Fun in New York

New York City's second World's Fair of the century opened with a splash. Water squirted, spurted, sprayed and gushed from the Fountain of the Planets and the Fountains of the Fairs, from the Astral, Solar and Lunar Fountains, the Fountain of the Continents and the Fountains of Progress; it rippled and trickled in numberless lakes, lagoons, canals and reflecting pools. And on opening day it dripped endlessly from the cold, grey clouds that dimmed the visibility of the helicopters and dampened the spirits of the groundlings.

But open the fair did, despite the abortive effort by CORE'S Brooklyn chapter to jam up all the approaches with stalled cars and subways. And it was very close to the readiness Fair Boss Robert Moses had prophesied all along. Externally, only a handful of buildings were not complete, ranging from the exposed rafters of the Belgian Village to a few forlorn steel girders sticking out of the ground at the site of the Hall of Science.

Despite the sodden launching, it was amply evident that in the 2,483 years since Xerxes staged his own 180-day fair to celebrate his world conquest, New York's was certainly going to be the biggest, and perhaps the best, ever.

Domes & Disks. It is a fun fair. Not in the oldfashioned, honky-tonk sense of the word, but as a showcase of entertainment mounted by America's most sophisticated and free-spending entertainers--its captains of industry.

An industrial exhibit once consisted of bringing in a hunk of machinery and putting a rail around it. Today, the most prosaic product whirls and whooshes, beguiles the eye and delights the mind.

Showmanship has become the respected and well-paid partner of industry. And the best fruits of this partnership are crammed in ordered profusion onto the 646 acres of Flushing Meadow (the site of New York's 1939 World's Fair), across the East River from the front office of the U.S.

The men, women and children pouring over by helicopter, hydrofoil, excursion steamer, automobile, bus, train and subway to push through the new fair's 89 turnstiles can see at once that, first and foremost, they are expected to enjoy themselves. This is no sobersided Park of Culture and Rest, but a fantastical medley of outrageous shapes and sizes--soaring planes and flying disks, strutted plastic and fretted steel, domes, pylons, floating cubes, and color everywhere. It is a place to ride a monorail and something called a People Wall, watch a hula, listen to a steel band, eat your head off, and shoot 31 minutes of rapids in a hollow log.

The Eye-Catchers. Except for G.M. and Ford, which crouch like two huge beasts across the road, fair buildings are low and airy rather than tall or massive. Where in 1939 France's imposing showcase rose like a grandstand beside the Lagoon of Nations, now stands IBM's egg, poised above a fantastic forest of steel trees. Across the pool, hovers the huge coffin-on-props of the Bell Telephone building, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz and Henry Dreyfus.

Some of U.S. architecture's proudest names are represented at the fair, but none come off with any particular distinction, except perhaps Charles Luckman with his severely simple United States Pavilion. Philip Johnson, enjoying plaudits in town for his newly opened theater at Lincoln Center (see Music), deserves no such cheers for his New York State Tent of Tomorrow and its flanking circular observation towers. Some of the most modest pavilions are among the best architecturally: Austria's light frames, Parker Pen's triangulated, airy shed, Scott's stockade, Spain's massive block.

It is in its juxtaposition of unrelated eye-catchers, punctuated by the tumorous globular pyramids of the Brass Rail snack bars, that the fair acquires a kind of wild wondrousness. And at night, when the ticky-tacky disappears and the jeweling lights go on, the happy, hoppy daydream becomes a garden of visual delight.

King & Genius. King of the fair is the computer. Computers are whirring everywhere--providing the visitor with a pen pal at the Parker Pavilion, the best place for a vacation at the National Cash Register Building, and the ideal hair color under the auspices of Clairol.

IBM spends twelve jumpy and exciting minutes explaining to the audience on its People Wall the principles of computer thinking with an ingenious Charles Eames movie on nine simultaneous screens, which achieves one of the fair's humorous high points with a sequence on planning a dinner party.

But if the computer is king, the perennial Walt Disney is the fair's presiding genius. Visitors to the Ford exhibit, lounging in convertibles, move from a prehistoric Disneyland of cavemen, cave cuties and cave kids, competing frolicsomely with winsome dinosaurs, into a Disneyesque future. At the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion the traveler goes by boat, sluicing through a busy-busy dreamland of Disney dollies with identical faces in fantasy costumes--winking, blinking and nodding to an accompaniment of high-decibel music. Some of the 950 admission price goes to UNICEF, and the theme of the boat ride seems to be that the children of all nations are all Kewpie dolls.

Disney's latest triumph is called audio-animatronics, a fancy word for talking and moving dummies, so cleverly made and subtly animated that they look exactly like real people who look like dummies.

