin (France). 82. Kelsey to Rowe, May 11, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 83. Kelsey to Rowe, April 29, 1929, Correspondence 1928– 1929, CML. The Spanish Society of Architects had also taken photographs of all the prize drawings and intended to publish them in their monthly magazine. Ludewig to Manger, June 19, 1929, Correspondence Kelsey 1927–1931, CML. 84. Kelsey, “Diary of Time Spent in Madrid,” April 20th, Saturday, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 85. Ludewig to Manger, May 4, 1929, Correspondence Kelsey 1927–1931, CML. 86. “Report of the International Jury on the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse,” April 20, 1929, Forms and Bulletins of Competition, 1928–1930, CML. 87. Kelsey, “Diary of Time Spent in Madrid,” April 29th, Monday, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 88. Memorandum to Director-General from W. A. Conkright, August 3, 1929, Correspondence Kelsey 1927–1931, CML. This is also mentioned in a letter to Rowe from Kelsey, December 5, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 89. Tony Garnier, Paul Bigot, and A. Guilbert to Orestes Ferrara, Correspondence with Prize Winners and Governing Board, 1929–1930, CML. 90. Memorandum, “Submitted to the Permanent Committee of the Governing Board of the Pan American Union on the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse by the Technical Advisor, Mr. Albert Kelsey,” (no date), Correspondence with Prize Winners and Governing Board, 1929–1930, CML. See Le Corbusier, Précisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (1930). This was the year that Le Corbusier traveled to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo to present his “Précisions” lectures. 91. Ludewig to Manger, May 7, 1929, and April 30, 1929, Correspondence Kelsey 1927–1931, CML. In a letter to Rowe from Kelsey, dated February 23, 1929, Kelsey mentions that he wrote to the Duke of Veragua to ask for his participation in the opening ceremony of the exhibition in Madrid. 92. Kelsey to Rowe, April 5, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. On May 6, Kelsey wrote to Rowe that “in all quarters, the utmost good feeling prevails. The Italians are again negotiating for the Exhibition,” and he enclosed a memorandum that he sent to Italy (Kelsey to Rowe, May 6, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML). On May 11, 1929, Kelsey wrote to Rowe saying the he had

not heard anything from the Italian Embassy. Kelsey to Rowe, May 11, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 93. Kelsey to Rowe, June 27, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. Three days later, Kelsey reported that the cases of drawings had been opened by the custom house in Rome and the colored drawings had been separated from the black and white drawings. Kelsey to Rowe, July 30, 1929, Correspondence 1927–1931, CML. 94. Kelsey to Fletcher, August 2, 1929, Correspondence 1928– 1929, CML. 95. Kelsey to Rowe, August 9, 1929, Correspondence Kelsey 1927–1931, CML. 96. Ludewig to Rowe, August 8, 1929, Correspondence Kelsey 1927–1931, CML. 97. Kelsey to Rowe, December 19, 1929, Correspondence Kelsey 1927–1931, CML. One of the other matters Kelsey turned to included an engineering plan for a proposed harbor development in Santo Domingo. 98. Kelsey to Rowe, June 1, 1929, Correspondence 1928–1929, CML. 99. Minutes of the Permanent Committee to the Governing Board of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, March 30, 1928, Minutes of Committee Meetings, 1927–1932, CML. 100. Countries with populations of 2 million or fewer would pay $15,000; 5 million or fewer, $20,000; 12 million or fewer, $30,000; and 35 million or fewer, $40,000. The apportionment by nation was divided into five groups: $300,000 (Dominican Republic and the United States); $40,000 (Brazil and Mexico); $30,000 (Argentina and Colombia); $20,000 (Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Peru, and Venezuela); and $15,000 (Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, and Uruguay). 101. H.J. Res. 255, 71st Congress, 2d Session, February 21, 1930. 102. His designs may have influenced Eero Saarinen’s St. Louis Gateway Arch ( juror Eliel’s son) and Juan O’Gorman’s library at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. 103. Kelsey, Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 134. 104. Ibid., 118. 105. Marconi, “Mostra romana.” 106. What would other architects who did not go beyond the registration phase have proposed? This long list included Max Bill, Marcel Breuer, Paul P. Cret, Le Corbusier, William Adams Delano, John Ekin Dinwiddie, O’Neil Ford, Moses Ginsberg, Arthur Loomis Harmon, Raymond Hood, Lazar Marcovitch Lissitzky (El Lissitzky), Robert Mallet-Stevens, the Perret brothers, Eliel Saarinen, William Van Allen, and the Vesnin brothers (Leonid, Viktor, and Aleksandr). Numerous Latin American architects who went on to establish successful careers also failed to submit designs after registering, including the Mexicans Fed-

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erico Mariscal, Enrique del Moral, Francisco Mujica, Smith Solar and Smith Miller, José Villagrán García; the Cubans Mira and Rosich; the Puerto Rican Antonin Nechodoma; the Venezuelan Carlos Raúl Villanueva (who registered from Paris); and the German architect Max Cetto (who later immigrated to Mexico). 107. Kelsey to Rowe, September 12, 1929, Correspondence 1927–1931, CML. 108. This generation of architects preceded a later group who received international recognition in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The competition highlighted some of the works of this lesser known, early generation of Latin American modern architects. In 1928, the absence of Latin American participation would have hindered hemispheric support, and Rowe and Kelsey’s dedicated and successful efforts to increase Latin American participation required much energy. This was the first international competition to focus on a Latin American city, and Latin America would not be recognized in the architectural community until the late 1930s. One of the earliest cases is Esther Born’s article on Mexican architecture, published in 1937 in Architectural Record. The Museum of Modern Art exhibition and catalog “Brazil Builds” of 1942 would later direct the spotlight more prominently on South America. See Philip L. Goodwin’s Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old 1652–1942. This late recognition is also seen in both Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Latin American Architecture since 1945 (1955) and Francisco Bullrich’s New Directions in Latin American Architecture (1969). 109. Kelsey to Rowe, May 13, 1929, Correspondence 1928– 1929, CML. 110. Kelsey to Rowe, April 12, 1930, Kelsey and Rowe Correspondence on Lighthouse Handbook, 1930, CML. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid. 113. Kelsey to Rowe, May 9, 1930, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 114. Airport design had become a recognized typological category by this time. In 1925, the New York Beaux-Arts Institute of Design launched the competition “An Airplane Landing in a Metropolis,” and in 1929, the Lehigh Portland Cement Company sponsored a competition for an ideal airport. Harvey Wiley Corbett and Raymond Hood served as jurors. The following year, Norman Bel Geddes proposed a “rotary airport” floating in New York Harbor, which would rotate in response to flight conditions. Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 33. Also see Shubert, “Lloyd Wright and the Lehigh Airport Competition.” The Beaux-Arts Institute of Design presented an award for an aerodrome in American Architect 99 (Jan. 11, 1911), 24. See Brainerd, “An Aeroplane Landing in a Metropolis.” 115. Kelsey to Rowe, May 9, 1930, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML.

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116. Kelsey to winning entries, May 23, 1930, Correspondence with Prize Winners and Governing Board, 1929–1930, CML. 117. Kelsey to Rowe, March 26, 1930, Kelsey and Rowe Correspondence on Lighthouse Handbook, 1930, CML. 118. Ibid. 119. Kelsey to Rowe, April 12, 1930, Kelsey and Rowe Correspondence on Lighthouse Handbook, 1930, CML. 120. Ibid. 121. Kelsey’s focus on connecting the international and local brings to mind the architectural theories of critical regionalism that emerged in the early 1980s in the writings of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, and later in Kenneth Frampton’s. Although this theory centered on contextualization resulting from the architectural attention given to climate, daylight, topography, and tectonic expression, Kelsey’s critical regionalist architectural ambition sought to attain a level of cross-cultural consensus, in keeping with the Pan-American ideology of unity. 122. Document attached to letter sent to Don Rafael Brache from Kelsey, April 28, 1930, Kelsey and Rowe Correspondence on Lighthouse Handbook, 1930, CML. 123. Minutes of the Permanent Committee to the Governing Board on the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, July 8, 1931, Minutes of Committee Meetings, 1927–1932, CML. 124. Kelsey to Rowe, June 30, 1931, “1931 Albert Kelsey CLMC,” CML. The committee at first accepted his offer, but they later decided that Kelsey’s role would have to be terminated after December 31, 1931, due to budgetary conditions. Minutes of the Permanent Committee to the Governing Board on the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, July 8, 1931, Minutes of Committee Meetings, 1927–1932, CML. 125. Kelsey to Rowe, July 20, 1931, “1931 Albert Kelsey CLMC,” CML. 126. Kelsey to Rowe, May 7, 1930, Kelsey and Rowe Correspondence on Lighthouse Handbook, 1930, CML. 127. Kelsey to Rowe, February 19, 1931, “1931 Albert Kelsey CLMC,” CML. 128. Minutes of the Permanent Committee to the Governing Board on the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, March 20, 1930, Minutes of Committee Meetings, 1927–1932, CML. 129. “Memorandum Relative to the Regulations and Contract for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse,” Manger, May 4, 1930, Forms and Bulletins of Competition, 1928–1930, CML. 130. “Program and Rules of the Second Competition for the Selection of an Architect for the Monumental Lighthouse,” Albert Kelsey, 1930, CML, Forms and Bulletins of Competition, 1928– 1930. 131. Pulliam to Rowe, March 3, 1930, Correspondence with Kelsey and Gleave, 1929–1933, CML.

132. Rowe to Pulliam, March 12, 1930, Correspondence with Kelsey and Gleave, 1929–1933, CML. 133. See Roorda’s Dictator Next Door, 48. 134. Pulliam to Rowe, April 1, 1930, Correspondence with Kelsey and Gleave, 1929–1933, CML. 135. The first postponement was to May 15, 1931; the second was to September 15. “Bulletin No. 5, May 4, 1931,” Forms and Bulletins of Competition, 1928–1930, CML. “Concurso Arquitectónico del Faro de Colón, Segunda Etapa, Boletín No. 2, 28 de enero de 1931,” Forms and Bulletins of Competition, 1928–1930, CML. 136. Kelsey to winning entries, May 23, 1930, Correspondence with Prize Winners and Governing Board, 1929–1930, CML. 137. “Concurso Arquitectónico del Faro del Colón, Segunda Etapa, Boletín No. 3, 21 de febrero de 1931,” Forms and Bulletins of Competition, 1928–1930, CML. 138. Rowe to Kelsey, July 14, 1931; July 20, 1931; July 30, 1931; and Kelsey to Rowe, August 10, 1931, “1931 Albert Kelsey CLMC,” CML. 139. “For release afternoon papers, Oct 17th and morning papers, Oct 18th,” Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929– 1933, CML. 140. Chicago Daily Tribune, October 18, 1931, 27. 141. Lescher received the award along with his associates Paul Andrieu, Georges Defontaine, and Maurice Gauthier. Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid. 145. Rowe wrote confidential letters asking Cret, Hood, and Warren P. Laird, of the University of Pennsylvania, for their opinion regarding “the effect which [the jury report] would produce in professional architectural circles” (Rowe to Hood, October 30, 1931, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML). Laird later recommended the report’s publication, stating that the text was “not outside the bounds of professional etiquette” (Laird to Rowe, November 9, 1931, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML). 146. Hood to Rowe, November 7, 1931, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 147. Cret to Rowe, November 3, 1931, Correspondence with Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1933, CML. 148. “Report of the International Jury of Award Concerning The Final Columbus Memorial Competition,” October 13, 1931, Correspondence 1932, CML. 149. Wright, Mumford, Pfeiffer, and Wojtowicz, Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford, 1865. 150. Kelsey to Rowe, October 19, 1931, “1931 Albert Kelsey CMLC,” CML.

151. Photographs of Wright and the students and numerous newspaper reports illustrate the extent of Wright’s involvement, FLWA. 152. New York Herald Tribune, November 7, 1931. 153. Phillips and Phillips, Worlds of Christopher Columbus, 238. 154. Gleave, “Report on the Design for the Christopher Columbus Memorial Lighthouse,” CML. 155. Gleave to Kelsey, September 27, 1932, Albert Kelsey, Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Correspondence, 1932–1933, CML. 156. Gleave to Rowe, March 8, 1932, Correspondence with Winners J. L. Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1949, CML. 157. Ibid. 158. Listín Diario, September 2, 1932, Albert Kelsey, Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Correspondence, 1932–1933, CML. 159. See Schrenk, Building a Century of Progress. 160. Gleave to Rowe, December 7, 1932, Correspondence with Winners J.  L. Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1949, CML. “Memorandum Covering the Exhibition at the Chicago Century of Progress International Exposition of (an enlarged model of ) the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse,” Correspondence 1932, CML. 161. Pulliam to Rowe, March 6, 1934, CML, 184. 162. Pulliam to Rowe, November 1, 1932, Correspondence 1932, CML. 163. Pulliam to Rowe, November 3, 1932, Correspondence 1932, CML. 164. Pulliam to Rowe, June 13, 1936, CML, 148. 165. Pulliam to Rowe, July 4, 1936, CML, 148. 166. Pulliam to Rowe, October 20, 1936, CML, 148. 167. The event ended in tragedy, however, when one of the planes crashed in Cali, Colombia. See Tejera R.’s Vuelo Panamericano Pro Faro a Colón. 168. “Message of Pan-American Fraternity from Generalísimo Doctor Rafael L. Trujillo Molina,” October 12, 1936, CML, 148. 169. Gleave to Rowe, November 1, 1936; February 6, April 15; and April 29, 1937, Correspondence with Winners J.  L. Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1949, CML. 170. Rowe to Gleave, October 16, 1944, Correspondence with Winners J .L. Gleave and Kelsey, 1929–1949, CML. 171. Atkins and Wilson, Dominican Republic and the United States, 94. 172. Memorandum for Dr. Manger from Mr. Curtiss, March 14, 1955, CML, Minutes of Committee Meetings, 1927–1932. The PAU terminated its responsibilities on November 18, 1949. 173. El Faro a Colón 1, no. 1 (1953): 84. The publication can be described as a cult journal featuring all aspects of the lighthouse and Columbus’ remains. The first issue contained an article by Gleave, “The Design of the Memorial Lighthouse” (the only essay

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to be published in English), and numerous presidential decrees and messages. This issue also featured an image of Dr. Armando Álvarez Pedroso examining Columbus’ “authentic mortal remains,” which was described as an official commission of a historical investigation that was ordered by Trujillo. Subsequent issues explored the monument’s relation to Catholicism in the Dominican Republic; excerpts from the Second Stage Program depicting the various competition entries; reprinted historical documents that supported the rhetoric of primacía; and information about the Pan-American movement and events like the “Vuelo Panamericano.” Catholicism was frequently discussed with regard to iconography, statues of saints, and an event where Pope Pio XII blessed the memorial lighthouse model. The journal also kept the reader informed about construction progress and controversies over Columbus’ remains. There are mentions of La Rábida in Spain and the Alcázar de (Don Diego) Colón, the viceregal residence of Columbus’ son in Santo Domingo. 174. This resembles a proposal produced for an image of PanAmerica under Nelson Rockefeller, when he was coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs from 1940 to 1944. The proposal was a combination of the Virgin Mary and the Goddess of Liberty, a symbolic layering of evangelical and unifying symbols. See Woll, Latin Image in American Film, 211.

