Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  This was no mere salesmanship; Grover Whalen honestly believed that the dazzling model of the world he was creating—the World of Tomorrow—could potentially charm the dictators5 of the world into seeing the futility of war.

  In addition to construction, the Whalen promotion machine went into high gear. In 1938, he convinced Governor Lehman to allow the words NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR 1939 to be stamped on every automobile license plate in the state. (To make room for it, the actual license numbers had to be reduced by almost a quarter in size.) Most citizens took the news in stride, yet if there was any advance indication of New York’s flippant attitude about the Fair, it came in the grumblings of drivers who wondered why they were being forced to carry free advertising on their cars.

  One particular cynic, a forty-two-year-old mechanic from White Plains named Martin McBohin, expressed his displeasure by covering up the offending ad with electrical tape and subsequently got himself arrested for defacing a license plate. Before his trial, he announced to the press, “Next thing you know6 the State will compel us to advertise someone’s corn flakes.”

  On the flip side, The New Yorker reported spotting a truck driver who, having lost his original plate and while waiting on a replacement, had hand-drawn his number on a piece of cardboard and had even taken great care in printing NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR 1939 in block letters above it.

  Whalen the salesman knew a good thing when he saw it, and the Theme Center logo was rapidly becoming famous. That summer, the uniforms of every New York Yankee, New York Giant, and Brooklyn Dodger ballplayer featured a different kind of “ball and bat”7—the Trylon and Perisphere. Then he took the promotion a step further, wondering why, in addition to all the free advertising he was getting, the public couldn’t be persuaded to actually pay for it. Promotion aside, he recognized that a good portion of pre-Fair revenues could be made from the sale of goods featuring the T&P. In an age when most labels were meant to be worn on the inside, Grover Whalen expanded the concept of branding to a new and larger audience. “I saw no reason8 why manufacturers should not profit by the advertising we received,” he explained, “and at the same time pay for that advertising. We began selling licenses to those manufacturers who wanted to tie up with us.”

  After unraveling a bolt of fabric for one reporter, he pointed to the Theme Center pattern and smiled broadly. “We get a royalty on every yard of goods that man sells,” he bragged. “And that’s just one item. There are thousands of others tied up in a similar way with the Fair, and we are being paid for all of them.”

  Still, he may have gotten carried away with the idea. “We may even change the shapes of rolls and frankfurters,” he went on. “Unless I’m disappointed, our visitors will be able not only to devour the Trylon and Perisphere with their eyes, but also with their mouths.”

  Throughout 1938, there was a dedication, a ceremony, or a groundbreaking every week, it seemed. In January, La Guardia, Moses, and Whalen presided as the cornerstone was laid for the New York City Building, one of only two structures erected to be permanent. (The New York State Marine Amphitheater, eventually to become more famously known as the Aquacade, home of Billy Rose’s water-ballet extravaganza, was the other.) Moses attended only because he wanted to use the building as an indoor ice-skating rink when the Fair was torn down. Grumpy in the foul weather, he told reporters, “Only the brave9 deserve the Fair.”

  In April, the steel framework of the Trylon and Perisphere began rising. U.S. Steel chairman Myron Taylor echoed Whalen’s peace mission by stating that the Fair was a place where “the peoples of the nations10 of the earth will repair to commune together as friends. It will have an unquestionable influence upon future amity.” Whalen took the opportunity to speak about the future without realizing how prophetic he was being; the ceremony took place under a torrential downpour.

  When he heard that Howard Hughes was planning a round-the-world flight, Whalen sold him on the idea of naming his plane the New York World’s Fair. In July 1938, Hughes carried the message of the Fair, and the Trylon and Perisphere logo, to Paris, Moscow, Siberia, and Alaska in a record-breaking three days, nineteen hours, fourteen minutes, and ten seconds—cutting in half the record set by Wiley Post just five years earlier.

