White, Henry Bacon, and Thomas Hastings of New York; Robert Farquhar of
Los Angeles; and Louis Christian Mullgardt, George W. Kelham, Willis
Polk, William B. Faville, Clarence R. Ward, and Arthur Brown of San
Francisco. To their number was later added Bernard R. Maybeck of San
Francisco, who designed the Palace of Fine Arts, while Edward H.
Bennett, an associate of Burnham, of Chicago, made the final ground plan
of the Exposition group. When San Francisco had been before Congress
asking national endorsement for the Exposition here, the plans which
were then presented, and on which the fight was won, were prepared by
Ernest Coxhead, architect, of this city. These proposed a massed
grouping of the Exposition structures, around courts, and on the Bay
front. They were afterwards amplified by Coxhead, and furnished the
keynote of the scheme finally carried out. While the Exposition belongs
not to California alone, but to the whole world, it is pleasant to find
that so much of what is best in it is the work of Californians and San
Franciscans.

The architects perfected the plan in 1912. At the same time the actual
work of preparing the site was completed with the filling of the
tide-land portions by hydraulic dredgers and the removal of the standing
buildings. In the same year the department chiefs were named and began
their work. John McLaren, for many years Superintendent of Golden Gate
Park, was put in charge of the landscape engineering; W. D'A. Ryan was
chosen to plan the illumination, and Jules Guerin and K. T. F. Bitter
were placed at the heads of the departments of color and sculpture. With
these details behind, the ground-breaking for Machinery Palace in
January, 1913, marked the beginning of the final stage. In the two years
that remained it was necessary only to carry out the plans already
perfected. No other exposition has been so forehanded. When the gates
opened on February 20, 1915, to remain open till December 4, the