Chapter Four 1. This was a response to the Panama Canal’s completion in 1914. Bryan suggested “the utilization of the Canal Zone by the churches as a religious and educational centre for the young men of the three Americas,” but cautioned, “It should not appear that North America was attempting through the university to impose its civilization upon the other countries of Pan-America” (New York Times, May 24, 1915, 6). Edwin Grant Dexter, president of the Instituto Nacional de Panamá, also promoted this Pan-American University. New York Times, April 22, 1917, 10. 2. The official southern terminus is Ushuaia, Argentina, which is also the southernmost city in the world. 3. The Central American portion of the highway, which ended in Panama City, was named as such, while the larger network was referred to as the Pan-American Highway. 4. The bridge was later called the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. 5. New York Times, June 7, 1946, 35. 6. La Prensa, July 25, 1939, and October 18, 1939. 7. La Prensa, November 20, 1940. 8. In 1959, this occurred in Chicago when the Pan-American Games took place there, inspiring the Science Museum’s “Festival of the Americas,” a photographic exhibition of the cities of

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the Western Hemisphere. By 1965, when Chicago’s Plaza of the Americas was built, the plaza became the site of Pan-American Day fiestas for the city’s growing Latino community. 9. Hunt, United Nations of America, 14. 10. William Eleroy Curtis and Buchanan had also planned a similar setup in a New York skyscraper following Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. 11. NYUA. 12. The Pan-American Airways building was designed by Emory Roth and Sons, with Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius serving as consultants. It was vehemently criticized for interrupting the vista along one of the city’s great thoroughfares, Park Avenue, and upstaging the elegant Grand Central Station. 13. See Portes and Stepick, City on the Edge, for an extensive history of the Cuban immigration to Tampa, Key West, and Miami. Portes and Stepick propose that there were two Floridas, “one being built out of the swamp with the dreams and ambitions of Yankee entrepreneurs; the other looking ever to Cuba and to Spain thanks to centuries of trade and political tradition” (90–95). See Arreola, “Mexican American Cultural Capital,” for a history of Mexican immigration in San Antonio. 14. Portes and Stepick write that it “took thrill-seeking tourists to Havana and brought hundreds of Cuban shoppers to Miami. .  .  . By the mid-1950s, the Miami tourist industry and the semi-permanent colony of Cuban visitors had settled into a comfortable relationship. . . . Implausible as it may seem, regular Havana-Miami flights continued after the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, ferrying a growing number of escapees. . . . Commercial flights to Miami ceased during the Missile Crisis of November 1962. . . . By 1965, annual Cuban refugee migration to the United States had dwindled to only 16,447; the cumulative total since the revolution stood at 210,000” (City on the Edge, 100–103). 15. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) won the lawsuit. 16. Such efforts also extended to institutions like the Office of Inter-American Affairs in Washington, D.C., headed in the 1940s by Nelson A. Rockefeller, who helped promote numerous cultural projects. In 1942, for example, he encouraged the collaboration between New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Pan-American Committee of the American Institute of Architects. This led to Philip L. Goodwin’s architectural exhibition Brazil Builds the next year, an important moment in the history of U.S. recognition of Latin American Modern architecture. 17. The fair’s organizers had explored a skyscraper design that a New York businessman promised to fund, and this may have led to the interest in involving Ferriss. The hotel entrepreneur and nightclub operator William Liebow recruited local architect Lawrence Murray Dixon to design a $15 million skyscraper. See

Bert Collier, “Project Explained at Meeting of Officials,” Miami Herald, August 13, 1948. 18. Interama’s proposed unconventional living arrangements reflect a time when architects and designers explored alternative dwelling systems, resulting in such projects as EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) at Disney World and the work of Telesis on the West Coast. Breuer, Interama Press Conference, February 23, 1967, EDSP. The team even considered Latin American participation, inviting Luis Malaussena of Venezuela, as well as architect and future president of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, to consult on the project. 19. Columbus Day was added as a national holiday in 1934, with the official date set at October 12. 20. The Pan-American Clipper fashioned a new streamlined aesthetic, the kind that reappeared when the Packard Pan-American was designed in 1952 for the Pan-American races. The PanAmerican Highway was inaugurated in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the First Pan-American Highway Conference in 1925. 21. The architects served as the editorial staff of the professional magazine Florida Architecture and Allied Arts, which Kiehnel inaugurated in 1935. Additional architects later joined the team. Mayor E.  G. Sewell enlisted the team, and consequently, the idea of creating a Pan-American-themed trade mart or exposition building has been attributed to Sewell or his successor Mayor C. H. Reeder. The fair’s date of origin has also been dated at 1915 or 1919, when the city first acquired Causeway Island. See “Pan-American Center Bill Opposed,” Miami Tribune, January 4, 1947. 22. Later, when Paist and Steward reinterpreted this scheme in their Florida Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair of 1939– 1940, it was designed in a Spanish Colonial style. 23. In a revised scheme called the Pan-American Trade Mart, there is mention of the firms Kiehnel and Elliot, Paist and Steward, and Weed and Reeder. 24. Another exposition occurred in Tampa, Florida, the PanAmerican Hernando de Soto Exposition in 1939. This exposition was planned to celebrate the quadricentennial of the explorer’s landing in 1539. 25. New York Times, September 3, 1939. 26. Pan-American Airways produced this publication, Pan American Trade Mart: An Institution to Fully Reveal and Develop the Resources of the Americas, in 1940. Governor Frederick Preston Cone correspondence (1937–1941), SAF. 27. Later, in 1943, architect Gordon Eugene Mayer also proposed the “Pan-American Trade Mart and Social Center.” 28. Senator Claude Pepper submitted a bill on March 20, 1941, to raise federal support. 29. “Pan-American or International Center or World Exposi-

tion (Permanent) at Miami,” Report, Frank F. Stearns, April 1944, SAF. Stearns based his findings on his book City Planning in Miami: 1941–42. 30. This scheme appeared in the Miami Daily News, December 5, 1944. 31. This plan shows a larger number of pavilions than previous ones, many dedicated to other functions and support services. 32. Robert Fitch Smith, Alfred Browning Parker, and John Edwin Petersen also joined them. There is also mention of William Kenneth Jackson, Archie Gale Parish, and James Gamble Rogers II. Some accounts state that the team began working as early as September 1949. At this time, a group of Miami businessmen, led by banker W. H. Walker, had organized a state agency to oversee the project, creating a sense of excitement that this fair was likely to take place. 33. Author interview with Alfred Browning Parker, July 28, 2007, Gainesville, FL. 34. “Thumb-nail Plot Plan Schemes A, B, C, D, E,” Meeting of February 10, 1951, HFAD. 35. In Miami, “tropical environments” cast in the Spanish Mediterranean style historically appeared as fictionalized cultural landscapes. The city had been subjected to unsuccessful tropical fruit production, paralleled by an obsession with Mediterranean and Andalusian architecture, and even an attempt to create an “American Riviera” in the 1920s. This occurred amid the development of golf courses, grand summer houses, and Baroque-style hotels. Carrère and Hastings designed Henry M. Flagler’s Ponce de León Hotel (1885–1887) and Alcázar Hotel (1886–1888) in St. Augustine, two mementos of this era of cultural importations. The thematic construction process initiated by Flagler, Collins, and the Merricks was based on an imagined past that did not draw on specific ties to the region. 36. “New Trade Center Called Effective Peace Factor,” Miami Herald, November 9, 1951, and Grace Wing, “Trade Mart Leaders Push Plan for RFC Loan OK,” Miami Daily News, April 27, 1952. 37. Ferriss, Power in Buildings, 45. 38. This design was published in: “Hemisphere Center Revealed in Startling Splendor, Noted Architects Unveil Plans for ‘Dream’ Project Here,” Miami Herald, May 21, 1950. An earlier version is also located in HFAD, “Theme Diagram, H.F. after conference with Dr. W. Meeting of February 15.” 39. See Pérez Oyarzún, “Le Corbusier.” 40. The new design resembled Parker’s original “Scheme C.” This scheme appeared in the Miami Herald on November, 16, 1954, and in Architectural Record, January 1955, 10–11. By 1955, other proposals are mentioned, including Armand Spitz’ proposal to design the world’s first Cosmorama. 41. Florida Architect, February 1956, 55.

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42. The project also appeared in major national architectural publications the following year. A similar arch design was produced by the Italian architect Bruno Ferrati for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition. A publication produced in 1930 with the first-stage winning schemes was widely distributed. 43. It is understandable that Saarinen declined an invitation to join the Interama architecture team, since the erection of this triple-arch monument in Miami would have stolen his thunder in St. Louis. 44. “Noted Architect to Help Trade Mart Development,” Miami Daily News, June 9, 1955. Two architects, Peruvian Fernando Belaúnde Terry and Venezuelan Luis Malaussena, were also brought in as consultants. In an interview, Belaúnde stated that he believed Interama would help establish a standardization of American credit systems for Latin American countries, which would help eliminate communism in Latin America. “Peruvian Hails Interama Plans,” Miami Herald, March 4, 1956, 8-F. 45. In his study of Arab travel accounts of Parisian fairs, Mitchell writes: “Besides the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, the different kinds of spectacles [the Arab narrator] described were ‘places in which [the Parisians] represent for a person the view of town or country or the like,’ such as ‘the Panorama, the Cosmorama, the Diorama, the Europorama, and the Uranorama’” (Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” 220). 46. See Çelik, Displaying the Orient, and Morton, Hybrid Modernities. 47. See González, “Unresolved Expressions,” 221–247. 48. Other team members included Colombian American Hernando Acosta, Cuban American Albert Trull, Harold C. Decker, Milton Harry, Claude Maddox, Otto Oppenheimer, and George Reed. Cuban American Wilfredo Borroto later joined the team. 49. President Eisenhower and his vice president, Richard M. Nixon, had also used the phrase “Progress with Freedom” prior to Kennedy in reference to communism, specifically in connection with Latin America. 50. The architects also considered a theme center icon, also resembling the Helicline, and numerous other spiral-themed proposals. Although these schemes were said to embody “American progress,” the Pan-American concept was only occasionally mentioned. Juanita Greene, “Interama Refuses to Play Dead, Hitches Its Dream to New Plan,” Miami Herald, March 13, 1960. 51. Living in nearby Fort Lauderdale at the time, Bingham was recruited by the authority. He had made a reputation with his Saturday Evening Post covers and popular advertisement campaigns. 52. “Miami Sets Stage for Interama,” Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 1965. 53. Stengren, “Biggest Building in World,” New York Times, January 19, 1964.

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54. The authority relied on local NAACP reports to support their claim. Correspondence between Holland and Muskat, January 7, 1966, Spessard L. Holland Papers, University of Florida, Smathers Libraries. 55. An application for the CFA loan was submitted on October 9, 1964, and the CFA approved it on January 29, 1965. 56. Stone had recently distinguished himself as architect of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi in 1958 and had designed the noted U.S. Pavilion for the Brussels World’s Fair that same year. 57. “Federal Action Unlocks $50 Million,” Miami Herald, February 27, 1966. The model first appeared in the Miami News, May 8, 1966. 58. Breuer, April 25, 1965, EDSP. 59. “Interama Exposition Hailed,” 40–41. 60. Interama Press Conference, February 3, 1967, SAF. 61. Weese’s pavilion was supposed to include “Free Cuba.” In December 1965, Browne, Breuer, Kahn, and Sert visited Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. They met with businessmen, industrialists, architects, and engineers, presenting their architectural plans everywhere they went. 62. Team member Milton Harry stated that it was Stone who insisted that all the pavilions maintain a white color so as not to emphasize differences. According to him, Stone was given the U.S. Pavilion because of his individualistic approach to architecture and experience with pavilion design. Author interview with Milton Harry, August 26, 2007, Miami, FL. Design development drawings found in Sert’s archives, however, indicate a number of color studies of the elevations belonging to the dormitory structures in Sert’s section of the International Area, showing that the pavilions weren’t conceived as completely white. 63. “Study for Report Pursuant to PL-89–355 (Interama) Prepared by U.S. Expositions Staff Office of Administration,” February 24, 1966–May 10, 1966, SAF. 64. The May 8, 1966, photo appeared in the Miami News, and the November 6, 1966, photo appeared in the Miami Herald. 65. These include Hotel El Panamá in Panama City, Panama, built in 1946; the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India, built in 1954; the Phoenicia Hotel in Beirut, Lebanon, built in 1954; and the Ponce Museum of Art in Ponce, Puerto Rico, built in 1961. At the time of his association with Interama, Stone’s Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology had just been built in 1965. He was the architect of the National Assembly Building, the Presidential Palace, and the University of Islamabad in Islamabad, Pakistan. 66. At this time, Kahn was collaborating with Isamu Noguchi on the Levy Memorial Playground (1961–1966) in New York City, and one sees similar formal articulations in the two projects. With this level of abstraction, the geomorphic forms Kahn

explored could have satisfied the pan-native theme, with their simultaneous reference to northern and southern indigenous forms, but he never directly addressed this as his intention. 67. Muskat visited the HemisFair’s organizers in San Antonio. See “World’s Tallest Concrete Structure,” San Antonio Express and News, February 6, 1965. Yamasaki was hired just two months after he attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the first World Trade Center tower in New York. See Smiley, “Architect Selected for Tower.” 68. Once the International Area was set in motion, the authority began developing the other sections. They asked Walt Disney to participate, but he declined because he had his own plans for a secret “Florida Project.” Soon after, plans for Disney World were made public. The confident Interama staff headed to Montreal’s Expo ’67 to take note of that exposition’s successes and failures. 69. Sert, for example, could point to extensive professional experience in various Latin American countries, which included his Pilot Plan for Havana, Cuba, of 1955–1956. 70. Andrews, “Critics Bog Interama Plan.” 71. Correspondence between Eduardo García Dartayet and Senator George Smathers, November 17, 1966, George A. Smathers Papers, Box 76, SAF. 72. Richard Nixon, “Statement of Naming Members to the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission,” July 3, 1969, Key Biscayne, Florida, SAF. 73. Numerous proposals followed, including the Rouse Corporation’s redesign of the fairgrounds in 1972. The firm’s design was called the Island of the Sun and included a Tower of the Sun, a Pyramid of the Sun, a Pan-American zoo, and other functions. In 1973, the Boston firm Cambridge Seven was retained, and a tower designed by Miami architect Edward Grafton (Pancoast’s grandson) was approved and widely published. Plans for Florida International University were also discussed at this time. Denver architect Charles Deaton proposed a “sculptured” tower, a vertical exploration of his sculptured house, which was soon after featured in Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper (1973). Other proposals included a replica of the Tower of London, a proposal for the largest dome in the nation, and an Urban Housing Prototype and elevated monorail that influenced EPCOT. 74. Interestingly, a hemispheric nexus in Miami is still under consideration in the early twenty-first century. Pancoast’s successor firm, Spillis Candela, was commissioned in 2005 to design a building in Miami for the permanent secretariat of the controversial Free Trade Area of the Americas, an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Representing thirtyfour nations of the Americas (all the Caribbean nations and Canada are now included), this “Cathedral of Diplomacy and Trade,” is a coda to Interama’s story. The institution’s location in Miami has not been confirmed, however, as other cities are competing for the

secretariat and some of the member states as well as nongovernmental organizations have worked to dismantle the organization. The Espirito Santo Plaza tower, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, is the only structure to give Miami its gateway symbol today, with its thirty-six-story concave indented arch. 75. Interama Press Conference, February 3, 1967, SAF. 76. Arreola, “Mexican American Cultural Capital,” 40. See also Ramos, Beyond the Alamo (2008). 77. Ibid., 34. 78. In 1916, the city briefly incorporated the concept into a proposed Texas Bicentennial and Pan-American Exposition. Similar appropriations occurred in other Texas cities, usually in the form of names of businesses and clubs, and in two more unsuccessful fair proposals, Galveston’s Inter-American Exposition in 1897 and Fort Worth’s Inter-American Trade Exposition in 1946. 79. Dallas Times Herald, February 16, 1937. 80. A similar attempt to rid the city of urban blight had led to construction of the Victoria Courts public housing complex, built directly across from the future fairgrounds in 1940 for AngloAmerican use. Thirty blocks of substandard housing occupied by the city’s earliest African American community were cleared to build Victoria Courts. In a further effort to manage ethnic enclaves, the Alazan-Apache Courts were built between 1939 and 1942 in the city’s predominantly Mexican American West Side. 81. Marshall T. Steves and Ewen C. Dingwall to Leon Barety, April 6, 1965. The date of incorporation was December 17, 1962, HFP. 82. Keller, “HemisFair ’68,” 35–77. 83. Ibid., 41. 84. Ford had designed the Presbyterian Pan-American School in Kingsville, Texas, in 1965–1966, a rural campus built for the education of Mexican American children. The building features Saltillo tile patios and native plants. The school was originally the Texas-Mexican (Tex-Mex) Industrial Institute, built in 1912, whose aim was to support the development of Christian manhood among Mexican young men. The school was later joined with the Presbyterian School for Mexican Girls in Taft, Texas, which opened in 1924. The schools were consolidated in 1956. The new school was built on a 679-acre campus, on land given to the school by Henrietta Chamberlain King, the wife of Richard King, owner of the King Ranch. 85. Guerra to González, June 18, 1964, HFP. 86. González to Guerra, June 26, 1964, HFP. 87. Guerra to Dingwall, December 3, 1964, HFP. 88. Guerra to Manupelli, January 26, 1965, HFP. 89. Ibid. The heroic statues would always be seen, according to Guerra, against a background of the towering theme structure, which itself would be surrounded by “small sylvan chapels.” 90. Freymann to Dingwall, July 23, 1964, HFP.

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91. HemisFair 1968, Immediate Release, August 4, 1964, HFP. 92. The twelve organizations were West Side Lions, San Antonio Charro Association, Pan American Optimist Club, LULAC, Bexar County Real Estate Association, Mexican Chamber of Commerce, Pan American League, Mexican-American Friendship, San Antonio Retail Grocers Association, University Optimist Club, Good Neighbor Council, and Sembradores de Amistad. 93. Memo from Carlos Freymann to Frank Manupelli, August 25, 1964, HFP. 94. PAPRA, Minutes of First Meeting, August 31, 1964, HFP. 95. James M. Gaines to O’Neil Ford and Allison B. Peery, January 31, 1966, HFP. 96. Ibid. 97. Responding to a related inquiry, board member Phyllis Adams sent a list of Latin American architects to Ford and Peery, which she had solicited from Betty Peppis, the former Design Editor of the New York Times. Phyllis Adams to Ford and Peery, February 16, 1966, HFP. 98. Allison B. Peery to Phyllis Adams, March 7, 1966, HFP. 99. Report to the Bureau of International Expositions, Paris, France, May 1966, HFP. 100. Memorandum to Allison Peery from Phyllis Adams, April 1, 1966, HFP. Also see Jack Lenor Larson to Phyllis Adams, February 17, 1966, HFP. 101. James M. Gaines to Robert Moses, March 7, 1966, HFP. 102. Ibid. 103. Robert Moses to James M. Gaines, March 14, 1966, HFP. 104. O. P. Schnabel, a San Antonio businessman, suggested fair organizers involve Pancho Villa’s widow, who lived in Chihuahua, in a fifty-room residence that had become a mecca for tourists. “She has the old Dodge car in the patio which was used by Pancho Villa when he was ambushed and killed. She has quite a few other mementos from Pancho Villa, and the thought occurred to me,” he shared, “that possibly the old Dodge and some of her mementos could be brought to San Antonio and a display made at the HemisFair ’68, where Mrs. Villa could make a ‘spiel’ and show off the various mementos” (O. P. Schnabel to James Gaines, May 30, 1966, HFP). 105. Keller, “HemisFair ’68.” 106. These proposals bring a history of tower designs and PanAmerican heritage themes to a comical end: HemisSpire; Purple Peeple Steeple; the Mast of Columbus; JFK Tower; San Antonio Spacienda; Wineglass of Friendship; and the longest, Tower of Magnificent & Inspirational Achievements & Developments in HemisWest. 107. James M. Gaines to William R. Sinkin, July 21, 1966, HFP. 108. Other political appointments caused friction in the community. For example, Connally had not been supportive of Mexican Americans who protested minimum wage earnings.