General Electric puts an audio-animatronic family through the years from 1890 to the present in a series of life-sized tableaux almost two decades apart, around which the seated audience revolves. Dad, Mom, the kids, the dog and the old folks wink, smile, twitch and roll their eyes among their household appliances with the general effect of a family under the influence of drugs. The Illinois exhibit has the most sophisticated audio-animatron of all: Abe Lincoln, across whose bearded visage pass no less than 15 separate and distinct expressions in the course of a six-minute speech.

Predictable Future. Smash hit of New York's 1939 World's Fair was General Motors' Futurama, and here it is again. "I have seen the Future," the lapel buttons still proclaim, and the models that futuramists peer at from their moving chairs are brilliantly made and expertly mounted. If they lack some of the wonder of 25 years ago, it is only because in the space capsule and Polaris age, the future has become slightly passe. TV has taken the edge off watching moon tractors crawl over the lunar dust or glimpsing a complex of resort hotels at the bottom of the sea.

The fair's best trip of all is Coca-Cola's. Visitors walk at their own speed, not through a minuscule model world, but through a life-sized re-creation--complete with smells and temperature changes--of five exotic scenes: a street in Hong Kong, a vista of the Taj Mahal, a lush Cambodian rain forest, an Alpine ski lodge, a cruise ship moving into the Rio de Janeiro harbor. (Not an audio-animatron in sight.)

In the fair's international section, by no means all of the exhibits of the 66 countries officially present are fully functioning as yet. The U.S.S.R. and Great Britain are not on hand, and France is only represented unofficially by a private group of industries. The reason is that New York's World's Fair is in a sense illegal; the International Bureau of Expositions, which Moses has characterized as "three people living obscurely in a dumpy apartment in Paris," has a rule that a country may stage a world's fair only once every ten years, and Seattle's 1962 fair was the one that counted.

At a Price. To take in all of the big show at Flushing Meadow it is estimated that a visitor would have to spend a dozen 51-hour days. And that is not all he would have to spend. After paying the $2 admission fee ($1 for a child), visitors are finding plenty of temptations that cost as much as or more than a first-run movie. Food ranges from a 25-c- hot dog at one of the Brass Rail's 25 snackeries through restaurants in varying price ranges up to the Toledo in the Spanish Pavilion, which is strictly for the last of the big spenders.

All this is in keeping with Robert Moses' hard-nosed determination to make his extravaganza financially solid. To that end, he has kept the fair corporation's payroll down to some 180 people, as against the 3,700 employed by New York's 1939 fair. He has also insisted that, rather than subsidize exhibits, the fair do without them. Item: though U.S. painters currently dominate the international art world, they have no showcase at the fair because no one could be found to put up the money. Item: though the Building of Medicine and Health was the second most popular exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair, there is now no such pavilion at Flushing Meadow because no drug manufacturer or foundation was willing to underwrite it. Item: though the most pregnant problem to stagger the modern world is the relation between living standards and human fertility, the only evidence of the population explosion at the fair is a 45-ft.-long electric sign at the Equitable Life Assurance Pavilion on which fairgoers may watch the population of the U.S. flip up and up in the time it takes to munch a hamburger.

One notable departure from big fair tradition that was planned is the absence of a midway, with its cooch dancers, catchpenny games and garish gadgetry. Instead, there are more religious pavilions than any other U.S. world's fair has ever known. The 1939 fair had only a single Temple of Religion; organized faith has taken better advantage of its rent-free opportunities in 1964 with numerous exhibits and no fewer than eight buildings.

Billy Graham has a handsome tabernacle, in which a filmed version of his appeal has already made more than 50 "decisions for Christ." And the $3,500,000 Vatican Pavilion houses, among other treasures, the fair's most honored guest--Michelangelo's famed Piet`a, his white marble statue of the dead Christ in the lap of his mother (see ART).

Glorious Diversity. Robert Moses' policies have produced fiscal prospects that are unprecedented in the fair game: a projected $99.1 million surplus in the fair's two seasons, after paying back $24 million to New York City for expenses incurred, plus giving the city an additional $40 million. Thus the fair may not present the future with the impact that a look at television, nylon and air conditioning had in 1939. But it will make far more money and pull more people through its gates than any other fair anywhere, ever.

And the crowds that come will have more fun than ever with all the fair's glorious diversity. Almost every kind of human situation has been provided for.

Diapers can be changed at the Scott Paper Pavilion, shoes shined by Johnson's Wax. Lost children can be found on some 300 closed-circuit color TV sets. Baby sitters can be found at the Protestant and Orthodox Center and at the Danish Pavilion's miniature Tivoli Gardens. Wallets can be found (sometimes) through the Pinkerton police. Status can be found in one of the industrial exhibitor's VIP rooms. Rest can be found in the Garden of Meditation. Sleep can be found on a mattress at the Simmons Beautyrest exhibit--$1 for 30 minutes.

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