Fair…and Unfair

 

This is a story of two world’s fairs, held 25 years apart. The early fair, the one my parents went to as kids, is still justly remembered with fondness and respect, one last good time before World War II. The later one, the space-age fair that my wife and I went to as kids, was also a dazzling, Disneyland-sized tribute to modern progress. It was held in the same place, by many of the same people: companies and designers who created the first one. But this new fair, “our” fair, was scorned by fashionable critics.

Then and forever since, the few writers who mention the New York World’s Fair 1964/65 saw it as ugly and unimaginative if not outright tacky, shallow corporate hucksterism. In the quaint language of the day, the fair was a distraction from pollution, prejudice, and poverty. The New York Times Sunday Magazine said something typical that seemed clueless and unintentionally funny even at the time. It still sticks with me: “Only the people who went to it liked it.” I’m one of them.

I usually write about technology intersecting show business. This post is about one very un-usual, very costly form of specialized moving image storytelling, the world’s fair or theme park exhibit ride. It’s a unique kind of show you actually move through, part inspiration, part entertainment, part advertising–or propaganda. It’s a popular art form that was essentially invented in America to look beyond those Depression blues. Its spirit lives on even today at Epcot Center and in every Disney park.

Flashback, all the way back to April 30, 1939. “I Have Seen the Future.” That’s what it said on a display pin you were handed when you stepped off the seated ride conveyor, at the end of General Motors’ spectacular Futurama exhibit at the 1939-’40 New York World’s Fair. Its dazzling moving diorama views of mile-high skyscrapers and 20-lane, 100-mile-an-hour superhighways made it by far the fair’s most popular pavilion. America’s future was looking far brighter than it did when the World’s Fair was first proposed in 1935, in the Gotham City-like depths of the Great Depression.

The Futurama badge you pinned to your lapel was a boldly colored design on enameled metal, New Deal stark and mythic looking. Working-class families were almost all Democrats, suspicious of Wall Street, and recently scarred by hard times. Yet they flocked to see the pride and self-flattery of rich corporations at the zenith of their power, spending bundles to create ten-minute visions of the future so elaborate that you can sit down and spend ten minutes riding through them. And Futurama, a word trademarked by General Motors, was where it all started.

When the NYWF opened, Germany’s conquests were still nearly bloodless, something that would change, and soon. But as the public swarmed through the gates on that last day of April 1939, there was still plenty of hope that it would indeed be the beginning of a bright new day.

Another seated conveyor “ride” at the 1939-’40 fair was called Democracity, the fair’s own giant light-and-sound diorama of city life in a rationally planned future. This exhibit took place inside a giant ball, half of the iconic Trylon and Perisphere theme center known to every viewer of the 1961 Twilight Zone episode, “The Odyssey of Flight 33.” In the diorama, each quadrant of the town had to re-paint their buildings to match the neighborhood’s voted-on color scheme. Democracity would have been democracy at its pushiest.

The pre-war fair wasn’t all rides, of course. It marked the public debut of nylon stockings, fax machines, new forms of plastic, robots, and television.

Some pavilions had a sense of fun, like NCR’s building that was shaped like a giant cash register, whose numbers displayed a running tally of the day’s attendance. There were exhibits of passenger trains and of milking machines. Foreign pavilions competed to attract visitors with free food and entertainment.

There was also a lakeside Amusement Area, with more traditional fairground entertainment, games of “chance,” carny barkers, and sideshows, including “artistic” poses by topless women. It doesn’t fit our clean image of 1939, but it happened.

Then, world war, and a world transformed. In the prosperous ’50s, with America effectively on top of the world, New York’s power circles wanted another round. Everyone was in on it: Democrats of Brooklyn’s Tammany Hall and the outer borough construction unions; patrician Republicans who ran Manhattan’s banks and real estate. Everyone could make a buck off another world’s fair. Political power broker Robert Moses, the unelected king of New York, accepted the job of making it happen. The date, 1964, was chosen as the 300th anniversary of Dutch New Amsterdam becoming British New York.

After toying with impractical schemes like a glass dome a mile in diameter, the city settled on the simplest, cheapest solution, of re-using the street plan of the ’39-’40 fairgrounds. The Kennedy administration was fully on board. Like the earlier fair, the flashiest parts would be presented by major corporations like General Electric, AT&T, IBM, DuPont, Bell Telephone, and the car companies.