  The massive press coverage continued. That summer, Grover Whalen was named the best-dressed businessman in the country. In September, the time capsule was buried. Shortly after, the first brick was laid in the Marine Amphitheater. And as winter settled in, local artists began painting the elaborate murals that would decorate the exteriors of several buildings in harsh, overly bright colors. Early spectators lucky enough to be given a preview may have scratched their heads, but the effect had been planned so that by midseason the following summer, the paint would fade sufficiently to its proper hue. For two years, the designers had been testing and developing new pigments to ensure their resilience to heat, wind, and rain.

  At precisely midnight on January 1, 1939, the World’s Fair made pyrotechnic history by setting off seven hundred aerial bombs that could be heard for miles around. Large, fiery portraits of President Roosevelt, Mayor La Guardia, and Grover Whalen lit up the sky, along with the words Happy New York World’s Fair Year 1939.

  But the biggest event of 1938 had been the World’s Fair Preview11 celebration held on April 30, exactly one year before Opening Day. For that occasion, Whalen had organized a massive publicity parade from Battery Place in downtown Manhattan out to the fairgrounds in Flushing, a total of sixteen miles. For Grover Whalen, it was the triumphant culmination of everything he had accomplished in every celebration he had presided over, from Woodrow Wilson to Lindbergh, combined with the fervent anticipation of the year ahead and the two glorious seasons to come. Only this time he could rightfully claim his place as the bona fide star of the show.

  The enormous procession included one hundred thousand marchers and more than three hundred animated displays, including, Whalen’s press kit pointed out, “the most bizarre and interesting floats ever seen in a New York parade. Giants and midgets, huge cigarettes and candy bars … are among the features of this section.”

  There were so many participants that it took over three hours for all of them to pass any given point. More than a million people turned out to watch “the largest mechanized parade in New York history.” Twelve hundred policemen and nearly every detective in the city were called out on duty, including, most likely, Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha. As a nod to his former role as police commissioner, Whalen ordered that the men in uniform be handed free hot dogs (in traditional rolls, alas!). The only hiccup in his way came from Robert Moses, who grumpily refused to allow the procession to cross over his Triborough Bridge on their way to Queens.

  When the festivities kicked off at ten-thirty, “the sun was shining and a warm breeze was blowing,” according to The New York Times. But by midafternoon the weather, offering its own preview of the World of Tomorrow, did a complete about-face. The warm breeze bellowed into a freezing wind, followed by a thick rainfall that stopped the parade in mid-march. It got so cold that two women on the Florida Exhibits float, shivering in their skimpy bathing suits, required medical attention. One of them, Nellie Barrett, smiled through chattering teeth as she told a Fair physician that she actually hailed from a town called Frostproof.

  By three-thirty, just as the marchers began filing past the reviewing stands out in Queens, the storm had grown into an incessant downpour. Less than a quarter of the parade had entered the fairgrounds when the order came for everyone to disperse, and a near riot ensued as tens of thousands ran for cover. Emergency squads from Brooklyn had to be called in to untangle the traffic jam of cars abandoning the makeshift parking lots.

  An evening program of concerts and fireworks was canceled and rescheduled for the following day, but the bad weather continued for so long that the actual event took place a full week later, on May 8. World’s Fair officials estimated the crowd at six hundred thousand; actual reports put the number at less than half that.
Whalen was typically undeterred despite the fact that storm clouds still hovered overhead.

  “The day was a big success,12 any way you look at it,” he said in his speech. “With rain threatening all day …

  “When we started the Fair we figured that forty million [visitors] would be satisfactory,” Whalen continued. “After a year or so we revised our figures and gauged our efforts at getting fifty million. Now we are confident that there will be more than sixty million at the Fair in 1939!”

  During the parade a week earlier, Mayor La Guardia had summed up all the hoopla of the three years prior and the three years yet to come. “Folks,” he said in a radio address from the fairgrounds, “you ain’t seen nothing yet!13 You just wait until May 1939, and you will see the greatest, most stupendous, the most wonderful and most marvelous site that you have ever seen.”