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109. William Phillips to Carlos Freymann, September 2, 1965, HFP; emphasis in original. 110. Washington Daily News, October 19, 1965. 111. Sub-Themes Specified in BIE Convention, Group XXXXII: 160; Religions and faiths, 161; Missions, 162; Social life; folklore; HFP. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. The ten major subthemes that he recommended were Ancient Civilizations, Discoveries and the Conquests, Movements of Independence, Ancient and Modern Religions, Evolution of the Arts, Economic Development to Date (since 1900), Social Development to Date (since 1900), Sciences, Wars, and The Future. Carlos Freymann to Ewen C. Dingwall, January 14, 1965, HFP. 115. Carlos Freymann to Ewen C. Dingwall, January 14, 1965, HFP. 116. Letter to Robert Moses from James M. Gaines, March 7, 1966, HFP. 117. Ibid. 118. Bureau of International Expositions officials to William W. Phillips, March 8, 1965, HFP. 119. On April 8, 1965, Dingwall, Freymann, and Powell met to discuss the presentation to the Bureau of International Expositions on May 10, 1965. There is mention of a number of HemisFair plans, which included plans and sections of a Legacy Area and a Zonal Plan. Supporting information would include drawings of the Plaza of Liberators and the Garden Area. Memo, dated April 8, 1965, HFP. 120. Dingwall to Phillips, February 10, 1965, HFP. 121. Memo to Allison Peery and Jack Trawick from Carlos Freymann, August 13, 1965, HFP. 122. Report to the Bureau of International Expositions, May 1966, HFP. 123. Meeting on September 2, 1965, between Dingwall, Freymann, and Powell to discuss the Bureau of International Expositions presentation, which would take place on May 10, 1965, HFP. 124. HemisFair officials visited Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, and Olvera Street Market as they prepared for the fair. Memo to Garden Study Group from Boone Powell, March 31, 1965, HFP. 125. From the Report to the Bureau of International Expositions, May 1966, HFP. 126. In O’Gorman’s mural, however, the reference was closer to Lutyen’s depiction of the British/Indian colonialist dichotomy, captured in the Viceroy’s House in Delhi. 127. With his mural, Rivera called for the merging of the (Latin American) artistic and (U.S.) technological expressions of the New World. Historian Jeffrey Belnap has noted how with this mural “Rivera developed a cultural model in which he ar-

gued that the world-historical destiny of the Americas lay in the dialectical fusion of these two systems, a fusion that would internalize the technological modernity of the machine within Greater America’s indigenous tradition” (Belnap, “Diego Rivera’s Greater America,” 64). Rivera deflected the Latin-Anglo division with an invented figure, an indigenous technoid that he painted at the center of his mural. This technoid was the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, depicted as a “half-stone, half-machine” figure, a “cyborg,” an organism with technologically enhanced abilities (ibid.). The stark juxtaposition of Indian culture and North American technology as a form of fusion made sense to Rivera, but it recalled earlier representations of the North and South as civilization/tropics or technology/raw materials. Given Rivera’s background, he may have been referencing José Enrique Rodó’s depiction of the Shakespearean characters Caliban and Ariel. In his book Ariel, published in 1900, Rodó proposes that two characters from The Tempest exemplify this duality. Ariel, the hopeful sprite, represented Latin America, and Caliban, the materialist, represented North America. However, in Rivera’s hemispheric model, the indigenous being was visibly strengthened by North American technological forces, and vice versa, transformation and fusion being the underlying requirement. 128. Description of the School of Tomorrow, HFP. 129. Congressman González had been assured that the InterAmerican Education Center was a high priority. Eugenia Davix to the Educational Exhibits Committee, March 2, 1966, HFP.

130. Description of “¡Gozar!” by John Kriken, HFP. 131. Keller, “HemisFair ’68,” 50.

Epilogue 1. Pease, “Borderline Justice/States of Emergency,” 89. 2. A far better solution would involve U.S. officials working with existing border towns to deal with their borders on a city-bycity basis. A coalition of Texas mayors was formed in 2007, representing cities from Brownsville to El Paso, to try to stop the fence project, claiming it presented an intrusion in their way of life. 3. New York Times, June 18, 2006. 4. Gruesz, “Gulf of Mexico System,” 491–492. 5. Johnson, “Renaissance German Cosmographers,” 7. Also, see O’Gorman, Invention of America (1961). 6. An effort to combine the U.S. Latino and the Latin American into a single entity is also seen in the political advocacy group the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Although LULAC is not a hemispherically oriented institution, the legal cases that have consumed its activities have focused on Latinos and Latin American immigrants. 7. Hinton, Historic Houston Streets, 12. 8. Castro-Klarén, “Framing Pan-Americanism,” 44. 9. Meeting on September 2, 1965, between Dingwall, Freymann, and Powell to discuss the Bureau of International Expositions presentation, which would take place on May 10, 1965, HFP.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Archives AAMA AICA BECA

BGC

BL CD

CHC CML

CMLA

CWTL DHS DRMP

DSNC

EDSP

FIUA FLWA

GASP

HAC

HFAD

HFP

HMSF HNOC HWAC

JFKL JLSC

LA84A

Alvar Aalto Museum and Archives, Jyväskylä, Finland Art Institute of Chicago Archives The Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Archives and Resource Center, Buffalo, New York Bel Geddes Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley Chalfant Drawings, National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States, Washington, D.C. Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Archives, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic Charlton W. Tebeau Library of Florida History, Miami Dallas Historical Society Diego Rivera Mural Project, City College of San Francisco Donald S. Nelson Collection, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas at Austin Edward Durell Stone Papers, University of Arkansas, Special Collections Florida International University Archives, Miami Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona George A. Smathers Papers, 1934–1969, University of Florida Special Collections, Gainesville HemisFair Archival Collection, University of Texas San Antonio Library The Hugh Ferriss Architectural Drawings and Papers Collection, Avery Library and Archives, Columbia University HemisFair Papers, Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio Historical Museum of South Florida, Miami The Historic New Orleans Collection Harry Weese Associates Collection, 1952–1978, Chicago History Museum John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts The Josep Lluís Sert Collection, Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University LA 84 Foundation Archives, Los Angeles

LIKC

LOC MBAD

MBP

MOMA

NOPL NYPL NYUA OMPC

PAHOA

PPCP

PRA SAF

SEAA

SL

SLHP

SLLA TRA

UBC UWA WFIUA

WMP YUA

Louis I. Kahn Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania Library of Congress, Drawings and Prints Collection Marcel Breuer Architectural Drawings and Sketches, Syracuse University Special Collections Marcel Breuer Papers, 1920–1986, Smithsonian Archives of American Art Museum of Modern Art, Architectural and Design Collection, New York City New Orleans Public Library, Special Collections New York Public Library, Special Collections New York University Archives Original Movie Poster Resource Collection, 1940– 1962, Long Island University Library Pan-American Health Organization Archives, Washington, D.C. Paul Philippe Cret Papers, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania The Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress State Archives of Florida, Inter-American Center Authority Records, Tallahassee Southeastern Architectural Archives, Tulane University, New Orleans Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University Spessard L. Holland Papers, University of Florida, Smathers Library State Library of Louisiana Archives, Baton Rouge Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site Foundation Archives, Buffalo, New York University of Buffalo, Special Collections University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison Wolfsonian-Florida International University Archives, Miami Beach William McKinley Papers, Library of Congress Yale University Archives, New Haven, Connecticut

Newspapers Chicago Tribune (also Chicago Daily Tribune) Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA) Cranford Citizen and Chronicle (Cranford, NJ)

Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA) Dixie (Jacksonville, FL) Dodatek Na Niedziele (Chicago, IL) El Heraldo de Brownsville (Brownsville, TX) El Mercurio (New Orleans, LA) El Misisipí (New Orleans, LA) La Época (San Antonio, TX) The Guardian (London) La Prensa (San Antonio, TX) Listín Diario (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) Los Angeles Times Maryland Bulletin Miami Daily News Miami Herald Miami News Miami Sunday News Miami Tribune New York Daily Tribune New York Herald New York Times Philadelphia Inquirer Rochester Herald San Antonio Express and News The Times (London) Washington Daily News

Magazines and Journals The American Architect The American Architect and Building News American Journal of Progress The Architectural Annual Architectural Record Architecture L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui The Atlantic Monthly Bulletin The Century: A Popular Quarterly El Economista Internacional Florida Architect Florida Architecture and Allied Arts Greater Buffalo Harper’s Weekly The Journal of American Industries LIFE Louisiana Life The Manufacturer and Builder Monthly Bulletin The Nation

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Saturday Evening Post Science Scientific American

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INDEX

Italic page numbers refer to figures and tables. Aalto, Alvar, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 107, 114, 124–125, 126–127 El Abrazo ritual, ix, ix, x–xi, x, xii, 205n5 Acosta y Lara, Horacio, 113, 115, 118, 119, 119, 124, 133 Adams, Franklin, 109, 216–217n25 Adams, John Quincy, 203 Adams, Phyllis, 226n97 Adee, Alvey A., 213n12 African Union, 8 Alamo (Misión de San Antonio de Valero): and Battle of Flowers parade, 181; and HemisFair themes, 196; images of, 187; “Remember the Alamo,” 195; Spain’s establishment of, 182 All-American coin, 215n80 Allen, Woody, 225n73 Alliance for Progress, xix, 154, 164 Alliance of Pan American Round Tables, xi Alofsin, Anthony, 101 Álvarez Pedroso, Armando, 222n173 American Exhibitors’ Association, 49 American Exposition (1883), Boston, Massachusetts, 207n25 American Exposition Company, 27–28 American House, Paris, France, 215n80 American Institute of Architects (AIA), 100, 110 americanismo, 9 Americas Society, New York City, 11 Amigos de las Américas (Houston), xix, 202 Anderson, Alexander D., 26–27, 34, 65, 208n50, 209n63 Antigua, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 205n3 Aparicio, Frances R., 84 Architects’ Collaborative, The (TAC), 185 Area Relief Fund (ARF) grant, 166 Argentina: Barret serving in, 70; Buchanan in ministerial post, 54; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; and Christ the Redeemer of the Andes statue, 129; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse inauguration attendance, 103; and Cotton States and International Exposition, 208n45; cuisine to be featured at Interama, 171; Exposición Continental Sud-Americana, 28, 207n25, 208n33; and Exposición

Histórico-Americana, 210n101; First Pan-American Highway Conference, xviii; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 121, 219n100; Helper in ministerial post, 34; and Interama, 224n61; and Mercosur, 200; New York World’s Fair pavilion, 2, 205nn2–3; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; as outside of tropics, 82; Pan-American Architecture Congresses in, 100; and PanAmerican Exposition, 52, 62, 212n163; Pan-American Games held in, xviii, 211n128; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and Pan-American Highway, 222n2, 223n20; Pan-American Sporting Games held in, 12, 14; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57 Argentina Pavilion, New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 2, 205n2 Armstrong, William T. L., 72, 80 Arnaz, Desi, 12, 152–153, 199 Arreola, Daniel D., 181 Art Deco, 106, 151, 183 Arte Público Press, 9 Arthur, Chester A., 210n103 Artigas, José, memorial, 98 Art Museum of the Americas, 11, 96, 206n25 Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 8 Atkins, George Pope, 105, 206n20 AULA: Architecture and Urbanism in Las Américas ( journal), 202–203 Austin, Texas, 153 Australia, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Austria: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116 Avenida de las Américas, Houston, Texas, xix, 202 Avenue of the Americas, New York City, xviii, xix, 6, 153–154, 153 Avery, Isaac W., 208n45 Bacon, Mardges, 218n80 Bacon, Robert, 213n12 Badger, Reid, 48 Bahamas, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Balaguer, Joaquín Antonio, 144, 147 Ball, Lucille, 12, 152–153, 199 Barbados, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Barbuda, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29

Barnes, Edward L., 185 Barragán, Luis, 185 Barrett, John: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 216–217n25; and Pan-American Society, xvii, 99, 205n6; and Pan-American Union Building, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76–77, 78, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 87–90, 93, 100; as Pan-American Union director-general, xi, 104–105; Pan-American University, Miami, 150 Bay of Pigs invasion, 154, 222n14 Beaux-Arts style: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 106; and Pan-American Exposition, 60; and PanAmerican Union Building, 68, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80. See also École des Beaux-Arts Beck, Raphael: and Pan-American Exposition logo, 62, 63; A Phantasy of Pan-America, 63 Béjar, Feliciano, 185 Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 223n18, 224n44 Bel Geddes, Norman, “Futurama” exhibit, 141, 141, 164 Belgium, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Belize: and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 207n17 Belluschi, Pietro, 163, 185, 222n12 Belmont, Perry, 36 Belnap, Jeffrey, 226–227n127 Bénard, Émile, 84 Benlliure, José Luis, 214n72 Bernstein, Leonard, 165 Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, 178 Bigot, Paul, 120, 121 Bill, Max, 219n106 Bingham, James, 165, 224n51 Biscayne Bay: and Christo, 178; and Interama, 149, 154, 156, 160, 165, 167; and Pan-American Exposition Building, 156 Blaine, James G., 43–44, 48, 206n10, 213n12 Bolívar, Simón (the Liberator): death of, 206n8; Jamaica Letter, xvii, 4; and latinidad, 206n23; as the Liberator, 4, 30; memorial and plaza, 96–97, 98, 215n75; monument in Central Park, xviii, 49, 211n121; and Pan-American concept, vii, viii, 4, 9, 203; and Pan-American Union Building, 80, 93 Bolivia: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; and Pan-American Exposition, 52, 212n163; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; proposed residential units at Interama, 171

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Bolotin, Norman, 47 borderlands, vii–viii, ix, 11, 150, 182, 190, 199–200, 202, 205n3, 227n2 Born, Esther, 220n108 Bracero Program, 153 Brazil: architecture students’ protest on Modernism, 135; Brazilian Pavilion renamed Monroe Palace, xvii, 206n6; and Carrère, 70; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117, 121, 128; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition stage-two jury, xviii; cuisine to be featured at Interama, 171; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 121, 219n100; and Hastings, 55; and HemisFair, 184, 185; and Interama, 169, 224n61; Kelsey on, 130; and Mercosur, 200; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 2–3, 2, 158, 205n3; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; as outside of tropics, 82; PanAmerican Architecture Congress in, 100; and Pan-American Exposition, 52, 212n163; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and PanAmerican Monument proposal, 215n74; and Pan-American Railway, xvii, 208n52; and Pan-American Union Building design competition, 71; and Pan-American Union Building inauguration, 96; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209nn57–58; and World’s Columbian Exhibition, 47; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27 “Brazil Builds” exhibition (1942), Museum of Modern Art, 220n108, 222n16 Brazil Pavilion, New York World’s Fair (1939–1940) (Niemeyer and Costa), 2–3, 2, 158 Breuer, Marcel: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 219n106; and Interama, 152, 155, 166, 166, 169, 171, 172, 174, 224n61 Brinker, John M., 49 British Guiana, and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29 British Honduras. See Belize Brotherhood of North American Indians building (Kelsey), xvii, 88, 214n55 Browne, Robert Bradford, 164, 165, 166, 224n61 Bryan, William Jennings, viii, xviii, 10–11, 150, 155, 201, 213n12, 222n1 Bryggmann, Erik, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 124 Buchanan, William I., 48, 54, 55, 65, 96, 222n10 Buck, Samuel H., 28–29, 31 Bullrich, Francisco, 220n108

Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) rules, 179, 187–188, 189, 190, 226n119 Burke, E. A., 27 Burle Marx, Roberto, 184, 185 Burnham, Daniel H., 32, 45, 48, 54, 55 Burn’s Cottage, 213n26 Burton, Charles, 42 Cabot, John, 37 California Pacific International Exposition (1935), San Diego, California, Pan-American Plaza, xviii Calle Ocho Festival, Little Havana, Miami, 179, 179 Cambridge Seven, 225n73 Canada: and American House, 215n80; and CCRFTA, 200; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; and Free Trade Area of the Americas, 225n74; and hemispheric fairs, 21, 29, 36, 52, 54, 61, 176, 211n135; and Interama, 176; and lack of PanAmerican identity, 11; and NAFTA, 200; and Pan-American Exposition, 52, 54, 56, 61, 64, 211n135; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and Pan-American Highway, 185; and Pan-American Union Building, 79, 82, 93; and Pan-American Union membership, 15, 15, 93, 206n29; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n58; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 44, 47, 211n109 Candela, Félix, 185 Carbonell, Pedro, 108 Carbonell Seijas, Teófilo, 105, 144 Caribbean: “Caribs,” 47; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 123, 130; and dollar diplomacy, 105; and Free Trade Area of the Americas, 225n74; and Interama, 169, 169, 172, 224n61; and international mail service, 155; and PanAmerican architecture, 4; and Pan-American Exposition, 49, 52, 61; and Pan-American Union Building, 84, 88, 89–90, 100; and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n58; and U.S.–Latin American relations, 20, 49, 62; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 47, 64 Caribbean Legion, 143–144 CARICOM, 200 Carnegie, Andrew, 67, 67, 68, 71, 72, 88, 214n55 Carrasco, Gonzalo, 207n22 La Carrera Panamericana (The Pan-American Car Race), Mexico (1950–1954), xix, 12 La Carrera Panamericana (The Pan-American Car Race), Mexico (1988), xix Carrère, John Merven: and Pan-American Exposition, 55, 70, 212n151; and Pan-American-themed projects, vii, 3; and PanAmerican Union Building, 70, 72, 96, 109, 213n22

Carrère, John Merven, with Thomas Hastings: Alcázar Hotel, 223n35; Ponce de León Hotel, 223n35 Carvalho, Flavio de Rezende, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 121, 123, 123, 124 Cary, George, 55 Casey, Edward Pearce, 72, 213n24 Casita, 96 Castro-Klarén, Sara, 9, 203 Cayuga Island. See Pan-American Exposition proposal (1899), Cayuga Island, New York CCRFTA, 200 Çelik, Zeynep, 6, 164 Centennial Exhibition (1876), Philadelphia, vii The Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade (Laredo), 202 Central America: and DR-CAFTA, 200; and Pan-American Exposition, 52, 54; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 44 Centro Cultural de las Americas (Tucson), xix, 202 Centro de Pan Americano, 158 Century 21 Exposition (1962), Seattle: and Dingwall, 184; monorail, 148, 149; Space Needle, 148, 149, 166 Century of Progress Exposition (1933), Chicago, Illinois, xviii, 105, 132, 139, 139, 165 Céstero, Tulio M., 114 Cetto, Max, 220n109 Champlain, Samuel de, 93 Chávez-Silverman, Susana, 84 Chicago, Illinois: and U.S. Latinos, 222n8. See also World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), Chicago, Illinois Chicago Tribune Competition (1923), 106, 109, 116, 117, 147 Chile: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; and Christ the Redeemer of the Andes statue, 129; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117, 125, 217n32; and Cotton States and International Exposition, 208n45; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and Interama, 224n61; and International Conference of the American Republics, 107; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 205n3; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; as outside of tropics, 82; PanAmerican Architecture Congress in, 100; Pan-American congresses in, 206n8; and Pan-American Exposition, 52, 61, 62, 212n164; and Pan-American Trade Mart, 159; and PanAmerican Union membership, 15; and Park of the Americas, 185; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; proposed residential units at Interama, 171 China Clipper (film), xviii, 96 Christo, 178 Christ the Redeemer of the Andes statue, 129, 133–134, 133

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Churrigueresque style, 93–94, 211n121 Cine Las Américas (Austin), xix, 202 Cisneros, Henry, 195 City Beautiful movement, 48, 73 Clarke, Gilmore D., 211n121 Cleveland, Grover, 206n10 Clubb, John Scott, “Opportunity knocks” illustration, 4 Coatlicue, 193, 227n127 Coleman, Will H., 41–42 Collier, C. A., 30 Colombia: Barret serving in, 70; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; and Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, 213n5; and Exposición HistóricoAmericana, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 121, 219n100; and Interama, 224n48; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; Pan-American Architecture Congress in, 100; and Pan-American Exposition, 52; and Pan-American Flight of the Columbus Lighthouse, 221n167; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and Pan-American Union membership, 5, 15, 81, 213n11; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; proposed residential units at Interama, 171; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47, 210–211n109 colonialism: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 130; and HemisFair, 192, 226n126; and hemispheric fairs, 29, 61, 164; and Pan-American Union Building, 69–70, 76, 80, 94, 96, 214n70; and quadricentennial celebrations, 42–43, 48; and tropics, 69–70; and world’s fairs, 22 Columbus, Christopher: discovery narrative, 20, 21, 32, 48, 50, 91, 96, 121, 137, 202; and hemispheric projects, 203; and PanAmerican Union Building, 69, 91, 93, 96; and quadricentennial celebrations, 6, 27, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 47, 48, 208n53; quincentenary celebration of voyage, 215n1; remains of, 2, 108, 114–115, 147, 216n24, 216n25, 222n173; signature of, 137; site of landing, 106–107 Columbus Day, xviii, 144, 216n12, 223n19. See also Pan-American Day Columbus Lighthouse, Cape Isabela, Dominican Republic, proposal for, xviii, 108 Columbus Mausoleum, Santo Domingo Cathedral, 108, 108 Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: aerial view of, 102; building of, xviii, 103, 138, 144, 147, 222n173; Christian religious symbolism of, 103, 104, 105, 140, 144, 147; Columbus’ remains in, 103, 147; commemorative stamp, 140, 140; cross as theme of, 104, 105, 143; cross-shaped beacon, 103, 103, 105, 109, 140;

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funding of, 105–106, 109, 113, 116, 118, 121, 131–132, 140, 141, 144, 219n100; Great Canyon of, 144, 146; inauguration of, xix, 103, 106, 215n1; journal of, 144, 221–222n173; New York World’s Fair diorama, xviii, 142, 157–158; New York World’s Fair model, 142; and Pan-American concept, 106, 144; Pan-American Flight for, 140, 221n167; Pan-American Park, 128; and Pan-American Union, 140; photograph of, 145; replica displayed at Century of Progress International Exposition, xviii, 105, 139, 139; Salas de las Vírgenes, 144, 222n174; and Santo Domingo’s primacía, 106, 216nn15–16, 222n173; separate units of, 128; site development, 141, 143; transformation and marketing of, 104; and U.S. imperialism, 106; Wall of Shame, 103; windows, 146 Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition: airport design, 104, 114, 124, 128, 130, 147, 220n114; in chronology, xviii; and cross theme, 112, 128, 133, 134, 137; and crypt of Columbus’ remains, 2, 108, 123, 124, 222n173; entries for, 107, 114, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 123, 124–125, 124, 126–127, 128, 129, 132–133, 133, 163, 224n42; funding of, xviii, 105, 107, 115, 131; Gleave’s design for, 103, 105, 106, 109, 112, 118, 128, 132–135, 137–141, 144, 147, 156, 184, 221–222n173; global participation in, 116; and hemispheric unity, 103, 104, 123, 220n121; historicist elements in designs for, 104, 105, 113, 140, 147; and Hood, 106, 110, 113, 115, 118, 119, 132, 134, 218n56; iconography of, 105, 113, 123, 133, 135, 137, 138; and Kelsey, 6, 70, 104–105, 106, 107–121, 115, 123–125, 128–132, 133, 134, 135, 147, 217n43, 217n50, 219nn91–93, 220n108, 220n121, 220n124; lack of recognition for, 147; Latin American participation in, 116–117, 116, 117, 128, 131, 218n71, 220n108; Levitan’s proposal, 109, 109; and lighthouse theme, 107–108, 111, 112, 131, 157, 176; Madrid exhibition, 109, 113, 114, 119–120, 119, 131, 219n91; Modernist elements in designs for, 104, 105, 106, 111, 124, 138, 139, 147; Old World–New World dichotomy in designs, 107, 121, 123; and Pan-American concept, vii, 110, 111, 112, 114, 121, 125, 128, 130–131, 140, 147, 220n121; and Pan-American Union, 1–2, 104–105, 106, 107, 109, 113, 116, 138, 217n28, 217n32; proposed locations for, 108, 109, 110, 111–112, 113, 216n22; and Pulliam, 105, 106, 107, 108–109, 114, 131, 139, 140, 141, 214n43, 215n6, 216n21, 216–217n25; registration phase, 110, 219–220n106; Rome exhibition, 120, 131, 219nn92–93; and Rowe, 104, 111, 114, 115, 117, 120, 128, 130, 131, 134, 138, 215n6, 217n50, 219n92, 220n108; stage-one competition, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110–118, 217n50; stage-one honorable mentions, 118, 120, 121, 128, 218–219n81; stage-one jury, xviii, 107, 113–114, 115, 115, 117–119, 119, 120, 121, 218n54; stage-one site plan, 112, 113, 117–118; stage-one winners, 118–119, 120, 121, 128, 219n83; stage-two competition, 104, 105, 106, 110, 113, 120, 128–132; stage-two jury, xviii, 107, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 138; stage-two site plan, 128–129, 129, 135; and tropical conditions,

110–111; tropical themes in design for, 106, 123, 130; two-stage format, 110, 217n28; and U.S.–Latin American relations, 105, 106, 107, 123 Commercial Bureau of American Republics, xvii, 5, 20, 38, 65, 206n10, 206n29, 213n5 Commercial Directory of the American Republics, 50 Community Facilities Administration (CFA), 166 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, 100 Connally, John, 188, 226n108 Cook, Walter, 55 Cordonnier, Louis, 116 Corner, James, 200 Costa, Lúcio, with Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil Pavilion, 2–3, 2, 158 Costa Rica: and CCRFTA, 200; and Central American Court of Justice, 68; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and national expositions, 208n44; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; and Pan-American Exposition, 212n163; and Pan American Round Table, xi; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; and Trujillo, 144; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 207n17 Cotton States and International Exposition (1895), Atlanta, Georgia, 30, 49, 208n45 Crescini, Giovanni, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 121, 122, 124 Cret, Paul Philippe: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 107, 132, 134, 216n20, 219n106; Hall of Science, 165; Kelsey’s partnership with, 71, 74, 77, 78, 88, 213n34; and Pan-American-themed projects, 68. See also Pan-American Union Building, Washington, D.C. (Cret and Kelsey) critical regionalism, 220n121 Cruchaga Tocornal, Miguel, 217n32 Cuba: and Caribbean Legion, 143–144; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117, 128, 130, 216n25, 220n106; and Commercial Bureau of American Republics, 206n29; and communism, 154; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and Interama, 169, 177–178, 224n61; and Miami tourism, 222n14; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 205n3; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; Pan-American Architecture Congress in, 100; and Pan-American concept, 81, 84; and Pan-American Exposition, 58, 60, 61, 62, 212n160, 212n164; and Pan-American Exposition proposal, Cayuga Island, 54; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; relations with U.S., 154, 164; and

remains of Columbus, 115, 216n25; and Sert, 225n69; and Spanish-American War, 49, 54; and Trujillo, 144; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47 Cuban-American refugees, 3, 154, 165, 166, 177, 178, 181, 222n14 Cuban Americans: hospitals founded by, 11, 177; and Interama, 154, 164–165, 166, 177–178, 178–179, 195, 224n48; and latinidad, 206n23; and Pan-American University, 150; television portrayals of, 152; and two Floridas, 222n13 Cuban Freedom Flights, 177, 178 Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act of 1966, 154 Cuban Revolution, 164 Cuellar, Henry, x Curtis, William Eleroy: expedition to South America, 210n103; and Exposición Hispano-Americana, 43; General Grant on a Banana Plantation, xvi, 1, 67; and International Bureau of American Republics, 70; as journalist, 211n117; and New York skyscraper, 222n10; and Pan-American Company, 48; and Pan-American concept, 65; as Pan-American promoter, 8; and Pan-American Union, 1; and raw materials of Latin America, 17; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 43–44, 47–48, 213n12; on Wright, 101 Czechoslovakia, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 118 Dahl, George L., 132–133 Danner, R. G., 159 Darlington, Fred W., 85 Daughters of the American Revolution: Constitution Hall, 213n24; Memorial Continental Hall, 209n63, 213n24, 215n76 Davis, Mike, 104 Dawes, Rufus, 139 Day of Indigenous Resistance, 216n12 Day of the Americas, 216n12 Deaton, Charles, 225n73 de Castro, Pedro A., 121 Degas, Edgar, Portraits in an Office: The Cotton Exchange, 31, 31 De Gelleke, Peter, 72, 79–80 Delano, William Adams, 219n106 Delaware Park, Buffalo, New York, 54–55 del Monte y Tejada, Antonio, xvii, 107, 108, 216n22 del Moral, Enrique, 220n109 del Valle, José Cecilio, memorial, 98 Denmark, and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101 de Palacio Elissagne, Albert, 41, 41 Depew, Chauncey M., 38, 48 Dewey, George, 58 Dexter, Edwin Grant, 222n1 Díaz, Porfirio, 62, 211n112 Dillon, Arthur, 72

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Dingwall, Ewen C., 183–184, 188, 226n119 Dinwiddie, John Ekin, 219n106 diplomacy: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 114; dollar diplomacy, 105; and expositions, 29, 34; and Interama, 155, 160, 165, 166, 195; and Pan-American architecture, 8; and Pan-American Union Building, 67, 71, 74, 78, 91, 93, 95, 96; and Pan-American Union Pavilion, 158 Disney, Walt, 225n68 Disneyland, 226n124 Disney World, 178, 225n68 Dixon, Lawrence Murray, 222n17 Dominica, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Dominican Republic: and “Caribbean Legion,” 143–144; centennial of independence from Spain, 143; and Century of Progress Exposition, 139, 139; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Ciudad Trujillo, 106; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 130, 217n32; and Commercial Bureau of American Republics, 206n29; and dollar diplomacy, 105; and DR-CAFTA, 200; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; Feria de la Paz y la Confraternidad del Mundo Libre, 164; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 109, 121, 141, 144, 219n100; and furniture for Pan-American Union Building, 93, 94; and Interama, 169; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 205n3; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; and Pan-American Exposition, 61, 212n164; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; political coup in, 131; and Pulliam, 106, 107, 131, 214n43; and Spanish-American War of 1898, 216n11; stamp showing Columbus Memorial Lighthouse and airplane, 140, 140; and tourism, 108, 144, 147. See also Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic Donaldson, Thomas, 38 Downing, Andrew Jackson, 209n59 DR-CAFTA, 200 Drew, Jane, 111, 217n43 Drummond, Henry, 217n42 Duke of Veragua. See Veragua, Duke of Dutch Guiana, and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29 Eames, Charles, 185, 213n22 Eames, Charles, with Philip Johnson, Festival of the Cities of the New World, xix, 98, 99, 196, 197, 215n75 École des Beaux-Arts: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 105, 132; and Cret, 71; and Pan-American architecture, 100. See also Beaux-Arts style Ecuador: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; First Inter-

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continental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas, xix, 214n55; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and national expositions, 208n44; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 205n3; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; and Pan-American Exposition, 52, 61, 212n164; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; proposed residential units at Interama, 171; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27 Eiffel, Gustave, 41 Eiffel Tower, 41, 109, 124 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 163, 224n49 El Caracol, Chichén Itzá, México, 125 Ellington, Douglas D., 107 El Mercurio, 10, 10 El Misisipí, 206n23 El Salvador: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and Pan-American Exposition, 212n163; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 207n17 El Vuelvo Panamericano Pro Faro de Colón, xviii Emory, Frederic, 213n12 Emory Roth and Sons, 222n12 England: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; stage-one winners of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 118; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 EPCOT, 179, 223n18, 225n73 Esenwein, August C.: and Pan-American Exposition, 55, 60, 61; site plan, Pan-American Exposition (1899), 50, 51, 78 Europe: and commerce, 36; and expositions, 28, 208n33; and Pan-American Exposition, 63; publications on designing in foreign environmental conditions, 110, 217n42; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 European Union, 8, 215n80 Expo ’67, Montreal, Canada, 225n68 Exposición Continental Sud-Americana (1882), Buenos Aires, 28, 207n25, 208n33 Exposición del IV Centenario del Descubrimiento de América, Madrid, Spain, 210n91 Exposición Histórico-Americana (1892), Madrid, Spain, xvii, 34, 37, 38, 42–43, 43, 47, 54, 210n96, 210n97, 210n101

