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PALACE OF DELIGHTS*
I met frank oppenheimer
soon ater I got my rst real writingjob with the venerable
Saturday Review,
which had just movedrom New York to San Francisco. It was the early 1970s, and SanFrancisco was, in the lingo o the day, happening — the placewhere you wore fowers in your hair.For an East Coast kid, everything about it was magic. Therewere golden hills and wildfowers; rows o pastel wedding-cakehouses set shoulder to shoulder on impossibly steep streets; a tun-nel you entered through a rainbow. You could take a erry boat toAngel Island and commune with seals. The stealth og spilled overthe hills ast and erce, snung out the red towers o the GoldenGate Bridge and engulng you in a silent, splendid isolation. Noth-ing seemed real. But the air o possibility was palpable.I had no interest in science whatsoever, having taken the usualdull courses in school and gone on to more interesting and rele-vant things, such as politics and culture. But one o the editors atthe magazine had heard about a strange new science museum inthe city, and I was sent to write about it. I had no idea what toexpect.
* “Palace o Delights” was the title given to a
Nova
documentary about the Explorato-rium. Frank thought it made the place sound like a brothel, but loved the lm nevertheless.
 
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the world he came into
This so-called Exploratorium was housed in the Palace o FineArts, at the oot o the Golden Gate Bridge — a huge “Romanruin” created by Bernard R. Maybeck or the 1915 Panama- PacicInternational Exposition. Maybeck designed it to crumble underthe weight o time. In the interim, the city had put it to use as a restation, a warehouse or telephone books, a garage or limousines,an airplane hangar, tennis courts. It almost did become a ruin, butby the 1960s, su cient public support had rallied to restore it —and by that time it had become enough o a landmark that evenMaybeck went along. It had just reopened in 1968.My taxi pulled up beside a quiet lagoon in a sunny park withswans and ducks and old olks on benches eeding the pigeons.Behind rose a massive salmon-pink colonnade and Romanesquerotunda; maidens leaned over giant cisterns draped with garlands.The air was sweet with eucalyptus — a scent that can still take meback to that day.Nearly hidden behind all this architectural pageantry was anenormous semicircular building. I walked under an archway atone end and opened a door into a dark cavern that seemed to pulsewith dim lights and eerie sounds. It was spooky and inviting.Although I couldn’t see it all rom where I stood, the space wasvast — ninety thousand square eet. The concrete supports andsteel girders looked like the bare ribs o a giant sh, and I elt asi I’d entered the belly o a whale. The foor was rough and ugly,the walls concrete. Wires and cables dangled rom the raters. Theonly light came rom rows o fuorescent lamps orty eet above;despite the presence o our enormous replaces, there was noheat, and it was cold. An early 1970 article said the place “has allthe charm o a blimp hangar.”It took a while or the eyes to adjust — and not only in a literalsense. The strange hums and fickers gave the place an ethereal,otherworldly eel. There was a big yellow tent on my let thathoused an electronics shop. On my right was a noisy machineshop, all sparks and whines o saws and welding and lathes. Hang-ing above the shop, a handmade sign announced:
here is be-
 
Palace of Delights
5
ing created the exploratorium, a community museumdedicated to awareness
.
*
I dropped a quarter into a donation barrel and jumped back as300,000 volts o purple lightning rom a tesla coil zapped up a tallpole. Then I did it again.I walked into a swirling wash o color where ne webs o sen-suous red and blue and yellow created huge sheets o undulatinglight orms. A very tall man was twirling Mylar lassos in the light,spinning swirls o colors. Several children — and adults — joinedhim. When I traced the colors back, I could see that they were ex-tracted rom an ordinary white sunbeam coming through a hole inthe ceiling; the beam spread out into a spectrum as it pirouettedthrough a rack o prisms; the prisms sent the whole palette o sun-light to a stand o thin vertical mirrors which then sliced it intothin ribbons o color — each uncannily pure. The tall man was BobMiller, and this was his “Sun Painting,” honored (along with Bob)in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “The Sun Painter.”I watched disembodied legs wearing patent-leather Mary Janeschase each other around in a circle — a shoe tester used by the Na-tional Bureau o Standards in the 1930s. Frank loved cool ma-chinery.Someone had made a dance foor o color-coded patches thatplayed music as you stepped on them (the idea was later made intoa toy sold at FAO Schwarz that was used to great eect in themovie
Big 
). One day, I was told, a would-be John Travolta deckedout in ull
Saturday Night Fever
regalia came and played his heartout. In truth, it was almost impossible not to perorm. (For ama-teurs, cards spelled out how to play “The Old Gray Mare” andthe theme rom
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
)Farther on, two small children were playing with a giant check-erboard o colored lights, “shooting” squares o dierent colorson and o with red and green light guns. “Bang, I got the red
* The sign was hand made by the wie o George Gamow — the late physicist who guredout that the universe began with a Big Bang (though he hated that term) and author o thepopular Mr. Tompkins series, which inspired many a physics career.
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