Academy of Sciences

A charter amendment passed on this day allowed the California Academy of Sciences to build its first building in Golden Gate Park.

The Academy's trustees retained the architect Lewis P. Hobart, who would set the Beaux-Arts plan the buildings followed for four decades. The site chosen was the former location of the Mid-Winter Fair's Mechanical Arts Building.

Work began on North American Hall, called the West Wing, the first building on the Academy's Golden Gate Park site; it was finished in 1916, an early example of a building type then rare in the West.

Steinhart Aquarium opened, the largest and most complete aquarium in the country at the time and one of the first municipal aquariums in the western United States, designed in the Neo-Classical manner by Lewis P. Hobart after he had toured aquariums in Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and Miami.

The Academy's East Wing was completed. A rendering of Hobart's proposed north elevation, printed in the San Francisco Chronicle on 25 September 1929, had shown a grand central portico linking the two exhibition halls that was never built.

Simson African Hall was built; the 2003 evaluation found it eligible for the California Register in its own right.

Science Hall was completed to the design of the San Francisco firm Weihe, Frick & Kruse.

Morrison Planetarium, part of Science Hall, was completed — one of the earliest major planetariums in the United States, and found eligible for the California Register in 2003.

Pflueger designed Wattis Hall, a research and exhibition hall of concrete in the Modernist manner, like Cowell Hall before it.

The Fish Roundabout was completed, the first exhibit of its kind in the country.