Exposición Histórico-Europea (1892–1893), Madrid, Spain, 42, 210n90 Exposición Ibero-Americana (1929), Spain, 114, 119, 215n1, 218n57 Exposición Nacional de Panamá (1915), Panama City, Panama, 81 expositions: Bureau of International Expositions rules, 179, 187–188, 189, 190, 226n119; and diplomacy, 29, 34; floating expositions, 28, 208n35; and industrialization, 21; and Pan-American concept, vii; popularity of, 22; and U.S.Latin American relations, 20, 21, 23, 27–31, 36, 65. See also hemispheric fairs; world’s fairs Exposition Universelle (1867), Paris, France, 22–23, 207n8 Exposition Universelle (1889), Paris, France, 41 Exposizione Italo-Americana (1892), Genoa, Italy, 210n90 Faber, Sebastiaan, 206n12 Farnham, Sally James, xviii, 94, 211n121 El Faro de Colón (magazine), xix Feria de la Paz y la Confraternidad del Mundo Libre (Fair of Peace and Fraternity of the Free World), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 164 Ferrati, Bruno, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 121, 122, 163, 224n42 Ferre, Maurice A., 195 Ferree, Barr, 42 Ferriss, Hugh: Avenue of the Americas proposal, 153, 154; and Interama, xix, 154, 159–163, 164, 183, 190, 192, 222n17, 223n32; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 154, 222n17; and Pan-American-themed projects, vii, 3; renderings of Interama, 160–163, 160, 161, 162, 163; and United Nations Headquarters, 154, 160, 161, 162 Ferris Wheel, 47 Festival of the Cities of the New World, xix, 98, 99, 196, 197, 215n75 Fifth International Congress of American States of 1923, Santiago de Chile, xviii, 81, 107 film, Pan-American concept in, xviii, 11–12, 13, 96, 152, 165, 199, 199 First Intercontinental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas, Quito, Ecuador, xix, 214n55 First International Conference of American States of 1889–1890: and Blaine, 206n10; in chronology, xvii; and Columbus Library, 38; and Commercial Bureau of American Republics, 213n5; and Curtis, 210n103; and model of equality, 61; monument proposed for, 215n74; and Pan-American concept, 81, 206n20; and quadricentennial, 36; U.S. in leadership role, 5, 68 First Pan-American Congress of Architecture, Montevideo, Uruguay (1920), xviii, 100, 100 First Pan-American Highway Conference, Buenos Aires, Argentina (1925), xviii, 223n20

Flagler, Henry M., 212n151, 223n35 Fleming, Thomas, 62 Florida International University, 225n73 Flying Down to Rio (film), xviii, 12 Ford, Isaac Nelson, 217n42 Ford, O’Neil: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 219n106; and HemisFair, 184, 185, 186–187, 195, 226n97; and La Villita, 151, 186; and Pan-American-themed projects, 3; Presbyterian Pan-American School design, 225n84; and Tower of the Americas, 166, 187 Foster, John w., 213n12 Fox, William C., 213n12 Frampton, Kenneth, 220n121 France: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; stage-one winners of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 118, 120; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Franklin MacVeagh House, 96 Free Trade Area of the Americas, Miami, Florida, proposal for, xix, 225n74 French Guiana: and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Freymann, Carlos, 185, 226n119 Fry, Maxwell, 111, 217n43 fucu, 140, 147 Furbish, Clinton, 213n12 Gaines, James M., 185, 188–189 Galería Las Américas, Los Angeles, California, xix Galéria Las Américas, Santa Monica, California, 202 Gálvez, Bernardo de, statue, 98 Garnier, Tony, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 107, 116, 120, 124, 125, 125 Gateway to the Americas International Bridge, Laredo, Texas, ix–x, 6, 151, 205n1, 222n4 Gateway to the Americas titles, 5, 151, 152, 155, 164, 177, 195, 202, 225n74 Gaudí, Antoni, 206n30 Geddes, Patrick, Outlook Tower, 209n74 Geiger, August, 156 General Secretariat Building, Washington, D.C., 96, 98 George Washington’s Birthday Celebration, Laredo, Texas, ix, ix, x, x, xii, 205n2 Gerbi, Antonello, 206n5 Germany: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 121; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; stage-

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one winners of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 118; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Gibbons, James Cardinal, 67, 67 Gilbert, Cass, 213n22 Ginsberg, Moses, 219n106 Girard, Alexander, “El Encanto de un Pueblo,” 193 Gleave, Joseph Lea: aerial view of revised model, 137; celebrating win after stage one, 132, 132; close-up of revised model, 137; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 103, 105, 106, 109, 111, 118, 128, 132–135, 137–141, 144, 147, 156, 184, 221–222n173; competition rendering of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 145; death of, 144; post-1933 Columbus Memorial Lighthouse model, 138; replica model for Century of Progress Exposition, 139; stage-one competition entry for Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 135; stage-two competition model, 136; stage-two competition perspective, 136 Glenny, Alice Russell, Coral Harp, 64 Goeritz, Mathias, 185 Golden Gate International Exposition (1939–1940), San Francisco, California, 192, 226–227n127 Goldman, Mark, 60–61 Gómez-Sicre, José, 185 Gonzales, Mario F., 185 González, Aníbal, 114 González, Henry B., 154, 183, 184, 185, 188, 194, 227n129 González, Robert A., 203 González Sánchez, Guillermo, 164 Good Government League (GGL), 183 Good Neighbor policy, xviii, 140, 152, 154, 155, 158 Goodwin, Philip L., 222n16 Grafton, Edward, 225n73 Grant, Ulysses S., vii, xxii, 1, 67 Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition (1937), Dallas, Texas, xviii, 151, 182, 183, 193 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations (1851), London, England, Crystal Palace, 22, 25 Great Wall designs commissioned by the New York Times, xix. See also U.S.–Mexico Border Fence “The Great Wall” (Moss), 198, 200–201, 201 Greece, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Green, Edward B., 55 Grenada, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Gresham, Walter Q., 213n12 Griswold, Florence Terry, xi Gropius, Walter, 222n12 Grossman, Elizabeth, 74, 76, 78, 213n21 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 10 Guadaloupe, and Pan-American Exposition, 212n163 Guatemala: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116;

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Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; and Pan-American Exposition, 212n163; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; and Trujillo, 144; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 207n17 Guerra, Henry A., Jr., 184–185, 192, 194, 225n89 Guilbert, Albert, 120 Guyana, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Haiti: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 130; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and Interama, 169; and Pan-American Exposition, 212n163; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47 Hammond, Ogden H., 119 Hansen, Oskar J., 132 Harmon, Arthur Loomis, 219n106 Harris, Jerome K., 183 Harrison, Lawrence E., 16 Harrison, Wallace K., 161, 218n80 Harry, Milton, 224n62 Hastings, Thomas, 55, 72, 213n22 Hastings, Thomas, with John Merven Carrère: Alcázar Hotel, 223n35; Ponce de León Hotel, 223n35 The Havana-Madrid Show (film), 12 Hay, John, 213n12 Helguera, Pablo, xix, 202 Helmle, Corbett, and Harrison, 107 Helper, Hinton Rowan, vii, 34, 38, 208n52 HemisFair ’68, San Antonio, Texas: aerial view of partial model, 186; and colonialism, 192, 226n126; and consumer culture, 195–196; development of, 179–180, 182–188; Fiesta Island, 191; and Ford, 184, 185, 186–187, 195, 226n97; funding for, 179, 182, 183, 188; hostesses of, 193–194, 194; Interama compared to, 184, 192, 194; International Market, 192; International Sector, 190, 192; Las Plazas del Mundo, 191; Latin American Committee, 184–185; Latin American participation in, 189– 190; logo of, 190, 190, 194; map of fairgrounds, 191–192, 191; Mexican American involvement in, 3, 151, 152, 154, 180–181, 183–185, 186, 187, 188, 194, 195, 226n92; Migration Fountain and Plaza, 183, 191; and Modern representation, 3; monorail of, 191, 191; and Muskat, 225n67; neighborhood razed for, 182, 186–187, 194; opening of, xix; Organization of American

States Pavilion, 189, 189; and Pan-American architecture, 152, 154, 180, 184, 195, 196; and Pan-American concept, vii–viii, 3, 150, 152, 180, 188, 194; People-Actuated Music, 193; Plaza de Libertad, 184, 185, 189, 192, 226n119; poster for, 196, 196; protests against, 154, 182, 194; and representations of Latinos and Mexicans, 187–188; and River Walk, 191; School for Tomorrow, 193; El Teatro de Pantomima, 193; themes and subthemes of, 188–189, 190, 193, 194, 226n114; Tower of the Americas, 165–166, 187, 187, 188, 191, 226n106; United States Confluence Theater, 191, 191; and U.S.–Latin American relations, 154, 195; U.S. Pavilion, 183, 192, 193; Los Voladores de Papantla, 193 hemispheric currency, xvii, 215n80 hemispheric fairs: and Canada, 21, 29, 36, 52, 54, 61, 176, 211n135; and colonialism, 29, 61, 164; and commerce, 20, 21, 70; cultural iconography of, 69; developmentalist themes of, 30; and PanAmerican architecture, 20–21; and Pan-American concept, 164; popular themes of, 21, 30–31, 64, 104, 188; as variant of world’s fairs, 20; and Western Hemisphere, 6, 21, 28, 29, 49, 54, 159, 172 Heredia, José María, 49 Herrera, Roberto, 81 Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 184 Highway of the Americas, El Paso, Texas, 202 Hill, Benjamin R., 151 Hill, Billie, 181 Hill, Richmond C., 53 Hines, Thomas S., 48, 207n7 Hinton, Mark, 202 Hispanic Medical Center, 11 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 216n14, 220n108 Holden, Edward S., 212n162 Holland: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116 Honduras: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 217n32; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 144, 219n100; and national expositions, 208n44; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; and PanAmerican Exposition, 61, 62, 212n164; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 207n17 Hood, Raymond: and Century of Progress Exposition, 139; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 106, 110, 113, 115, 118, 119, 132, 134, 218n56, 219n106; and Wallace K. Harrison, 218n80; and Wright, 135 Hood, Raymond, with John Mead Howells, Chicago Tribune Competition, 106

Hoover, Herbert, xviii, 155 Hornbostel, Henry: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 120, 123, 124, 132; and Pan-American-themed projects, 3; and Pan-American Union Building, 72 Howard, John Galen, 55 Howe and Lescaze, 107 Howells, John Mead, 106 Huber, Leonard V., 22 Hungary: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116 Hunt, Ben B., 153 Hurricane of 1915, New Orleans, 20 Hurricane San Zenón, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 131–132 IBAR (International Bureau of American Republics) architectural competition (1907), xvii, 212–213n4 Ibarrola, Ramón, 25 Ibero-American Exposition (1929), Seville, Spain, 114, 119, 215n1, 218n57 ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites), 216n16 I Love Lucy (television show), 12, 152–153, 199 India, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 indigenous peoples: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 106, 123, 124, 215n1; and Exposición Hispano-Americana, 42, 43, 43, 54, 210n96; and HemisFair, 185, 188, 189; and hemispheric projects, 203; narratives of, 3, 80, 94, 100; and Pan-American Exposition, 63, 65; and Pan-American Union Building, 69, 79, 80–81, 85, 88, 91, 94, 96, 214n55; and quadricentennial fair proposals, 36–37; and quincentenary celebration of Columbus’ voyage, 215n1; and Rivera, 227n127; and “vanishing Indian” theory, 37; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47. See also pan-native themes; U.S. Native Americans Institute of Texan Cultures, 191, 193 Interama (Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center), Miami, Florida: aerial views of model, 174–175; Caribbean Pavilion, 169, 169, 172, 224n61; Center of the Americas, 162, 162; Ceremonial Plaza, 169, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 176; change in focus, 178, 225n73; and commerce, 155; Cuban American protests of, 154, 166, 179, 195; and Cuban exiles, 177; Cultural Area, 165, 167; design for, 12; and Ferriss, xix, 154, 159–163, 164, 183, 190, 192, 222n17, 223n32; Ferriss’s renderings of, 160–163, 160, 161, 162, 163; Freedom Tower, 165, 167, 167, 175, 176; funding for, 155, 156, 158, 163, 166, 177, 178; HemisFair ’68 compared to, 184; Hemisphere Hanging Gardens, 161, 161, 162; and hemispheric unity, 149, 164, 179, 194, 195; Industrial Area, 165, 167; International Area, 165, 166, 167, 167, 169, 171, 172, 224n62, 225n68; International Bazaar,

INDEX

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168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 176; and Modern movement, 3, 167, 177, 196; and Pan-American architecture, 154–155, 166, 167, 176, 195, 196, 223n18; and Pan-American concept, vii, 149, 152, 160, 161–162, 166, 167, 172, 194, 224n50; Parliamentary Meeting Center, 171, 172, 174; preliminary model, 166, 167; and Progress with Freedom theme, 164–165; proposed Tower of Freedom, 149, 150, 165, 167, 176; proposed underwater tunnel, 149, 149, 165; revival of, 154–155, 165; site of, 156; Special Projection Theater Area, 171, 172; spiral-themed proposals, 224n50; Spire, 161, 161, 162; Sports and Leisure Area, 167; Star Architects Phase proposals, xix; team of architects, 154, 156, 160, 163, 164, 166–167, 166, 169, 171–173, 176, 179, 223n21, 223n32, 224nn61–62; Tower of the Americas, 176; and tropical themes, 152, 160, 167, 172, 173–174, 195, 196, 223n35; and urban design, 155, 171–172, 177, 195; and U.S.–Latin American relations, 154, 164, 195; U.S. Pavilion, 165, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 224n62 Inter-America House, New York City, xviii, 2, 205n2 Inter-America House, San Francisco, California, xviii Inter-American Bank proposal, xvii Inter-American celebration of 1892 proposal, 34, 209n57 Inter-American Center Authority, xix, 159, 163, 164, 166, 171, 224n51. See also Interama (Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center), Miami, Florida Inter-American coin, xvii, 215n80 Inter-American Commission of Women, 87 Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center. See Interama (InterAmerican Cultural and Trade Center), Miami, Florida Inter-American Defense Board, 96 Inter-American Exposition proposal, Galveston, Texas, xvii, 225n78 Inter-American Highway, 151, 222n3 Inter-American Planning Society, xix, 215n78 Inter-American Trade Exposition proposal, Fort Worth, Texas, xviii, 225n78 Inter-American University, San Germán, Puerto Rico, xvii, 206n6 Inter-Development Bank, 97, 98, 100 International Bridge of the Americas, El Paso, Texas, 202 International Bureau of American Republics, xvii, 5, 43, 50, 65, 70, 210n103, 212–213n4, 213n11 International Conferences of American States, 5, 5, 65, 68. See also First International Conference of American States of 1889–1890 International Exhibition, Barcelona, Spain, 114, 119, 218n57 International style, 216n14 International Trade Exhibition (1925), New Orleans, Louisiana, xviii International Trade Fair and Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center proposal (1953), New Orleans, Louisiana, xix

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International Union of American Republics, xvii, 38, 206n10 Ireland, Alleyne, 217n42 Irwin, William, 49, 211n124 Isabella II (queen of Spain), 210n91 Italy: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 121, 130; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; and Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas proposal, 34; stage-one winners of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 118; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 It’s All True (film), xviii, 12 Izaguirre, Carlos, 217n32 Jackson, William Kenneth, 223n32 Jamaica: and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 207n17 Japan, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Jareño y Alarcón, Francisco, 210n91 Jarvis, Inocencia Flores, x Jarvis, Samuel Matthias, x–xi, 205n4 Jay, Robert, 38 Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Competition (St. Louis Gateway Arch), 162–163 Jenison, Edward Spencer, proposal for World’s Columbian Exposition, 38, 39, 41 John Paul II (pope), 103, 144 Johnson, Christine R., 202 Johnson, E. Kurtz, World Exposition of 1892 and Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas Exposition, 35, 35, 36, 209n60 Johnson, Lyndon B., 166 Johnson, Philip, and Modern architecture, 216n14 Johnson, Philip, with Charles Eames, Festival of the Cities of the New World, xix, 98, 99, 196, 197, 215n75 Juárez, Benito Pablo, statute, 98 Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge, Laredo, Texas, x Judson, Whitcomb L., project for monumental tower at World’s Columbian Exposition, 39, 39 Kahn, Louis I.: Erdman Dormitories, Bryn Mawr College, 173; and HemisFair, 185; and Interama, 152, 166, 166, 169, 171, 172– 173, 174, 177, 179, 224n61, 224–225n66; National Assembly building, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 172, 173; and Pan-American Union, 96, 214n71; Salk Institute, La Jolla, 173 Kahn, Louis I., with Isamu Noguchi, Levy Memorial Playground, 224n66 Kanellos, Nicolás, 9 Katavolos, William P., 185

