Friday, Jan. 17, 1964
Out of the Bull Rushes
Pick up your left foot, pick up your right, Walk away from every care.
This is your fun time, you are entitled to it, Fair is Fair.
And Moses is Moses. This week, in the world's most glamorous ex-dump, feet were being picked up in double time to the tune of Richard Rodgers' official Fair Is Fair march to prove that when Robert Moses says there is going to be a world's fair in Flushing Meadow in 1964, there damn well will be a fair.
In the flat-roofed headquarters building, the electronic countdown clock (Fair staffers call it "the Ulcer Machine") was ticking off the seconds, minutes, hours and days before the long-promised morning of Wednesday, April 22. With 14 weeks to go, it had finally become apparent to everyone that the deadline would be met. Finally, that is, to everyone but Fair President Moses: he never had any doubts. "All that remains," says he, "is to pitch in, let nothing slow our pace, and throw open the doors to those who said at the beginning that we couldn't make it."
There had been good reason for skepticism. The 1959 announcement of the world's biggest world's fair was greeted with a who-needs-it attitude by many of the nation's best-heeled potential exhibitors. The Paris-based International Bureau of Expositions huffily refused to recognize Moses' $500 million gambol in the meadow as a proper world's fair on the grounds (among other reasons) that there can be only one world's fair per country per decade, and Seattle was it. But the big corporations came round, and some nations skirted the bureau code by allowing private trade associations to take over the financing of exhibits; one member nation, Lebanon, defied it by going ahead with an official pavilion. More than 50 nations are represented, and of the major powers, only Great Britain, Italy and Russia abstain.
Belly Dancers, Dragons. Ever since Prince Albert masterminded the first one at London's Crystal Palace in 1851, world's fairs have been almost as frequent as revolutions. Many have influenced the architecture, the entertainment tastes and the commerce of their day. In the U.S., the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, with its acres of white plaster palaces, has been accused of setting the cause of modern architecture back by generations; it also established the belly dance as a U.S.
art form. Forty years later, Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress Exposition helped spread the gospel of contemporary architecture with its buildings in the "modernistic" style -- forests of blue mirrors, thickets of chromium stair rails, and jungles of neon tubing; it also gave America the fan dance. New York's 1939 fair brought a sense of monumentality combined with reason to architecture, with its carefully planned plazas of glass brick and fluted stucco. It also floated the Aquabelle.
Moses' fair has no architectural unity, and this fact may be its esthetic salvation. Architects and city planners screamed "hodgepodge" when Moses first revealed that it was going to be every designer for himself in 1964. But the resulting potpourri of styles, materials and shapes provides a laboratory for architectural experimenters who can afford to test new and nutty ideas on temporary structures--ideas which may give permanent builders in the U.S. something to think about. Buildings range in style from Architect Ira Kessler's Doric-columned Hall of Free Enterprise, through the gold and vermilion dragon's lair of the Hong Kong pavilion dreamed up by Painter Dong Kingman, and the fortresslike stone Japanese pavilion embellished by Sculptor Masayuki Nagare, to one of Eero Saarinen's last works, the egg-shaped IBM pavilion, which nests above steel treetops, hauls 500 spectators at a time up into its ovoid interior on a sloping "people wall" to view a nine-screen movie about computers.
Theme symbol of the Fair is the Unisphere, a stainless-steel skeleton of the earth complete with illuminated, cut-glass inserts marking capital cities. The 120-ft.-diameter globe is the gift of U.S. Steel, will remain on its fountainhead after the Fair closes. Visitors remembering the Trylon, the tricornered obelisk that towered 700 ft. above the 1939 fair, may wonder why nothing so tall or eye-catching looms above the 1964 exposition. The answer is "progress," in the form of a skyful of jets lowering for Kennedy International Airport six miles away or for La Guardia even closer at hand. The FAA has put a ceiling on the Fair. Tallest structure allowed is the 232-ft. observation tower of the New York State pavilion; on most other buildings, there is an 80-ft. limit. In place of a Trylon, a 13 billion-candlepower tower of light beaming up from the Electric Power and Light pavilion will lure fairgoers at night.
Enough domes have been decreed to make Kubla Khan's eyes bug. Buckminster Fuller's 159-ft.-diameter geodesic dome (TIME cover, Jan. 10) floats over the 2,100-seat World's Fair assembly hall (designed by Architects Eggers and Higgins). Welton Becket & Associates has designed for General Electric a "curvilinear lamella" dotted with lights; moon craters and mountains encrust the dome of the Transportation and Travel pavilion, designed by Clive Entwhistle Associates. The State of Alaska exhibit hunches beneath a concrete igloo conceived by Olson & Sands of Juneau.
