![]() "In the darkest days of the Depression, they dreamed of orderly hygenic cities and houses. ... They looked ahead to safe, fast travel on luxurious streamlined aircraft, trains, buses, ships, and automobiles. Unlike modern architechts, whose utopias rarely develop beyond the drawing stage, the first American industrial designers were able to build their model city, the 1939 New York World's Fair." [Bush, p. 3] |
THE 1939 NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR suffered from unfortunate timing and the investors lost two-thirds of their investment. Before the war broke out full-fledged, however, the fair attracted large crows to Flushing Meadow Park in Queens. Many of the people who came liked not only the fair, but Queens as well. Communities Forest Hills and Elmhurst sprang up after the war. [Moorhouse, pp. 242-243]
The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago inspired the creation of Coney Island. The 1939 New York World's Fair set a new price performance point, with their amusement parks and rides and "stage-set representations of vernacular architecture," that Walt Disney was inspired to create Disney World.
Sharon Zukin draws some remarkable parallels between Chicago in 1893
and New York in 1939. Both fairs had ideal communities, the
200 idealized buildings of the White City and the Town of Tommorrow
in New York. Both fairs featured visions of world led by brave
corporations (though by 1939, it was a new generation of
corporations, led by General Motors, GE, Eastman Kodak, and AT&T).
[Zukin, p. 225]
The future was the topic of this world's fair, even more so than most. Norman Bel Geddes designed a Futurama ride for General Motors, putting the user in chairs that moved across a model of an idealized United States. From one coast to another you flew across cities of the future, with cars on spacious roads and pedestrians on elevated walkways.
Geddes forgot one detail. His model city had no churches. This ommission was noticed (repeatedly) when the fair opened in 1939, and by the 1940 season of the fair churches had magically appeared in the Futurama. [Gerlernter, pp. 23-25]
When you were done with the Futurama, you might then go to the Perisphere, a huge dome. Inside was Democracity, a perfect model of a perfect world with a thriving central core and pleasant suburbs for nuclear families. The Democracity was high art for model making, taking over 100 people to keep the exhibit running.
You left the Perisphere by walking down the Helicline, a long ramp
that snaked around the dome. Next to the Perisphere was the huge
spike of the Trylon. The Trylon and Perisphere, painted white and
lit brightly at night, were the visual
icons of this world's fair, appearing everywhere you went in New York.
[Gerlernter, pp. 66-82]
While the radio world was moving quickly in the 1930s with the
stunning success of Armstrong's FM invention, David Sarnoff
had staked RCA's future on the new-fangled medium of television.
He scheduled his first program to conincide with the opening
of the 1939 New York World's Fair.
RCA built their pavilion on the Avenue of Progress. Only a few hundred people around the city had sets, but that didn't stop Sarnoff from putting a camera on the Avenue of Patriots. On April 20, 1939, Sarnoff stood in front of the camera, talking to just a few people, and proclaimed "now, we add radio sight to sound." [Lewis, p. 275]
Just as Baron Haussman crowned his achievements with the Universal Exposition of 1867 in Paris, Robert Moses wanted to crown his own achievements with the 1964 New York World's Fair. The fair left huge debts behind, but it also left Shea Stadium and "the hollow fretwork of the Unisphere, with its abandoned dedication to man's aspiration towards Peace through mutual understanding." [Moorhouse, p. 297]
The 1964 World's Fair in New York also featured the future, but it was in somehow different. There was not a brave new future to show. The AT&T Video Phone and a few new cars, but it was not like a whole generation of technology was about to spring out into society.
The era of the Great Exhibitions started in 1851 at the Crystal Palace and ended in 1939 at the New York World's Fair. During those 86 years, the world saw an industrial come into being. The fairs are people went to understand what this new world would be and how it would affect their lives.
The world's fairs of the industrial era played a crucial role in cushioning the shock of technical change. The fairs were a place where engineers could meet to advance the state of their art: rising to the challenge of the mammoth expositions by inventing new buildings and towers, power plants and Ferris Wheels. The fairs left a lasting impression on the landscape in the form of their Eiffel Towers, but they also left lasting impressions in the minds of their visitors. The fairs truly were the icons and markers of the beginning of the industrial age.
Donald J. Bush, The Streamlined Decade
Braziller (New York, 1975). The birth of planes, trains,
and automobiles in the 1950s.
David Gelernter,
1939: The Lost World of the Fair,
Free Press (New York, 1995). Wonderful book about the
New York fair written by a prominent computer scientist.
Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air,
HarperCollins
(New York, 1991). The story of radio's early days.
Geoffry Moorhouse, Imperial City: The Rise and Rise
of New York
Spectre (London, 1989).
Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World
University of California Press
(Berkeley, 1991), p. 225