Kellogg, Frank B., 113 Kelsey, Albert: and Brotherhood of North American Indians building, xvii, 88, 214n55; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 6, 70, 104–105, 106, 107–121, 115, 123–125, 128– 132, 133, 134, 135, 147, 217n43, 217n50, 219nn91–93, 220n108, 220n121, 220n124; Cret’s partnership with, 71, 74, 77, 78, 88, 213n34; death of, 144; on internationalism, 111, 131, 216n14; and Pan-American architecture, 68, 70, 81, 84–85, 88, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107, 195; and Pan-American Exposition, 60, 195; and Pan-American-themed projects, 3, 68; and Santo Domingo harbor development, 219n97. See also Pan-American Union Building, Washington, D.C. (Cret and Kelsey) Kelsey, Henrietta, 113 Kemmerer, Edwin W., xvii Kendall, John Smith, 29 Kennedy, John F., xix, 154, 164, 165, 166, 196, 224n49 Kiehnel, Richard, 156 Kimball, Francis H., 48, 153, 211n118 Kimball, Thomas R., 213n22 King, Henrietta Chamberlain, 225n84 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 194 Kinkel, Charles, and George R. Pohl, design for Chicago Columbia Tower, 40, 41 Kirk, Claude, 178 Knights of Columbus, 131, 216n25 Knott’s Berry Farm, 192, 226n124 Knox, Philander C., 213n12 Knudson, Adolphus Alvord, tower design, 37, 39, 41, 49, 88, 209n74 Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Espirito Santo Plaza tower, 225n74 Kriken, John, 193 Lai, Chee Kien, 70, 111 Laing, Christine, 47 La Rábida monastery, Huelva, Spain: and remains of Columbus, 222n173; replica for World’s Columbian Exposition, 44, 46, 47; and Whitney, 114, 115 Laredo, Texas: border culture of, ix–xii; The Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade, 202; Gateway to the Americas International Bridge, ix–x, 6, 151, 205n1, 222n4; George Washington’s Birthday Celebration, ix, ix, x, x, xii, 205n2 La Salle, Robert Cavalier de, 50, 211n137 Las Américas: and HemisFair, 179–197; and Pan-American concept, 6, 152–153, 202–203 Las Américas Museum of Art (St. Augustine), 202 Las Américas Premium Outlet, San Diego, California, xix Latin America: and Bolívar’s Pan-American concept, 4; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial

Lighthouse Competition participation, 116–117, 116, 117, 118, 128, 130, 131, 218n71, 220n108; and Exposición HistóricoAmericana, 43; and HemisFair, 185; Modern movement in, 2–3, 205n3; participation in World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 207n17; raw materials of, 17; reception of Pan-American Union Building, 78, 81, 82–83, 90, 100–101; representation in HemisFair, 189–190; representation in Pan-American Exposition, 49, 58–59, 60, 61–62, 63, 65, 212n163, 212n164, 212n168; representation in World’s Columbian Exposition, 44–45, 47, 48, 65, 210– 211n109, 211n112; world’s fairs held in, 29. See also U.S.–Latin American relations; and specific countries Latin American immigrants, and Pan-American concept, 10–11 Latin American studies programs, 12 latinidad, 84, 206n23 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, 213n26 La Villita, San Antonio, Texas, 151, 180, 180, 181, 184, 186, 191, 196 League of American Nations, xviii, 17 League of Nations competition (1927), Geneva, Switzerland, 16, 134 League of Nations of Pan-American Indians, xviii, 214n55 League of North American Indians, xviii League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 151, 181, 182, 227n6 Le Corbusier: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 116, 120, 219n106; Mundaneum, 6, 206n30; and “Précisions” lectures, 219n90; and Rio de Janeiro urban proposals, 160; Villa Savoye, 216n14 Lee, Muna, 11 Lefaivre, Liane, 220n121 L’Enfant, Pierre Charles, 73 Leoffler, Jane C., 6 Leopoldo (prince of Brazil), 29 Lescher, Théodore, 133, 221n141 Levitan, Benjamin W., and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse proposal, 109, 109 Liebow, William, 222n17 Lissitzky, Lazar Marcovitch (El Lissitzky), 219n106 Lleras Camarga, Alberto, 213n11 Lockey, Joseph, 206n20 The Logical Point magazine, 26, 26, 207n11 Longoria, Rafael, 203 Loomis, Francis B., 213n12 López Lomba, Ramón, 215n80 Lord, Austin W., 72 Los Angeles Mexican American Chamber of Commerce, 7 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), St. Louis, Missouri, 60 Lowey, Raymond, 159 Luperón, Gregorio, viii, 108

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Lutyen, Edwin, 80 Lynch, Edgar, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 132, 133 MacGregor, Luis, 121 Machado, Mike, 185 Malaussena, Luis, 223n18, 224n44 Mall de Las Américas, Miami, Florida, xix Mallet-Stevens, Robert, 116, 219n106 Manning, Warren H., 54 Maris, Mona, 7 Mariscal, Federico, 128, 219–220n109 Martí, José, 81, 203, 215n73 Martin, T. H., 29 Martínez Silva, Carlos, 213n5 Martinique, and Pan-American Exposition, 212n163 Maverick, Maury, 151, 186, 196 May, Cliff, 205n9 Maya’s Pan-American Orchestra, xviii, 12 Mayer, Gordon Eugene, 223n27 McAllister, Walter W., 183 McConnico, S. B., 28, 30–31 McCreary, James B., 213n5 McGarvie, Harry F., 62 McGrath, J. Howard, 99 McKim, Charles F., 72, 79 McKinley, William, 43–44, 54, 60–61, 211n137 McMillan Commission Plan for Washington, D.C., 72, 73, 79 Melnikov, Konstantin, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 107, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124 Memorial Lighthouse Commission, 108 Mendelsohn, Erich, 106 Mercosur, 200 mestizo/mestizaje, 93, 124, 152, 196, 205n3, 205n5 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), 222n15 Mexican Americans: and Bracero Program, 153; and cultural identity, xi, xii; involvement in HemisFair, 3, 151, 152, 154, 180–181, 183–185, 186, 187, 188, 194, 195, 196, 226n92; and latinidad, 206n23; and League of United Latin American Citizens, 151, 181, 182, 227n6; and minimum wage earnings protests, 226n108; and Pan-American identity, 7, 10; and PanAmerican School, 225n84 Mexican Mining Pavilion, as Mexican Alhambra, 25, 25, 37, 47, 61, 84, 212n168 Mexico: and El Abrazo ritual, ix, ix, x–xi, x, xii, 205n5; and borderlands, vii–viii, ix, 11, 150, 182, 190, 199–200, 202, 227n2; canals considered for, 20, 31; La Carrera Panamericana, xix, 12; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116;

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Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117, 121, 124, 125, 125, 128, 130, 219–220n106, 220n108; commercial treaty with, 27; and Exposición HistóricoAmericana, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 121, 219n100; and Gateway to the Americas International Bridge, ix–x, 6, 151, 205n1, 222n4; and Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, 182; and HemisFair, 150, 151, 181, 185, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 196; and hemispheric wall between U.S. and Mexico, vii, 198, 200, 201, 201, 227n2; and Interama, 176, 224n61; and International Conference of American States, 65, 68; and Kelsey, 84; Mexico City’s Alameda de Santa María Park, 25; and NAFTA, 200; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 205n3; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29, 207n29; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; Pan-American Architecture Congress in, 100; and PanAmerican Exposition, 52, 54, 56, 60, 61–62, 212n164, 212n165, 212n168; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and Pan-American Highway, 17, 151; and Pan American Round Table, xi; and Pan-American Union Building, 79, 84, 87, 88, 111, 214n70; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; quadricentennial fair proposed in, 208n53; and Texas Centennial Exposition, 151; and Trujillo, 144; U.S. annexation of northern Mexico, 9; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 43, 47, 211n112; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 19–20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 25, 26, 27, 37, 61, 84, 207n17, 207n22 Miami, Florida: and African Americans, 165, 166, 224n54; Cuban immigration to, 154, 164, 165, 166, 177, 181, 222nn13–14; and Gateway to the Americas title, 5, 6, 155, 164, 177, 195, 202, 225n74; and hemispheric centrality, 150–151, 157; and Pan-American concept, 155; Pan-American fair proposals, 156–159, 223n31; Pan-American Peace and Industrial Fair, 164; Pan-American Trade Mart, 156, 157, 157, 159, 223n23; proposed Pan-American Exposition Building, xviii, 156, 156; and tourism, 155, 159, 195. See also Interama (Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center), Miami, Florida Miami Dade InterAmerican Campus (Miami), 202 Miami Metropolitan Hospital, 11 Mier, Sebastián B. de, 26 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 114 Mira and Rosich, 220n109 Miranda, Carmen, 11, 13, 152 Missile Crisis of November 1962, 154, 222n14 Mission style, 48, 59, 214n55 Mitchell, Timothy, 164, 224n45 Modern movement: anti-historicist aims of, 2; and Beaux-Arts style, 105; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition,

104, 105, 106, 111, 124, 138, 139, 147; and expositions, 21; and HemisFair, 192; and Interama, 3, 167, 177, 196; and International style, 216n14; in Latin America, 2–3, 205n3; and Pan-American architecture, vii, 157; Streamline Moderne, 105, 106, 124, 139, 156; and Wright, 134, 135 Monroe, James, 203 Monroe Doctrine, xvii, 5, 8, 28, 36 Monroe Palace, Rio de Janeiro, xvii, 206n6 Monumento a Colón (Whitney), 114, 115 Moore, Charles W., 185 Morales, Ángel, 107, 110, 217n32 Morton, Pat, 6 Moses, Robert, 185–186, 188–189 Moss, Eric Owen, “The Great Wall,” 198, 200–201, 201 Moya Blanco, Luis, 107, 133 Mujica, Francisco, xviii, xix, 153, 215n75, 220n109 Mumford, Lewis, 135 Mundy, H. Hastings, proposed Pan-American Exposition Building in Miami, xviii, 156, 156 Museo de Las Américas (Denver), xix, 202 Museum of the Americas, Dallas, Texas, xix The Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., xix, 98 Muskat, Irving Elkin, 165–166, 166, 171, 177, 178, 179, 225n67 Mussolini, Benito, 120 Nabuco, João, 96, 130 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 194 nativism, vii–viii Nechodoma, Antonin, 220n109 Nelson, Donald S., and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 107, 132–133, 133 New Orleans, Louisiana: and Gateway to the Americas title, 5, 202; and hemispheric policy, 28, 64; International House, 177; Pan-American Exposition/World’s Panama Exposition proposal, xvii; as port, 25–26, 27, 28, 31, 64, 207n11; Spanishlanguage newspapers of, 206n23. See also North, Central, and South American Exposition (1885–1886), New Orleans, Louisiana; World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition (1884–1885), New Orleans, Louisiana New South Wales, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 New York Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, 220n114 New York City, New York: Americas Society, 11; Avenue of the Americas, 6, 153–154, 153; Pan-American Building, 48–49, 211nn119–120; and Pan-American concept, 153; postcard of New York of the future, 153; World Trade Center, 225n67 New York State Centennial and All-American Exposition, 49 New York World’s Fair (1939–1940): Bel Geddes’ “Futurama” exhibit, 141, 141, 164; Brazil Pavilion, 2–3, 2, 158; diorama

of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, xviii, 142, 157–158; and Ferriss, 154; Florida Pavilion, 223n22; Hall of Nations, 205n3; Helicline, 162; model of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 142; and Pan-American architecture, 157; Pan-American Highway Gardens (Avis Exhibition), xix, 185; Pan-American Union Pavilion, xviii, 2, 143, 157, 157; Pan-American Wing, 157, 205n3; Trylon and Perisphere, 161, 161, 162, 164 New York World’s Fair (1964–1965), 177, 185 Niagara Falls: and Knudson’s tower design, 37, 39, 49; and PanAmerican Exposition, Cayuga Island proposal, 20, 49, 50, 51, 54, 211n137; and Pan-American Exposition (1901), 49–50, 54, 58, 60, 64, 211n124; and quadricentennial proposals, 34; as symbolic of U.S. power, 49, 211n124 Nicaragua: canals considered for, 20, 27, 207n21; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 144, 219n100; and Pan-American Exposition, 212n163; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47 Niemeyer, Oscar, with Lúcio Costa, Brazil Pavilion, 2–3, 2, 158 Nixon, Richard, 27, 178, 224n49 Noguchi, Isamu, with Louis I. Kahn, Levy Memorial Playground, 224n66 Norten, Enrique, 200, 201 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 200 North, Central, and South American Exposition (1885–1886), New Orleans, Louisiana: advertisements for, 208n40; attendance of, 28, 29; in chronology, xvii; and commerce, 20, 21, 28, 30–31; countries participating in, 29; and hemispheric policy, 28–29, 207–208n30; Horticultural Hall, 30, 31; layout of, 28, 207n29; Main Building, 28, 29, 208n42; naming of, 28; planning for, 27–28, 207n26; theme of, 29; and world’s fair genre, 22. See also World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition (1884–1885), New Orleans, Louisiana Norway, and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101 Nuestra Pan-América: and Pan-American Union, 96–101, 150; site plan, 97, 98 Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, ix, 151 OAS (Organization of American States) Pavilion, HemisFair ’68, 189, 189 Obregón, José, 207n22 Obregón Santacilia, Carlos, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 121, 124, 125 Office of Inter-American Affairs, 222n16, 222n174 Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, 12 O’Gorman, Juan: The Confluence of Civilizations, 192, 192,

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226n126; and Goertiz, 185; library at National Autonomous University of Mexico, 219n102 Olivares, José de, 212n168 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 32, 45, 54–55, 210n108 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr., 54–55 Olmsted, John C., 22 Olney, Richard, 213n12 Oltar-Jevsky, W. K., and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 118, 218n80 Olvera Street Market, 192, 226n124 Organization of American States (OAS): buildings associated with, 97, 98; buildings of, 5; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 144; and commerce, 200; and HemisFair, 189, 189; and Lleras Camargo, 213n11; members of, 94; mission of, 203; and Pan-American conferences, 100; and Pan-American Union Building, 5, 94, 214n67; restructuring of Pan-American Union as, xix, 81–82; as stronger organization, 17. See also PanAmerican Union Orientalism: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 111; and Pan-American concept, 11; and Pan-American subjects, 8; and Pan-American Union Building, 69, 95 Ortiz, Fernando, 84 Osorio, Luis E., 217n42 Outlook Tower, Edinburgh, Scotland, 209n74 Oyarzún Philippi, Rodulfo A., and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 125, 128 Páez Vilaró, Carlos, Roots of Peace, 96 Pain, Henry J., 60 Paist, Phineas E., 156, 223n22 Palace of the Soviets Competition, 117 Palacio Pan-Americano, 182, 183 Palacios de Bibliotecas y Museos, Madrid, Spain, 42, 210n91 Pan (Greek God), 62, 63 Panama: Barret serving in, 70; Bolívar’s meeting of nations in, 4; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; and Commercial Bureau of American Republics, 206n29; Exposición Nacional de Panamá, 81; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 144, 219n100; Hotel El Panamá, 224n65; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; Pan-American Congress in, xvii, 4; and PanAmerican Flight of the Columbus Lighthouse, 140; and Pan-American Highway, 151, 222n3; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; and Pan-American University, xviii, 10, 150, 206n6, 215n80, 222n1; and U.S. Army Caribbean Training Center, xviii, 206n31; and U.S. imperialism, 81, 100 Panama-California Exposition (1915–1917), San Diego, California, vii, xvii, 26, 81, 215n80

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Panama Canal: American Zone, 81, 100; completion of, xvii, 81, 150, 215n80, 222n1; expositions celebrating, 26; inauguration of, 105, 214n43; and Pan-American concept, 20; and U.S. imperialism, xvii, 100 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), San Francisco, California, vii, xvii, 26, 81 Pan-Americana (film), xviii, 12, 13 Pan-American Administrative Building, Washington, D.C., xix, 96 Pan-American Airways (Pan Am), xviii, xix, 2, 6, 17, 150, 154, 155, 158, 178, 200, 222n12 Pan-American architecture: and asymmetrical U.S.-Latin American relationship, 15; chronology of, xvii–xix; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 104, 140; cultural binaries in, 21, 28, 79–80, 93, 152; and divisive constructs, 15–16; and HemisFair ’68, San Antonio, Texas, 152, 154, 180, 184, 195, 196; history of, 6–7; and Interama, 154–155, 166, 167, 176, 195, 196, 223n18; and Kelsey, 68, 70, 81, 84–85, 88, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107, 195; map of, xvi; Pan-American Architecture Congresses, 100, 100; and Pan-American Exposition (1901), 15–16, 20, 21, 49, 59–60, 61, 65, 212n151; and Pan-American Union Building, 67, 68–69, 78, 80; and quadricentennial fair proposals, 32, 37; and skyscrapers, xviii, 28, 106, 109, 147, 153–154, 153, 206n30, 215n75, 222n10, 222n17; and tropical theme, 69, 70; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 20, 32, 38–39, 41–42, 47, 48, 59, 65; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 22, 25, 65 Pan-American Architecture Congresses, 100, 100 “Pan-American Architecture” Exhibition, Chicago, Illinois (1959), xix Panamericana Texana, xix Pan-American Building, New York City, xix, 48–49, 211nn119–120 Pan-American Center, Las Cruces, New Mexico, xix, 11, 202 Pan-American Center and Hispanic Garden, St. Augustine, Florida, xix, 11 Pan-American Clipper, 155, 223n20 Pan-American Commercial Exhibit, 48 Pan-American Company, 48 Pan-American concept: americanismo, 9; and asymmetrical U.S.-Latin American relationship, 15; and Bolívar, vii, viii, 4, 9, 203; and borderlands, vii–viii, 200, 227n2; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 110, 111, 112, 114, 121, 125, 128, 130–131, 140, 147, 220n121; and cultural exchange, 3, 4; evolution of, vii, viii, 3–4, 28, 152–154, 155, 177, 178–179, 203; and First International Conference of American States of, 81, 206n20; and HemisFair, 3, 150, 152, 180, 188, 194; ideological development of, 104; images of, 3, 4; and Interama, 149, 152, 160, 161–162, 166, 167, 172, 194, 224n50; and local loyalties, 147, 151–152; narratives of, 3; and nationalist discourse, 34; Old World–New World theme as counterpoint to, 34; and