The international clearinghouse for world’s fairs had already okayed Seattle’s Space Needle world’s fair of 1962, and was in the process of approving Montreal. They turned down New York. They’d turned down New York in the 30s, too, but this time they made it stick. Most major countries like Britain, France, and Germany didn’t participate. To save face, the fair allowed privately owned unofficial fake “pavilions” that were no more than a fast-food stand and a souvenir shop. A definite mistake, though not a killer one.

In a late stage of design, the USSR and its satellites changed course and withdrew. In a fit of spite, Moses—that’s Robert Moses—gave their land to God; he made their pavilion real estate available to religious groups, just this legal side of free of charge. Not everyone loved the flashy Vatican pavilion, but my family did. The Billy Graham Evangelical Organization had a great exhibit. For years to come, I was the only Catholic kid in the neighborhood who subscribed to the Hour of Decision newsletter (as well probably being the only one with a copy of the album to 1964’s biggest Broadway hit, Fiddler on the Roof). An Anglican writer complained good-naturedly that the various denominations of the Protestant and Orthodox pavilions looked like a bunch of Allegheny Airlines check-in counters. It should be admitted that the ’64-’65 fair was a bit on the churchy side, but it accurately reflected the attitudes of the country at that time, a reality that irritated the hell out of critics.

Progressives were increasingly distrustful of technology, and seemed to have no interest in automobiles, computers, suburban living, video telephones, or space travel.

In 1964 and 1965, the GM Futurama’s exciting ten-minute trip into the future was once again the most popular exhibit at the fair. Seated riders glided past lifelike scenes of lunar colonies, arctic weather control stations, and underwater scenic hotels. The so-called pin that ride attendants handed you was made of injected plastic, and its symbol was just an atomic abstraction of the space age. A sign of changing times and styles.

People in 1939 wore hats, and men often wore a jacket and tie even in summer heat. By contrast, a glance at color photos of the 1964 crowds doesn’t look that strange to us today. People are dressed for comfort, as we do today, though for the ladies, slacks and not-very-short shorts were still outnumbered by dresses and skirts. It was a world of families, not singles. The crowds of ’64, the civil rights era, were more racially integrated than 1939’s, as ours are today.

Some of the differences between then and even just a few years later don’t show up readily in photos. What we think of as the ’60s had barely started. There was no women’s movement to speak of. The only new freedom for women touted at the fair was the kind that modern appliances and wash and wear fabrics could convey. The world of 1964 wasn’t thinking much about gay rights or the environment, not yet, anyway. The Vietnam war hadn’t inflamed the country; that came later. There was no graffiti, and very little crime at the fair. As far as we know, the smell of marijuana was never detected wafting through its nighttime streets. All of this would change quickly, even by the time of the New York fair’s gifted, conceited younger sibling, Montreal’s much-loved expo67.

More than a half-century on, I still think that most, not all later criticisms of the fair were snobbish sour grapes. The ’39 fair also had its share of tacky, and ’64 had plenty to be proud of. It hosted the Pope and the Beatles, among 51 million other people. It inspired artists from Andy Warhol to Stanley Kubrick. If its fascination for outer space now seems a little naïve, it appears to be coming back into style. The IBM pavilion’s computers-are-your-friends creativity was smartly ahead of its time, and so were the telecommunications forecasts of one of the fair’s other great ride pavilions, Bell System/AT&T.

Walt Disney, whose theme park rides owed much to the earlier fair, designed no fewer than four exhibits, three of which were retained afterward for use in Disneyland: the Illinois pavilion (Abe Lincoln in Illinois), Pepsi-Cola (It’s a Small World), GE Carousel of Progress (It’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow) and the biggest of the four, Ford Motor Company’s own ride through history, one-upping GM by having the passengers seated in actual Ford cars, propelled from below with small electric motors.

The top attraction remained the General Motors Futurama. There’s a saying in show business, “Give the people what they want and they’ll show up for it.” That’s why two generations of people waited in hour-long lines to see what amounted to a slow ride around an ingeniously detailed, three-block-long model train layout, while contemplating America’s future. What Futurama gave us in the crowd was buoyant technological optimism.

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  1. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Misthiocracy got drunk and (View Comment):

    Hypothesis: In 1939 the a world fair felt like a tonic for a weary nation coming out of the Depression. In 1964 a world fair felt more like a triumphant nation spiking the ball in the end zone, especially considering how the nations most ravaged by WWII didn’t participate.

    I’ll buy that. There’s a lot of truth to it, and you see echoes of that in the way that many of our European allies were secretly cheered by the USSR beating the USA into space. They didn’t really prefer the Russians; they just liked to see something wipe the grin off our faces.

