1939 New York World's Fair
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The 1939-40 New York World's Fair, located on the current site of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (also the location of the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair), was one of the largest world's fairs of all time. Many different countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people attended its exhibits in two seasons. The NYWF of 1939-40 allowed all visitors to take a look at "The world of tomorrow."
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[edit] Planning
In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, a group of New York City businessmen decided to create an international exposition to lift the city and the country out of depression. Not long after, these men formed the New York World's Fair Corporation, whose office was placed on one of the higher floors in the Empire State Building. The NYWFC elected Grover Whalen as the president of their committee. The whole committee consisted of Winthrop Aldrich, Mortimer Buckner, Floyd Carlisle, John J. Dunnigan, Harvey Dow Gibson, Fiorello La Guardia, Percy S. Straus, and many other business leaders.
Over the next four years, the committee planned, built, and organized the fair and its exhibits, with countries around the world taking part in creating the biggest international event since World War I.
In 1938, the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees did their part to promote the upcoming fair with their jerseys. All players on those teams wore patches featuring the Trylon, Perisphere, and "1939" on their left sleeve.
The fair ran for two seasons, from April to October each year. To get the Fair's budget overruns under control and augment gate revenues, the fair management in the second year replaced Whalen and placed much greater emphasis on the amusement features, and less on the educational and uplifting exhibits. Countries under the thumb of the Axis powers in Europe, e.g., Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France, ran their pavilions in 1940 with a special nationalistic pride. In both seasons, the only major world power that did not participate was Germany.
[edit] The Fair's Two Seasons
[edit] Grand opening
Finally, on April 30, 1939, a Sunday, the fair had its grand opening, with 200,000 people in attendance. Although many of the pavilions and other facilities were not quite ready for this opening, it was put on with pomp and great celebration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the opening day address, and as a reflection of the wide range of technological innovation on parade at the fair, his speech was not only broadcast over the various radio networks but also was televised.
[edit] Exhibits
One of the first exhibits to receive attention was a time capsule, which was not to be opened till 6939 A.D. The time capsule was a tube containing writings by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, copies of Life Magazine, a kewpie doll, a dollar in change, a pack of Camel cigarettes, millions of pages of text on microfilm, and much more. The seeds contained in the time capsule (wheat, corn, oats, tobacco, cotton, flax, rice, soy beans, alfalfa, sugar beets, carrots and barley, all sealed in glass tubes) are probably the only ones on earth never exposed to radiation from nuclear explosions. The time capsule is located at , at a depth of 50 feet. A small stone plaque marks the position.[1]
Other exhibits included a streamlined pencil sharpener, a futuristic car based city by GM and one of the first televisions. There was also a huge globe/planetarium located near the center of the fair. Bell Labs' Voder, a keyboard-operated speech synthesizer, was demonstrated at the Fair.
The copy of Magna Carta belonging to Lincoln Cathedral also left Britain in 1939 for the first time to be in the British Pavilion at the fair. Within months Britain joined World War Two and it was deemed safer for it to remain in America until the end of hostilities. It therefore remained in Fort Knox, next to the original copy of the American constitution, until 1947.
The fair was also the occasion for the 1st World Science Fiction Convention, subsequently dubbed Nycon 1.
On July 4, 1940 the fair hosted "Superman Day." Notable was the crowning of the "superboy and supergirl" of the day, and a public appearance by Superman, played by actor Ray Middleton; the first time any had played the role.
The Jewish Palestine Pavilion introduced the world to the concept of a modern Jewish state, which a decade later would become Israel. The pavilion featured on its façade a monumental hammered copper relief sculpture entitled "The Scholar, The Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil" by the noted Art Deco sculptor Maurice Ascalon.
Although the United States would not enter the Second World War until the end of 1941, the fairgrounds served as a window into the troubles overseas. The pavilions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example, did not reopen for the 1940 season. Also that year, two NYPD officers were killed by blast while investigating a time bomb left at the British Pavilion.[1][citation needed]
[edit] Themes and Zones
The Fair was themed. It was divided into different "zones" (the Transportation Zone, the Communications and Business Systems Zone, the Food Zone, the Government Zone, and so forth). Virtually every structure erected on the fairgrounds was extraordinary, even experimentally so, because architects were encouraged by their corporate or government sponsors to be creative, energetic, and innovative. Novel building designs, materials, and furnishings were the norm.