Orientalism, 11; and Panama Canal, 20; and Pan-American Exposition, 21, 49, 59, 61, 62–63, 65; and Pan-American Union Building, xii, 1, 22, 68–69, 81, 82–83, 106; and stereotypes, 1, 2, 15, 61, 62, 69, 153, 159, 173, 174, 182, 203; and tropical theme, 69–70; U.S. definition of, 8–9, 22; and U.S. government, 4–5, 8–9; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 21, 65 Pan-American Congress, Panama, xvii, 4 Pan-American Day, xviii, 155, 164, 222n8. See also Columbus Day Pan-American Exposition (1901), Buffalo, New York: aerial view of, 57; attendance of, 55; and Buchanan, 48; Chiquita exhibition, 56; in chronology, xvii; color scheme of, 60; and commerce, 62, 63–65, 212n159; Court of Fountains, 55, 58; diagram of fairgrounds, 56; Electric Tower, 37, 55, 58, 58, 59, 59, 60, 61, 62, 88; and gender issues, 62–63, 63, 64; hemispheric theme of, 49, 63, 64–65; Latin American representation in, 49, 58–59, 60, 61–62, 63, 65, 212n163, 212n164, 212n168; and model city, 195; and Niagara Falls, 49–50, 54, 58, 60, 64, 211n124; night view, 58, 59; and Pan-American architecture, 15–16, 20, 21, 49, 59–60, 61, 65, 212n151; and Pan-American concept, vii, 21, 49, 59, 61, 62–63, 65; and Pan-American flag, 212n162, 214n41; Pan statue, 62, 63, 63; planning of, 55; plan of, 56; posters for, 61; Rainbow City, 58, 60; and Rumsey Farm site, 54, 212n142; and Spanish Renaissance style, 15–16, 21, 59, 212n151; Triumphal Bridge, 55, 57, 58; unity theme of, 60; U.S. American theme of, 50; and U.S. imperialism, 9, 49, 60–61, 212n160, 212n162 Pan-American Exposition and Industrial Merchandising Mart, 158, 158 Pan-American Exposition Company, 50 Pan-American Exposition proposal (1899), Cayuga Island, New York: The Arena, 211n128; and discovery narrative, 50; electrified tower with spiral railway, 53, 54, 55; Esenwein’s site plan proposal, 50, 51, 52, 60, 78; hemispheric theme, 49, 52, 78; location of proposed exhibition grounds, 50, 51; Main Building, 50, 52, 52, 53, 54, 78; and Niagara Falls, 20, 49, 50, 51, 54, 211n137; and Pan-American architecture, 20, 52–54; and Pan-American concept, 49, 50; perspective, 53; poster for, 49, 50; postponement of, 54; proposal for, xvii Pan-American Exposition/World’s Panama Exposition proposal, New Orleans, Louisiana, xvii, 207n11 Pan-American Fiesta, Lakewood, California (1945), xviii Pan-American Games, xviii, xix, 16, 17, 211n128, 222n8 Pan-American Goodwill Flight, xviii, 140 Pan-American Health Organization, xix, 97, 100, 203, 214n72 Pan-American Health Organization Building, Washington, D.C., xix, 97, 97, 98 Pan-American Health Organization Building architectural competition, xix, 97 Pan-American heritage themes: and Columbus Memorial

Lighthouse, 144, 146; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 104, 113–128, 130, 137; discovery myth, 20, 21, 32, 48, 50, 91, 96, 121, 137, 202; and HemisFair, 188, 189, 226n106; independence of New World, 21, 80, 91; and indigenous peoples, 21, 36–37; and Interama, 149, 151; and Pan-American architecture, 1, 21, 31; and Pan-American citizen, 7, 8, 15; and Pan-American Exposition (1901), 37, 64, 65, 212n162; and Pan-American Exposition proposal, Cayuga Island, 54; and Pan-American Union Building, 7, 80, 84, 87, 90, 91, 99; and Pan America Roosevelt, 63, 65; Spanish colonial legacy, 21, 41, 42–43, 48; and Sunset magazine, 205n9; and tropical imagery, 21, 69–70, 82–91, 95, 96, 100, 101, 106, 110, 123, 130, 152, 157, 160, 172, 172–174, 177, 195, 196, 223n35; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 32, 48, 65; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 37 Pan-American Hernando de Soto Exposition (1939), Tampa, Florida, xviii, 7, 7, 155, 223n24 Pan-American high-rise proposals, New York City, xviii Pan-American Highway: and El Abrazo ritual, ix–x; and La Carrera Panamericana, 12; as connecting network, xi–xii, 17, 165, 200; establishment of, 100, 155, 223n20; and HemisFair ’68, 185–186, 196; proposal of, xviii; route of, xviii, 155, 222n2; and San Antonio, 151; and U.S. imperialism, 9 Pan-American Highway Gardens (Avis Exhibition), xix, 185 Pan-American Hospital, Miami, Florida, xix, 177 Pan-American Hospital, New York City, xviii, 11 Pan-American Hotel, Guatemala City, Guatemala, 206n6 Pan-American International High School, Elmhurst, New York, xix Pan-American International High School at Monroe, Bronx, New York, xix Pan-American League (PAL), 181, 182 Pan-American Magazine, 10 Pan-American Medical Association, 11 Pan-American Monetary Unit, xvii, 215n80 Pan-American monument proposal, Washington, D.C. (1892), xvii, 215n74 Pan-American monument proposal, Washington, D.C. (1960), xix, 215n75 Pan-American Narcotics Investigatory Commission (PANIC), 199 Pan-American Olympics, 100 Pan-American Park, Long Beach, California, xix Pan-American Park, Paterson, New Jersey, xix Pan-American Public Relations Association (PAPRA), 185 Pan-American Queen pageant winners, 17 Pan-American Railway, xvii, 208n52 Pan American Round Table, xi, xvii, 150–151 Pan-American Skyscraper design, New York City (1913–1914), xvii

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Pan-American Society, xi, xvii, 70, 99, 205n6 Pan-American Sporting Games, 12, 14 Pan-American Sports Organization, xviii, 206n28, 211n128 Pan-American States Association, 48 Pan American Student Forums, xi Pan-American subject and citizen: concept of, viii, 7–12, 15; and “essential” characteristics of Latin American nations, 1; and Interama, 155, 165, 166, 171, 172, 177, 195; and Pan-American architecture, 7–8; and Pan-American Union, 82, 172; redefinition of, 3 Pan-American Trade Mart, Miami, Florida, 156, 157, 157, 159, 223n23 Pan-American Union: and Bryan, 10–11; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 1–2, 104–105, 106, 107, 109, 113, 115–116, 138, 217n28, 217n32; commercial roots of, 4, 205n1; countries included in/excluded from, 15, 15, 29, 93, 206n29; and cultural hegemony, 8–9; and equal representation of American republics, 15–17, 23, 68, 81, 91, 93, 214n45; establishment of, xi, xii, 65, 205n6; funding of, 121; history of, 5; logos of, 15, 15; mission of, 71, 76, 77, 81, 88, 100, 101; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 2, 143, 157, 157; Nuestra PanAmérica, 96–101, 98, 150; precursors to, 29; and propaganda, 8–9, 10. See also Organization of American States (OAS) Pan-American Union Building, Washington, D.C. (Cret and Kelsey): Annex, 85, 96, 97, 98; Assembly Hall, 68, 74, 76, 88, 89; Aztec Fountain, 83, 86–88, 86, 87, 90; and Beaux-Arts style, 68, 71, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80; Blue Aztec Garden and Pool, 69, 82, 83, 88–89, 89, 90, 91, 100; bronze entrance door, 82, 82, 85; centennial of inauguration of, 96; classicism redefined in, 80–81, 84, 96, 101; Columbus Library, 38, 65, 68, 71, 76, 85, 85, 88, 104, 214n51; Columbus Library reading room, 68, 74, 76, 88; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 106; conference rooms, 68, 74; Council Chamber, 214n67; cour d’honneur plan, 74, 84–85; design competition, 68–69, 70, 71–77, 106, 213n16, 213nn21–23; design development of, 68, 70, 77–82, 77, 88, 90, 104, 212–213n4; diagrams of floor plans, 75; domestic theme, 71–72, 76–77, 78, 100; first- and second-floor plans, 74; furniture for Governing Board Room, 93, 94; Gallery of Patriots and National Flags, 92, 93, 184; Garden Apartment, 68, 69, 77, 82, 88, 90, 91, 123; Governing Board Room, 93–94, 94; Hall of the Americas, 75–76, 93, 94–96, 95; hallways, 68; and hemispheric unity, 93, 100–101, 104; iconography of, 69, 79, 80, 90, 96, 101; illustration of winning entry, 69; inauguration of, xvii, 65, 67, 70–71, 213n4; Jade Fence, 88, 89, 123; Latin Americans’ reception of, 78, 81, 82–83, 90, 100–101; location of, 36; and New World theme, 80, 81, 91; and Organization of American States, 5, 94, 214n67; and Pan-American architecture, vii, 67, 68–69, 78, 80; patio of, 66, 67, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74–75, 76, 83, 84, 85–86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 172; pylon view of, 79; role of, 9, 70,

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75–76; rubber-fig tree of, 67, 67, 70–71, 82, 87, 101; Sala Bolívar, 85, 85; serpent motif, 88; in site plan of Nuestra Pan-América, 97, 98; staircase leading to Hall of the Americas, 92; statues at entrance, 7, 78, 79, 80; and tropicalism, 69–70, 82–91, 95, 96, 100, 101, 110, 177, 195; and U.S. interpretation of Pan-American concept, xii, 1, 22, 68–69, 81, 82–83, 106; and U.S.–Latin American relations, 28, 70, 71, 93; vestibule, 83, 85–86; Xochipilli statue, 88–89, 89, 100 Pan-American Union Pavilion, New York World’s Fair (1939– 1940), xviii, 2, 143, 157, 157 Pan American Unity mural (Rivera), xviii, 192, 193, 226–227n127 Pan-American universities, viii, 10–11, 150, 201, 215n80 Pan-American University, Edinburg, Texas, xix, 205n3 Pan-American University, Miami, Florida, xviii, 150, 155, 215n80 Pan-American University, Panama City, Panama, xviii, 10, 150, 206n6, 215n80, 222n1 Pan-American Village, Havana, Cuba, 206n6 Pan-American Week, xix, 7 Pan-American World Airways Poster, 11, 13 Pan America Roosevelt, 63, 65. See also Pan-American Exposition (1901), Buffalo, New York Pan-Anna-Ettseedo, xvii, 63. See also Pan-American Exposition (1901), Buffalo, New York Pancoast, Russell T., 156, 160 PANIC (Pan-American Narcotics Investigatory Commission), 199 pan-native themes: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 123; and HemisFair, 189; and Kahn, 225n66; and Pan-American Exposition (1901), 63; and Pan-American Union Building, 86, 91, 94, 100, 214n55; and quadricentennial fair proposals, 36–37, 42. See also indigenous peoples PAPRA (Pan-American Public Relations Association), 185 Paraguay: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116; cuisine to be featured at Interama, 171; and Interama, 169; and Mercosur, 200; as outside of tropics, 82; and PanAmerican Exposition, 52, 212n163; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57 Pardo, Felipe, 71 Paris Exposition (1900), 54, 58 Parish, Archie Gale, 223n32 Parker, Alfred Browning, 160, 223n32, 223n40 Parque de las Américas, Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, 206n6 Parra, Manuel, 185 Paxton, Joseph, 22 Peabody, Robert S., 55 Peace Palace at The Hague, 68, 71 Pease, Donald, 199 Pedro I (emperor of Brazil), vii

Pedro II (emperor of Brazil), 130 Peery, Allison B., 184, 185, 186, 226n97 Pepper, Claude, 223n28 Peppis, Betty, 226n97 Pérez Montás, Eugenio, 216n16 Pérez Oyarzún, Fernando, 160 Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas proposal, 34–36, 35, 209nn57–59 Perret, Auguste, 116, 219n106 Perret, Gustave, 116, 219n106 Peru: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117, 128; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and Interama, 223n18, 224n61; and Kelsey’s images of New World, 129; and national expositions, 208n44; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 205n3; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; Pan-American Architecture Congresses in, 100; Pan-American congresses in, 206n8; and Pan-American Exposition, 52, 212n163; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; proposed residential units at Interama, 171 Petersen, John Edwin, 223n32 Peynado, Francisco J., 215n6 Pfeiffer, George L., 156 Philippines, the, 49, 54, 60, 212n160 Phillips, Carla Rahn, 137 Phillips, William D., 137 Phillips, William Lyman, 164 Phillips, William W., 187–188, 189 Piccard, Auguste, 165 Pio XII (pope), 222n173 Pirandello, Luigi, 6 Plaza of the Americas, Chicago, Illinois, xix, 222n8 Plaza of the Americas, Washington, D.C., xix Pocahantas, x, xi Pohl, George R. and Charles Kinkel, design for Chicago Columbia Tower, 40, 41 Ponce Museum of Art, Ponce, Puerto Rico, 224n65 Pope, John Russell, 72, 213n24 Portes, Alejandro, 222nn13–14 Portugal: and Columbia quincentenary, 215n1; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101 Powell, Boone, 189, 226n119 Powell, John Wesley, 37 Pozzi Guelfi, Adolfo F., 214n72

Predock, Antoine, 200, 201 Price, Charles Matlack: comparative photographs of PanAmerican Union Building, 77; and Pan-American Union Building design development, 77–78, 79, 80, 88, 90, 96 Pries, Lionel H., and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 129, 129 Proctor, David R., design for Chicago Columbian Tower, 40, 41 Public Works Administration (PWA), 156, 158 Puerto Rico: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 220n106; Inter-American University in, 206n6; Miami mayor born in, 195; and Pan-American Exposition, 60, 61, 212n160, 212n164; and Ponce Museum of Art, 224n65; and Spanish-American War, 49, 54; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47 Pulliam, William E., and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, xvii, 105, 106, 107, 108–109, 114, 131, 139, 140, 141, 214n43, 215n6, 216n21, 216–217n25 Putnam, George, 216n21 quadricentennial fair proposals, xvii, 6, 27, 32, 34–38, 42–43, 47, 48, 54, 208n53, 209n67. See also World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), Chicago, Illinois race and racism: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 111, 124, 130; and Exposición HistóricoAmericana, 43; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 28; and Pan-American concept, 62, 153; and PanAmerican Union Building, 69, 80, 93; and tropics as term, 70; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27 Raza Unida Party, 154 Reagan, Ronald, xix Rebull, Santiago, 207n22 Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, 9 Reeder, C. H., 223n21 regionalism: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 110, 123, 124, 130, 220n121; critical regionalism, 220n121; and expositions and world’s fairs, 21, 22; and HemisFair, 152, 195; and hemispheric fairs, 63; and Interama, 3, 167, 169, 172, 174, 176, 195; and Knudson, 209n74; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 157; and Pan-American Center, Las Cruces, 202; and Pan-American concept, 100, 130, 152; regional identity, 4, 8, 15, 167; and trade-bloc agreements, 200; and tropics, 69–70, 172, 195; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 48 Reid, William A., 88 Rendle, Arthur E., 19 Reyes, Anita, 7 Richardson, Sullivan C., 12 Ridge, Tom, 200

INDEX

253

Rivera, Diego: Pan American Unity mural, xviii, 192, 193, 226–227n127; Tropical Mexico and Xochipilli and His Votaries fresco, 88–89 Robertson, Edwin L., 156 Robin, Ron T., 6 Rockefeller, David, 11 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 140 Rockefeller, Nelson A., 12, 222n174, 222n16 Rockhill, William Woodville, 213n12 Rodó, José Enrique, 227n127 Rogers, James Gamble, II, 223n32 Romeu, Fernando, 108 Roosevelt, Franklin D., xviii, 12, 140, 154, 155, 156, 178 Roosevelt, Theodore, xvii, 63, 65, 100 Root, Elihu, 5, 67, 68, 72, 213n12 Rosaldo, Renato, 43 Rouse Corporation, 225n73 Rowe, Leo S.: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 140, 141, 147; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 104, 111, 114, 115, 117, 120, 128, 130, 131, 134, 138, 215n6, 217n50, 219n92, 220n108; and Inter-America House, 205n2; and PanAmerican Union, 104–105, 213n11 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), 138 Rudolph, Paul: and Interama, 152, 163, 166, 166, 169, 172, 173, 176, 177; and Sarasota High School, 172 Ruiz de Salces, Antonio, 210n91 Rusk, Dean, 190 Russia, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Russian Constructivism, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 106, 107, 117 Rydell, Robert W., 6, 30, 62, 212n160 Saarinen, Eero, 162–163, 219n102, 224n43 Saarinen, Eliel, 106, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 219n106 Said, Edward, 8, 111, 206n15 Saint Lucia, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Sallade, Wilma Arline, stamp dress of, 7, 7 Saludos Amigos (film), xviii, 152 Salvatore, Ricardo, 8–9 San Antonio, Texas: Alazan-Apache Courts, 225n80; Battle of Flowers Parade, 181, 191; and cultural heritage, 151–152, 181–182; as Gateway to the Americas, 151, 152, 195; and InterAmerican Highway, 151; and La Villita, 151, 180, 180, 181, 184, 186, 191, 196; Mexican American population of, 154, 180–181, 183–184, 194; Mexican ties of, 181; and Pan-American concept, 151; and Pan American Round Table, xi, xvii, 150–151; River Walk, 151, 180, 191; and tourism, 151, 180, 186, 195; Victoria Courts public housing complex, 225n80. See also HemisFair ’68, San Antonio, Texas