    By contrast, expo67 felt practically like a love-in. US coverage was envious. Trudeaumania, The Original! was a big hit down here, where we were still afflicted with JFK-worship. Honestly, for Americans it’s a surprise to check and discover that Lester Pearson was still running the show, and PET was still only the justice minister in 1967. He became PM only in ’68, but to us it tends to blur together.

    Dad did public relations for Expo ’67 when the Herald-Tribune shut down. Did my first business day trip with him to Rochester, and when the Fair opened, more passes to get around the lines in Montreal (but only one trip, since Eastern Airlines wasn’t giving away freebees and cost more than the 15-cents a subway ride to the ’64-’65 Fair did). We went back in 1970 when the U.S. ‘Buckeydome’ pavilion was still an attraction but the other events were more on the normal amusement park level and you could only look at Habitat ’67 and the tinkertoy nature of it for so long….

    That picture needs a cartoon of two construction guys trying to figure out what went wrong.  Two pages of the plans stuck together maybe?

    • #31
  2. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    In those days, families not only had brand loyalty for cars, but corporate loyalty. Chevy and Ford were rival teams. As part of a Chevy family, I was inclined to be skeptical about the works of Dearborn.

    Most of my family on both sides were GM buyers, though one of my older cousins did make her dad buy her a Mustang convertible in ’65. But going the opposite direction of GM at the Fair and basically offering up “Pastrama” was a smart move by Ford, and for a first grader, the moving dinosaurs were really cool….

     

    • #32
  3. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Futurama I was designed by Normal Bel Geddes, with heavy input from GM’s styling czar Harley Earl. One advantage that exhibit had, per James Lileks, is that no one had ever seen anything like it. By contrast, Futurama II was a corporate design with a striking, curved overhanging entrance wall that critics compared to car tailfins. People liked it, a lot, but it wasn’t quite the novelty it had been 25 years before, nor could it have been. 

    Ride design has tradeoffs. Not enough curves in the ride path and there are no surprises, no just-around-the-next-bend moments. Too many serpentine moves and the ride track tends to jam more often. 

    • #33
  4. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Futurama I was designed by Normal Bel Geddes, with heavy input from GM’s styling czar Harley Earl. One advantage that exhibit had, per James Lileks, is that no one had ever seen anything like it. By contrast, Futurama II was a corporate design with a striking, curved overhanging entrance wall that critics compared to car tailfins. People liked it, a lot, but it wasn’t quite the novelty it had been 25 years before, nor could it have been.

    Ride design has tradeoffs. Not enough curves in the ride path and there are no surprises, no just-around-the-next-bend moments. Too many serpentine moves and the ride track tends to jam more often.

    The New York City pavilion for the ’64-’65 Fair also was an indoor ride, but in that case, they put you in little pillbox booth-like four person cars, which did a circular loop around a diorama of a lit-up New York City at night. Interesting as a one-time experience, though the thing I remember most about it was that someone apparently had peed in the car before our trip (which if you want to be cynical, was the actual Futurama experience for what New York City was about to turn into just 3-4 years later).

    • #34
  5. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Futurama I was designed by Normal Bel Geddes, with heavy input from GM’s styling czar Harley Earl. One advantage that exhibit had, per James Lileks, is that no one had ever seen anything like it. By contrast, Futurama II was a corporate design with a striking, curved overhanging entrance wall that critics compared to car tailfins. People liked it, a lot, but it wasn’t quite the novelty it had been 25 years before, nor could it have been.

    Ride design has tradeoffs. Not enough curves in the ride path and there are no surprises, no just-around-the-next-bend moments. Too many serpentine moves and the ride track tends to jam more often.

    The New York City pavilion for the ’64-’65 Fair also was an indoor ride, but in that case, they put you in little pillbox booth-like four person cars, which did a circular loop around a diorama of a lit-up New York City at night. Interesting as a one-time experience, though the thing I remember most about it was that someone apparently had peed in the car before our trip (which if you want to be cynical, was the actual Futurama experience for what New York City was about to turn into just 3-4 years later).

    That city diorama is featured in the romcom New Year’s Eve. The Unisphere, of course, appears in Men in Black. So even if architecture critics have gratefully forgotten about the ’64-’65 fair, the movies haven’t. 

