Coming Soon

The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition on San Francisco's waterfront was, in spite of its name, a celebration of San Francisco as much as of the completion of the Panama Canal. Just nine years prior the city was largely a smoldering ruin of the 1906 earthquake and fire, and many of its inhabitants couldn't imagine it shining for decades to come. But the PPIE capped a period of torrid building and dreaming that brought the city back in just nine years.

One building from the vast exposition embodied that audacious spirit long after it closed: Babylon. Originally the state of Ohio pavilion, it was purchased as the fair was being demolished, floated down San Francisco Bay to San Carlos, and went on to host a string of local inventors, entrepreneurs, schemers and crackpots for 40 years before it was fittingly burned to the ground to make way for a nascent Silicon Valley full of risk takers.