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San Antonio Fair, Inc., 183 Sandwich Islands, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 San Martín, José de, 80, 93, 98, 211n121 Schnabel, O. P., 226n104 The School of Panamerican Unrest, xix, 202 School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia, xix, 206n31 School of the Americas, Panama, xviii, 206n31 Schrenk, Lisa, 139 Second International Conference of American States, 65, 68 Sert, Josep Lluís, 152, 166, 166, 169, 171, 172, 224nn61–62, 225n69 Sesquicentennial Freedom Fair proposal, Washington, D.C., xix, 97, 98, 99, 99, 215n75 Sevel, Sanford, 164 Sewell, E. G., 223n21 Shakespeare, William, 37 Sheply, George F., 55 Sherman, John, 213n12 Shops at Las Americas, San Diego, California, xix, 202 Simón Bolívar monument, Central Park, New York City, xviii, 49, 211n121 Simón Bolívar Park, 96–97, 98, 215n75 Singer Sewing Machine Company, “The Singer Seam Unites Two Continents,” 63, 64 Siri, Román Fresnedo, 97 Sixth Annual Inter-State and International Commercial Convention (1878), Chicago, Illinois, 208n53 Smalley, Eugene, 26, 27 Smith, Joseph P., 213n12 Smith, Margaret Chase, 99 Smith, Robert Fitch, 223n32 Smithsonian Institution, 36 Sordo Madaleno, Juan, 185 South America: and Pan-American Exposition, 52, 54; and Pan-American Union Building, 7, 79; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 44 Soviet Union, 121, 218n72; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116, 117; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117, 118, 119–120, 121 Spain: and Bolívar’s Pan-American Congress, 4; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; colonial legacy of, 41; and Columbian quincentenary, 215n1; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 107, 109, 113–114, 116, 130; and Columbus memorial lighthouse proposals, 108; establishment of the Alamo, 182; and Exposición HistóricoAmericana, xvii, 34, 37, 38, 42–43, 43, 47, 54, 210n96, 210n97, 210n101; Exposición Histórico-Europea, 42, 210n90; Exposición Ibero-Americana, 114, 119, 215n1, 218n57; Madrid exhibition of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 109, 113, 114, 119–120, 119, 131, 219n91; and Palacios de

Bibliotecas y Museos, 42, 210n91; and Pan-American Exposition, 60; and Pan-American Union Building, 214n70; and Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas proposal, 34; and stage-one jury for Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 113; stage-one winners of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 118; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47, 211n109 Spanish-American War of 1898: and Barrett, 70; in chronology, xvii; and Dominican Republic, 216n11; and Pan-American Exposition, 49, 54, 58, 60, 62; and U.S. imperialism, 8, 49, 58, 60, 81 Spanish Colonial style, xii, 21, 59, 69, 106, 130, 157, 188, 196, 223n22 Spanish Geographical Society, 41 Spanish Renaissance style, 15, 21, 59, 96, 212n151 Spanish Society of Architects, 119, 219n83 Spillis Candela, 225n74 Spitz, Armand, 223n40 Stacy-Judd, Robert, 101 Statue of Liberty, 105 St. Christopher and Nevis, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Stearns, Frank F., 158–159, 213n22 St. Elmo, Walter M., 114–115, 218n66 Stepick, Alex, 222nn13–14 Steward and Skinner, 164 Stokes, William Earl Dodge, 34, 209n70 Stone, Edward, Jr., 164 Stone, Edward Durell: and Avenue of the Americas, 153; Hotel El Panamá, Panama City, 224n65; and Interama, 152, 166, 166, 169, 173–174, 176, 224n62; Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology, 224n65; and Pan-American-themed projects, vii, 3; Phoenicia Hotel, Beirut, 224n65; United States Embassy, New Delhi, 224n65 Stone, Martin, 186 Streamline Moderne: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 105, 106, 124, 139; and Pan-American Trade Mart, 156 St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Sullivan C. Richardson Pan-American Highway Expedition, (1940–1941), 12 Summer Carnival and Electrical Exhibition, St. John, New Brunswick, 37 Summit of the Americas, 5, 93 Sunset magazine, xii, 205n9 Suriname, and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Sweden: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation,

116; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Switzerland: Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116 Szukalski, Stanislaw, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 117, 124, 125 Taft, William Howard, 67, 67, 105 Tatlin, Vladimir, 123 Taylor, James Knox, 55 Telesis, 223n18 Temple of the Three Windows, Machu Picchu, 147 Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio, 26 Texas Bicentennial and Pan-American Exposition proposal, San Antonio, Texas, xviii, 225n78 Texas Centennial Exposition (1936), Dallas, Texas, 132–133, 151 Thatcher, John Boyd, 210n105 Thiede, Richard, 121 Third International Conference of American States, 68 Third Summit of the Americas, 93 Thompson, E. H., 47 Thompson, Joann Marie, 211n127, 212n151 Three Americas Exposition, 27, 35, 36, 73, 97, 98 Three Americas Museum, 36, 209n63 Three Americas Railway, vii, 27, 34, 200, 208n52 time, concept of, 69 Title VI National Defense Education Act of 1958, 12 Tobago: and Interama, 169; and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 Torgerson, G. M., 207n7 Touch of Evil (film), 199, 199 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ix Trinidad: and Interama, 169; and Pan-American Union membership, 206n29 tropical architecture: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 106, 123, 130; conditions suited to, 84, 110–111, 217n42; and Interama, 152, 160, 167, 172, 173–174, 195, 196, 223n35; and Pan-American Union Building, 69–70, 82–91, 95, 96, 100, 101, 110, 177, 195 tropics: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 104, 130; conditions of, 111; and Festival of the Cities of the New World, 196; geographical territory of, 82; and Knudson’s tower design, 209n74; Latin America identified with, 82, 83–84, 100; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; and Rivera, 227n127; and U.S. imperialism, 69–70, 81, 84 Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 104, 106, 131, 141, 143–144, 147, 221–222n173; Feria de la Paz y la Confraternidad del Mundo Libre, 164; League

INDEX

255

of American Nations proposal, xviii, 17, 141; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 164; and Pan-American Union, 17 Truman, Harry S., 163 Trylon and Perisphere, New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 161, 161, 162, 164 Tsao, Calvin, 200, 201 Tulchin, Joseph S., 214n45 Turkey, and World’s Columbian Exposition, 211n109 Turner, Charles Y., 60 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 37 Tuttle, Julia, 155 Tzonis, Alexander, 220n121 Uhl, Edwin F., 213n12 Umberto (king of Italy), 120 unilateral power, and U.S. government’s definition of PanAmerican concept, 9 United Fruit Company, 8 United Nations Competition (1964), 16 United Nations Headquarters, New York, 154, 160, 161, 162 United Nations of America proposal, University of Texas at Austin, xviii, 153 United States: and Bolívar’s Pan-American Congress, 4; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116, 117; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 117, 130, 133; and DR-CAFTA, 200; and Exposición HistóricoAmericana, 42, 43, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 109, 121, 131, 144, 219n100; and Interama, 176; and NAFTA, 200; and national expositions, 208n44; Pan-American Architecture Congress in, 100; and Pan-American Exposition, 61, 62, 212n164; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 214n72; and PanAmerican Highway, 185; and Pan-American Trade Mart, 159; and Pan-American Union Building, 79; and Pan-American Union membership, 15, 81; and Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas proposal, 34; stage-one winners of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 118. See also specific expositions U.S. Americans: and commerce with Latin America, 1, 26; and Pan-American identity, 11; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 48 U.S. Army Caribbean Training Center (School of the Americas), Panama, xviii, 206n31 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 17 U.S. imperialism: and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 106; hemispheric motives of, 8, 20; and Pan-American concept, viii, 154, 203; and Pan-American Exposition, 9, 49, 60–61, 212n160, 212n162; and Pan-American Union, 5, 81–82; and Pan-American Union Building, 9, 81, 82, 100; and Spanish-

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American War of 1898, 8, 49, 58, 60, 81; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 48; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 25 U.S.–Latin American relations: asymmetry in, vii, 1, 9, 15, 29, 31, 58–59, 61, 106, 152, 156, 157, 159; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 105, 106, 107, 123; and expositions, 20, 21, 23, 27–31, 36, 65; and hemispheric policy, 28–29, 36, 48, 64–65, 207–208n30; and Latin-Anglo division, 15, 20, 38, 62, 68, 70, 79, 151, 152, 154, 167, 180, 192, 195, 227n127; and PanAmerican concept, 68; and Pan-American Union Building, 28, 70, 71, 93; political climate of 1960s, 154 U.S. Latinos: in Chicago, 222n8; cultural identities of, 194–195, 199–200; hemispheric consciousness of, 9–11, 153, 206n23; and Las Américas concept, 202–203; and Miami, 179; and PanAmerican concept, 6, 8, 9, 10, 10, 154, 203; population of, 203. See also Cuban Americans; Mexican Americans U.S.–Mexico Border Fence, 200–202, 227n2. See also Moss, Eric Owen, “The Great Wall” U.S. Native Americans: and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 37, 43, 43; and Kelsey’s Brotherhood of North American Indians building, xvii, 88, 214n55; and Pan-American Exposition, 63, 65, 100; and Pan-American Union Building, 86, 94; and pan-native theme, 86, 94, 214n55; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 37 U.S. South: and expositions, 27, 31; and Pan-American concept, 5; and world’s fairs, 22. See also specific expositions Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 193, 219n102 Universidad Pan-Americana, Guadalajara, Mexico, 206n6 University Baptist Church, Austin, Texas, xii University of Miami, 11 University of Miami International House, 159 University of Texas-Pan American, 11 Ureña, Rafael Estrella, 131 Uruguay: and American House proposal, 215n80; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 113, 116, 117; cuisine to be featured at Interama, 171; Day of the Americas, 216n12; and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 210n101; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and Mercosur, 200; notable Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition entrants, 117; as outside of tropics, 82; Pan-American Architecture Congresses in, xviii, 100, 100; and Pan-American Exposition, 52; and Pan-American Health Organization building competition, 97, 214n72; and Pan-American Union Building, 96; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57 Van Allen, William, 219n106

Van Ness Mansion, 213n26 Van Ness Park, 213n8 Vaquero Palacios, Joaquín, 107, 133 Vasconcelos, José, 124, 205n3 Vásquez, Horacio, 107, 113, 114, 131, 216n11 Vázquez, Pedro Ramírez, 185 Velasco, José María, 207n22 Venezuela: and Bolívar, 4; Chicago Tribune Competition participation, 116; Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition participation, 116, 220n106; Day of Indigenous Resistance, 216n12; and funding of Columbus Memorial Lighthouse, 219n100; and Interama, 223n18, 224n61; and New York World’s Fair (1939–1940), 205n3; and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; Pan-American Architecture Congress in, 100; and Pan-American Union membership, 15; proposed Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas, 209n57; proposed residential units at Interama, 171; and Simón Bolívar Park, 96–97, 98, 215n75; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 47; and World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 27, 207n17 Venezuelan Council of Indian Nations, 215n1 Veragua, Duke of, 42, 114, 119, 219n91 Vesnin, Aleksandr, 219n106 Vesnin, Leonid, 219n106 Vesnin, Viktor, 219n106 Vespucci, Amerigo, 202 Vietnam War, 177 Villa, Pancho, 226n104 Villagrán García, José, 220n109 Villanueva, Carlos Raúl, 220n109 Villa Vizcaya, Miami, 159 Waldseemüller, Martin, 202 Walker, W. H., 223n32 Walton, William, 34, 208n53 Warner, Charles Dudley, 42 Washington, George: Birthday celebrations, ix, ix, x, x, xii, 205n2; bust in Pan-American Union Building, 67, 93; on panel of PanAmerican Union Building, 80 Washington Mall, 73, 73, 82 Weed, Robert Law, 156, 160 Weese, Harry: and HemisFair ’68, 185; and Interama, 152, 166, 166, 169, 171, 172, 177, 224n61 Welles, Orson, xviii, 12, 199 Welles, Sumner, 216n25 Western Hemisphere: and Exposición Histórico-Americana, 42; and HemisFair ’68, 188, 189, 190, 203; and hemispheric fairs, 6, 21, 28, 29, 49, 54, 159, 172; and hemisphericism, 202–203; and Interama, 172; and Pan-American architecture, 1, 32; and

Pan-American concept, 3, 4, 6, 11, 20, 203; and Pan-American Union, xi; and Pan-American Union Building, 68; and Whitaker’s Western Hemisphere idea, 4. See also U.S.–Latin American relations West Indies: and North, Central, and South American Exposition, 29; and Pan-American Exposition, 54; and Three Americas Exposition, 36 West Side Story (film), 165 Wharton, William F., 213n12 Whitaker, Arthur P., 4 White, Eugene Richard, 58, 59, 60, 62 White City. See World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), Chicago, Illinois White House, Pan-American Union Building compared to, 76 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt: and Aztec Fountain, 86, 88, 114; and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 114, 117, 121; Monumento a Colón, 114, 115; and Pan-American-themed projects, vii, 3 Whitton, Rex, 186 Wilson, James Grant, 37, 208n53 Wilson, Richard, and HemisFair logo, 190, 190, 194 Wood, Eric Fisher, and Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 123, 124, 213n22 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 151 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), Chicago, Illinois: aerial view of, 46; in chronology, xvii; and City Beautiful movement, 48, 73; and commerce, 35, 36, 48, 62, 63–65; Court of Honor, 21, 45, 45, 47, 48, 58; and Curtis, 43–44, 47–48, 213n12; detail of aerial view of, 18; diagram of fairgrounds, 44; discovery narrative of, 20, 32, 34, 36, 38, 41–42; and Europe, 211n109; La Rábida monastery replica, 44, 46, 47; Latin American representation in, 44–45, 47, 48, 65, 210–211n109, 211n112; layout of, 50, 211n127; map of, 44; Mexican Mining Pavilion (Mexican Alhambra), 24, 25, 25, 37, 47, 61, 84, 212n168; Midway Plaisance, 45, 47, 47; and multinational claims, 6; and Native Americans, 37; New World theme of, 21, 32, 38, 48; Niña, Pinta and Santa María replicas, 44, 47; North Pond, 47; and Pan-American architecture, 20, 32, 38–39, 41–42, 47, 48, 59, 65; and Pan-American concept, 21, 65; photograph of, 32–33; proposals for, 32, 38–39, 39, 40, 41–42, 41, 209n67, 209n85; site selection, 45, 210n108; White City as nickname of, 32, 37, 48, 60, 73; Women’s Building, 47 world’s fairs: and Bureau of International Expositions, 179; and commerce, 21, 22; conventions of, 64–65; development in 1960s, 195; and equal representation, 15; hemispheric fairs as variant of, 20; Latin Americans’ self-representation in, 84; naming of, 28, 207n25; and Pan-American concept, vii; spatial formulas of, 21, 22–23; standards in, 179; themes of, 27, 188. See also expositions

INDEX

257

World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition (1884– 1885), New Orleans, Louisiana: Art Exhibition Building, 207n22; attendance of, 22, 207n5; and Audubon Park, 22; bird’s-eye views of, 19, 23, 26; California and Florida Gardens, 19, 24; and commerce, 21, 23, 25, 27, 63–65; diagram of fairgrounds, 24; discovery narrative of, 20; as electrical fair, 54; HemisFair compared to, 194; Horticultural Hall, 19–20, 19, 23, 24, 25, 206n1; Latin American participation in, 27, 207n17; lectures of, 27; Main Building, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 207n7; Mexican Alhambra, 25, 25, 37, 47, 61, 84, 212n168; Mexican and Central American Gardens, 19, 24; Mexican Commissioners and Headquarters Building, 24, 25, 26; Mexican Garden, 25; Mexican Mining Pavilion, 24, 25; Mexican pavilions, 19–20, 23, 24, 25, 25, 27, 37, 84; and Pan-American architecture, 22, 25, 65; and Pan-American concept, 21; and Pan-American

258

D E S I G N I N G PA N - A M E R I CA

landscape, 19–20, 67; and proposals for quadricentenary, 34; Site Plan of, 24; spatial formula of, 21, 23, 24, 27; State Exhibits Building, 25. See also North, Central, and South American Exposition (1885–1886), New Orleans, Louisiana World Trade Center, New York City, 225n67 Wright, Frank Lloyd: and Brazilian students, 135, 221n151; as juror for Columbus Memorial Lighthouse Competition, 106, 132, 134, 135; and Pan-American concept, 101; Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 134, 134 Yamasaki, Minoru, 152, 166, 167, 171, 176, 178, 225n67 Yeager, Gene, 27 Zaremba, Charles William, 34, 38, 109, 208n53 Zueblin, Charles, 60