    Potentially the best of them all could have been Tomorrowland, which has some amazing recreations of the style of the 1964 pavilions. But it was saddled with a confusing, earnest but charmless story. Instead of reaffirming the good intentions and high hopes of the era, it ends up being a semi-woke invocation of We Are the World

    • #35
  6. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    And don’t forget that the Ferris wheel is now outside Detroit.

    • #36
  7. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Arahant (View Comment):

    And don’t forget that the Ferris wheel is now outside Detroit.

    You are referring to the giant tire? 

    • #37
  8. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Arahant (View Comment):

    And don’t forget that the Ferris wheel is now outside Detroit.

    You are referring to the giant tire?

    That’s the one.

    • #38
  9. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Potentially the best of them all could have been Tomorrowland, which has some amazing recreations of the style of the 1964 pavilions. But it was saddled with a confusing, earnest but charmless story. Instead of reaffirming the good intentions and high hopes of the era, it ends up being a semi-woke invocation of We Are the World.

    The ’64-’65 period, right between the JFK assassination and the beginning of the John Lindsay years as mayor, was sort of a ‘tottering on the abyss’ period for New York City that the Fair was both a respite and a symbol of. It definitely was a way for a few hours to avoid the mounting problems in the city, particularly the crime rate rise (Kitty Genovese was murdered three miles south of the Fair site a month before it opened), and aside from being unloved by the Times, in part because it was a Robert Moses creation, the Fair was a financial money pit, paying back only 33 cents on the dollar to investors (which was actually the same as the 1939-40 Fair returned to its backers).

    It also sucked the lives out of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island and Freedomland in the Bronx, as both amusement parks closed after the summer of ’64 because all their customers were going to the Fair (Freedomland may have been the Springtime for Hitler of amusement parks, in that it was set up to fail and be turned into Co-Op City a few years later, while part of the land where Steeplechase was ended up being turned into lower income apartments by Fred Trump). By 1966, there was no more Fair, and the big amusement parks in NYC were pretty much gone, unless you wanted to endure the subway ride out to Rockaway Playland (a trip measured in light years from Manhattan) or go over to Palisades Park in New Jersey (where if you didn’t have a car you had to endure the thrill ride of  taking Public Service Transit from the Port Authority Bus Terminal).

    • #39
  10. Steve C. Member
    Steve C.
    @user_531302

    Unfortunately, I can’t find the picture of me standing next to the James Bond Aston Martin.

    • #40
  11. Jim Kearney Member
    Jim Kearney
    @JimKearney

    I enjoyed the 1964-5 New York World’s Fair immensely. As a mid-teen struggling academically after an unsuccessful Latin immersion experiment in a school fixated on the past, this glimpse of the future filled me with joy and optimism.

    My parents knew the Fair’s PR man, so I heard nothing but good things about it and was encouraged to make return visits. It was convenient to Shea Stadium, spacious, safe, and had foot rejuvenation machines placed strategically throughout. The phone company pavilion had a timer where you could compare dialing your number on a rotary dial with tapping it out on a wonder of the future, touch-tone. Another exhibit set up pen pals across the globe. All the PR for American business filled a void in my education. We need something like it today.

    Later, the New York State Pavilion became The Pavilion, an open air rock concert venue where you could dance on a giant map of the state. A few days before the moon landing, several thousand of us journeyed there for a terrific Grateful Dead performance.

    Thanks for the memories, and for the link to Lileks’ 1960’s collection

    • #41
  12. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    One forgotten part of the Fair was the Heliport. Urban commuting via helicopter was going to be “a thing”. It was the site of the Top of the Fair restaurant. Flights from the Wall Street heliport and JFK airport were sporadic. The new Pan Am building was built with daily flights in mind, but legal opposition blocked the flights until the World’s Fair was over in 1965. From then until 1968, Pan Am did indeed fly first class passengers to and from JFK from the roof. The flights stopped because of low ridership.

    In 1977, after years of wrangling, they resumed for three months. Then in May, there was a fatal accident when a chopper rolled over on its side after landing, killing four people waiting to board, and sending a blade 800 feet to the street, killing a pedestrian. That ended the flights permanently. The incident is featured in thinly disguised form in the first Superman movie. 

    • #42
  13. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    One forgotten part of the Fair was the Heliport. Urban commuting via helicopter was going to be “a thing”. It was the site of the Top of the Fair restaurant. Flights from the Wall Street heliport and JFK airport were sporadic. The new Pan Am building was built with daily flights in mind, but legal opposition blocked the flights until the World’s Fair was over in 1965. From then until 1968, Pan Am did indeed fly first class passengers to and from JFK from the roof. The flights stopped because of low ridership.