The zones were distinguished by many subtle color cues, including differently colored lighting. The "Theme Center" consisted of two all-white, landmark monumental buildings named the Trylon (over 700 feet tall) and the Perisphere which one entered by moving stairway and exited via a grand curved walkway named the Helicline. The Theme Center was designed by the architect Wallace Harrison and his associate Max Abramovitz. Only the Trylon and Perisphere were all white; avenues stretching out into the zones from the Theme Center were designed with rich colors that changed the further one walked from the center of the grounds. For example, the exhibits and other facilities along the Avenue of Pioneers were in a progression of blues, starting with pale tints and ending in deep ultramarine. At night, with the latest in lighting technology switched on, the effect was magical.
The design of Disneyland, with its themed Frontierland, Tomorrowland and central Sleeping Beauty Castle clearly owes something to the 1939 World's Fair[citation needed]. The resemblance of Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center to the Fair is even closer, and was widely noted by architectural writers when it opened. Epcot's geodesic-sphere "Spaceship Earth" bears a distinct family resemblance to the Perisphere.
With its vast acreage and prominent location just south of the Theme Center the important focal center of the transportation pavilions attracted widespread attention. Perhaps the most popular of the Transportation Zone pavilions was the one built for General Motors. There the 36,000 square foot Futurama exhibit, designed by famed industrial designer and theater set designer Norman Bel Geddes, transported fair visitors over a huge diorama of a section of the United States that was designed with a stunning array of miniature highways, towns, 500,000 individually designed homes, 50,000 miniature vehicles, waterways, and a million miniature trees of diverse species. These elements of the diorama gradually became larger to the visitors (who were seated in moving chairs overhead) the further along they moved through the exhibit, until the (GM) cars and other elements of the exhibit became life-size.
Adjacent to the GM pavilion was the Ford Pavilion, where cars drove on a figure eight track on the building's roof endlessly, day in and day out. Not far from GM and Ford was the Chrysler exhibits, where an audience in a theater with the new technology called "air conditioning" could watch a Plymouth being assembled right before their very eyes. And the Railroad Conference exhibits (on seventeen acres) included "Railroads on Parade," a spectacular live drama re-enacting the birth and growth of railroads.
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A visitor walking to the left of the Theme Center on the Avenue of Patriots would visit the Communications and Business Systems focal exhibits. At the AT&T Pavilion the Voder, a mechanized, synthetic voice, spoke to fairgoers,foretelling the widespread use of electronic voices decades later. At the IBM pavilion, electric typewriters and a fantastic machine called the electric calculator, using punch cards, were on display, among hundreds of artworks from 70 countries around the world. And next door to these business exhibits was a building, "Masterpieces of Art," housing 300 priceless works of the Old Masters, from the Middle Ages to 1800. This was no sideshow; thirty five galleries featured great works from DaVinci and Michelangelo to Rembrandt, from Hals to Caravaggio and Bellini. Whalen and his team were somehow able to borrow priceless paintings and sculptures from Europe and hang them in a graceful, understated building in Queens for two years.
Continuing outward from the Theme Center one saw the Food Zone. Among the many unique exhibits was the Borden's exhibit, that featured 150 pedigreed cows (including the original Elsie) on a "rotolactor" that mechanically bathed them, dried them, and milked them. Next door was the Continental Baking exhibit, presenting a vast, continuous process of baking breads and other products. Consistent with the design sense of the Fair, this building was fashioned, ad-like, in the shape of a huge packaged bread loaf, white with red, yellow, and blue balloons on its curved facade. Behind the exhibit was a bona fide wheat field from which wheat was harvested and used in the baking process.
The sixty foreign governments that participated in this fair contributed a wide diversity of creatively designed pavilions housing a stunning array of cultural offerings to fairgoers. The Italian pavilion attempted to fuse ancient Roman splendor with modern styles, and a 200 foot high water fall defined the pavilion's facade. Its popular restaurant was designed in the shape of the nation's luxury cruise line ships. The French pavilion, on the Court of Peace that was the grand open space northeast of the Theme Center, ran such a celebrated restaurant that after the fair closed and World War II ended, the restaurant remained in New York City - and soon established itself (as Le Pavilion) as one of the finest French dining establishments in the city.