The three largest exhibitors at the Fair are automakers. Behind a facade resembling a giant curving windshield, General Motors will present the 1964 model of the Futurama that it introduced at the 1939 fair, will tote 70,000 visitors a day into the future on moving lounge chairs. Ford has hired Walt Disney to whip up a Magic Skyway ride, an updated version of the old scenic railway, which seats visitors in shiny convertibles for an automated safari through a "time tunnel" into prehistory to observe the invention of that vital device, the wheel. In Chrysler's moated compound, between Ford and General Motors, something is going on, but only Chrysler knows what.
Next: Tomorrow. Robert Moses' 1964 catalog of "man's achievements in an expanding universe" (the Fair's theme) is, to a great degree, Grover Whalen's 1939 World of Tomorrow come true. Many of the predicted wonders of Whalen's tomorrowland already seem old-hat after 25 years: superhighway networks, air-conditioned homes and television are long-established faits accomplis. The 1964 Fair forecasts a tomorrow of computers, Plexiglas, and vacations in outer space. Other samplings of man's latest (if less than major) achievements: > "Touchtone" phones (1,400 of them), with pushbuttons instead of dials, which the Bell System is installing in its pay stations. Also loungelike "family booths," in which the whole family can talk to some isolated loved one via a centrally placed microphone --thus providing lifelike conversation, complete with interruptions. Bell will have another marvel to show as bait for future phone users: a device first perfected by the redoubtable Tom Swift in 1914 and now called "Picture Phone" will put callers on house-to-house TV.
> Pay-as-you-nap slumber rooms provided by the Simmons mattress company, where half-hour rest periods will be supervised by "Beautyrest Ladies," who will "check and gently awaken any guest who may have drifted from a light nap to a deep sleep." Price per half-hour snooze: $1.
> A chance to photograph Mom as Serpent of the Nile on a set from Cleopatra at Hollywood, U.S.A., a concession masterminded by George Murphy, the former hoofer, now a candidate for the Senate.
> A lifesize, plastic Abraham Lincoln (in the Illinois pavilion) that wrinkles its brow, winks its eye, and recites the Gettysburg Address like a bewhiskered Chatty Cathy. > An actuary's-eye view of the U.S. in the Equitable Life pavilion, where a relief map will flicker with lights as citizens are born or die and a giant counter like a trip speedometer will chronicle the nation's minute-by-minute race toward population explosion. >Electronic pen-palships formed in the Parker Pen pavilion, where a computer will match the interests and languages of Fair visitors with those of overseas correspondents.
If the 1964 Fair promises to be high on achievement, it will be low on hootchy-kootchy. The Meadow Lake Amusement Area, a monorail-belted ghetto for fun and games, will have its share of dancing girls who will bump not, neither will they grind; the reason may be a matter of money as much as morals. Girlie shows at the recent Seattle fair were a financial disaster, and efforts by operators to stimulate business by stimulating the customers brought the paddy wagon for the peelers. But Concession Consultant former Judge Samuel I. Rosenman says that there is no objection to "artistic" shows like the Folies-Bergere or the Lido revue from Paris (though not so bare for the Fair). Says Rosenman: "We want entertainment, all right, but something the police won't raid."
Hot Dogs, Memory Lane. From the top of the heliport, which rears like a T square in the sky at the west end of the Fair site, Robert Moses stood in galoshes and windbreaker last week, looking upon his work in all its muddy, megalithic splendor. What Moses saw, however, was not the Fair and the 70 million visitors who would come to gape and ache and learn during the next two years. He saw what would remain after the last hot dog had been sold, the last blister soothed, and the last pageant had hung up its costumes.
Only the heliport, the Unisphere, and the Hall of Science, among the Fair's great buildings, will survive; the rest will be bulldozed down memory lane. Said Moses: "Even if their foundations were solid enough to make them last--which they aren't--what would we do with them? We want the land for people, for a new sort of super Central Park, with marinas and every outdoor recreation facility. Greater New York's population center has shifted out here, with new apartments rising all the time, and people must have breathing space. This is the last world's fair for Flushing Meadow, and it is going to be a great and wonderful fair. But our park will be even greater."
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