    In 1977, after years of wrangling, they resumed for three months. Then in May, there was a fatal accident when a chopper rolled over on its side after landing, killing four people waiting to board, and sending a blade 800 feet to the street, killing a pedestrian. That ended the flights permanently. The incident is featured in thinly disguised form in the first Superman movie.

    It is still a thing, but you have to have major jack to swing it.

    Or work for a helicopter company and have a vice president owe you a favor.

    • #43
  14. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    Percival (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    One forgotten part of the Fair was the Heliport. Urban commuting via helicopter was going to be “a thing”. It was the site of the Top of the Fair restaurant. Flights from the Wall Street heliport and JFK airport were sporadic. The new Pan Am building was built with daily flights in mind, but legal opposition blocked the flights until the World’s Fair was over in 1965. From then until 1968, Pan Am did indeed fly first class passengers to and from JFK from the roof. The flights stopped because of low ridership.

    In 1977, after years of wrangling, they resumed for three months. Then in May, there was a fatal accident when a chopper rolled over on its side after landing, killing four people waiting to board, and sending a blade 800 feet to the street, killing a pedestrian. That ended the flights permanently. The incident is featured in thinly disguised form in the first Superman movie.

    It is still a thing, but you have to have major jack to swing it.

    Or work for a helicopter company and have a vice president owe you a favor.

    As I’ve heard it, when Billy Joel is performing his monthly concert at Madison Square Garden, he helicopters out immediately after the show.  He’s probably back at his home on Long Island before the last fans have left the theater.

    • #44
  15. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Miffed White Male (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    One forgotten part of the Fair was the Heliport. Urban commuting via helicopter was going to be “a thing”. It was the site of the Top of the Fair restaurant. Flights from the Wall Street heliport and JFK airport were sporadic. The new Pan Am building was built with daily flights in mind, but legal opposition blocked the flights until the World’s Fair was over in 1965. From then until 1968, Pan Am did indeed fly first class passengers to and from JFK from the roof. The flights stopped because of low ridership.

    In 1977, after years of wrangling, they resumed for three months. Then in May, there was a fatal accident when a chopper rolled over on its side after landing, killing four people waiting to board, and sending a blade 800 feet to the street, killing a pedestrian. That ended the flights permanently. The incident is featured in thinly disguised form in the first Superman movie.

    It is still a thing, but you have to have major jack to swing it.

    Or work for a helicopter company and have a vice president owe you a favor.

    As I’ve heard it, when Billy Joel is performing his monthly concert at Madison Square Garden, he helicopters out immediately after the show. He’s probably back at his home on Long Island before the last fans have left the theater.

    Let’s see … hop over to 34th Street and head towards the East River past the Empire State Building. About 10 blocks. Boom — there’s your bird home.

    • #45
  16. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    One of my brothers is ex-NYPD aviation and flies helis and jets for a trio of Manhattan billionaires who co-own the fleet. In 2007, I was visiting home and landed at La Guardia. He was supposed to drive me to our Dad’s house. The ride turned out to be in a Eurocopter, and we had freedom of the air. We went all over the city and harbor. Just fantastic, like riding God’s own motorcycle. 

    • #46
  17. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    One of my brothers is ex-NYPD aviation and flies helis and jets for a trio of Manhattan billionaires who co-own the fleet. In 2007, I was visiting home and landed at La Guardia. He was supposed to drive me to our Dad’s house. The ride turned out to be in a Eurocopter, and we had freedom of the air. We went all over the city and harbor. Just fantastic, like riding God’s own motorcycle.

    Not a copter story, but on opening weekend of the Fair in 1965 dad was doing a story for the Trib on the Goodyear blimp, which Fair officials had been able to snag for publicity, and we went out to Flushing Airport, where the blimp was moored, and took a ride over the Fair, and then towards Manhattan and as far south as 14th Street before turning around and heading back to Flushing. Not a fast ride, but definitely a fun one.

    Less fun because of the surprise was the small fixed-wing plane we then flew in to get a view of the Fair more from the Long Island side. Flushing Airport isn’t there anymore because it basically was on the other side of Flushing Bay from LaGuardia, and to avoid getting in the flight path of the big jets planes taking off from Flushing had to make a very quick 90 degree turn east and out over Long Island Sound. Since I was on the right side of the plane I then got a very spectacular — and sudden — downward-looking view of the Fair as the plane banked right towards the Throgs Neck Bridge. Would have been nice to know the flight plan prior to takeoff.

    • #47
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