Beyond the corporate and government zones, the wildly popular but less uplifting Amusements Area was not integrated into the thematic matrix, and was a mere Area rather than a Zone. Despite the high-minded educational tone that Grover Whalen attempted to set, the "Amusements Area" was the most popular part of the Fair and included roller coaster, the Life Savers parachute jump (which was later moved to Coney Island where it still stands), and carnival acts such as a collection of performing midgets. Many of the shows provided spectators with the opportunity of viewing women in very revealing costumes (for all intents and purposes topless): the Frozen Alive Girl, the Dream of Venus Building, and, above all, The Billy Rose Aquacade, which was demolished in 1996. Somehow, the nudity was generally accepted by the public as part of the "World of Tomorrow".
The Aquacade was put on in a special amphitheater seating 10,000 people and included an orchestra to accompany the synchronized spectacular swim show. It featured Johnny Weismuller and Eleanor Holm, two of the most celebrated swimmers of the era, and dazzled fairgoers with its lighting and cascades and curtains of water, pumped in waterfalls at 8,000 gallons a minute. The cost of admission: eighty cents.
A special subway line, the IND World's Fair Railroad, was built to serve the fair and dismantled after its closure. World's Fair (now Willets Point-Shea Stadium) station on the IRT Flushing Line was rebuilt to handle fair traffic on the IRT and BMT. A Long Island Rail Road station (now Shea Stadium) was built next to the Flushing Line station.
[edit] Closure
The fair was open for two seasons, and was officially closed forever on October 27, 1940. It attracted over 45 million visitors and generated roughly $48 million in revenue. Since the Fair Corporation had invested 67 million dollars (in addition to nearly a hundred million dollars from other sources), it was an economic failure, and the corporation declared bankruptcy.
[edit] Influence on later literature and popular culture
The 1939 World's Fair made a strong impression on attendees and influenced a generation of Americans. Later generations have attempted in to recapture the impression it made in fictional and artistic treatments:
- World's Fair, by E. L. Doctorow
- 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, a mixed non-fiction and fictional book by David Gelernter
- All-Star Squadron, a comic book published by DC Comics from 1981 until 1987 and set during the 1940s, was about a superhero team whose headquarters were in the Trylon and Perisphere.
- In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, one of the main characters breaks into the abandoned fairgrounds and the Perisphere itself, where he has a significant sexual experience.
- "Fifty Years After the Fair" is a song written and recorded by Aimee Mann. With a mixture of nostalgia and remorse, it describes the Fair from the current vantage-point of "tomorrow".
- "1939" is a song performed by the Brooklyn band Piñataland. The album version begins with a recording of President Franklin D. Roosevelt declaring the Fair's opening, followed immediately by a short excerpt of a 1939-contemporary song which includes the lyrics, "to the World of Tomorrow we come." The song makes reference to Great Depression and many of the Fair's celebrated features.
- In addition to the Fair's subtitle, the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow features a shot of what look like the Trylon and Perisphere and appears to be set in 1939.
- In the game "Chrononauts", in an alternate universe where Hitler has been assassinated, black forest cake is popularized at the German pavilion at the fair.
- Matt Groening's show Futurama was named after the GM exhibit.
- In the animated film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a young Bruce Wayne and girlfriend attend the Gotham World's Fair, dubbed "The World of Tomorrow" and full of 1930's style architecture.
- A 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone features an airplane that mysteriously travels back in time to 1939. The crew only realizes their strange situation when the World's Fair comes into sight under their plane.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Tour of the 1939 World's Fair
- Images from the '39 NY World's Fair
- Welcome to Tomorrow
- Iain Baird (Television Historian), Television in The World of Tomorrow
- Superman Day at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair
- http://www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine3/items.html
- The New York World's Fair Community
- nywf64.com (1964/1965 New York World's Fair Website)
| Preceded by Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) |
World Expositions 1939 |
Succeeded by Port-au-Prince International |