  A long and hearty cheer rose up from the crowd. La Guardia let them roar for nearly a minute, then roused them once more when he concluded, “Congratulations, Mr. Whalen!”

  * Official World’s Fair literature and most published reports put the Trylon at seven hundred feet high and the Perisphere at two hundred feet in diameter; but by some accounts, the actual dimensions were lowered by about 15 percent owing to budget constrictions.

  * Heinz eventually settled on an odd, domed-shaped building in another section of the Food Zone. But the pickles didn’t disappear entirely—they appeared on the lapels of every visitor who picked up a free pickle pin after visiting the exhibit.

  PART TWO

  Dawn of

  A NEW DAY

  1939: The First Season

  For more than three years, Mr. Whalen has been organizing an army, ruling it by diplomacy and governing it by consent. He has caused a City of Tomorrow to come into being at a time when many of us were afraid to think of tomorrow. The Fair he has built faces forward, toward the rising sun. It celebrates no twilight of the Western World.

  —New York Times editorial, 1939

  President Franklin Roosevelt addresses the crowd gathered in the Court of Peace on Opening Day, April 30, 1939. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  12

  “THEY COME WITH JOYOUS SONG”

  As Opening Day approached, Grover Whalen spent the better part of the last week confined to his bed, bound and determined to rid himself of a nasty cold. The night before opening, he tossed and turned, running numbers in his head, going over and over the schedule of events the next day. President Roosevelt would officially dedicate the Fair that afternoon, on television no less. Whalen wondered what old FDR would say and then, worrying about it, decided instead to put that concern out of his mind and rehearse his own speech again. As the sun came up, he sat in his study and tried to concentrate, but something kept catching his eye.

  He couldn’t keep from smiling. On his desk sat an advance copy of that week’s Time magazine, and this issue, like that of every other journal and newspaper in the city, was dedicated to the opening of the World’s Fair. Except that the wise old editors of Time had decided to focus on him personally: Right there on the cover Whalen saw a rare full-color illustration of himself, grinning broadly and doffing his homburg, the letters G.W. clearly stitched inside. The Fair’s Trylon and Perisphere Theme Center was merely a backdrop to his horse-toothed visage.

  The morning of April 30, 1939, as Whalen had hoped, bloomed bright and promising as he hurried through breakfast and skipped his usual routine of calisthenics with his personal trainer. As he rode out to the fairgrounds, the unfettered sunshine warmed his car, a six-wheeled Imperial Parade Phaeton that had been built especially for him by Chrysler. It was early yet, not quite nine o’clock, and there was plenty of time; the gates wouldn’t officially open until eleven.

  Crossing over the Triborough Bridge on his way to Queens, Whalen read the weather reports and smiled again. The papers were all predicting an unusually warm day for early spring. From his private cockpit in the rear of the Phaeton, he peered through the car’s uniquely curved windows and checked out the sky, noting an endless sea of blue and not a cloud in sight. If this kept up, it would be a record-breaking day.

  From every point in the city, not a few others had the same idea. Special World’s Fair trains began riding out to Flushing Meadows at nine, carrying excited passengers who hoped to be among the first to enter the New York World’s Fair on Opening Day. They, too, had read the weather reports, and as such they donned their finest tweed suits and woolen dresses and left behind their sweaters and overcoats. Most didn’t even think about carrying an umbrella.

  At ten-fifteen, forty-five minutes before they were supposed to, the turnstiles nevertheless began spinning as the early birds burst forth from subway cars and shoved their way down the ramps to the entrance. They were a frantic-looking bunch, and so the order was given to let them in ahead of schedule, not only to ease the inevitable crowding, but also to avoid trouble.

  Just inside the fairgrounds, they were met by equally frantic peddlers of peanuts and guidebooks and all manner of World’s Fair–branded gee-gaws. Everything everywhere had that ever-present Trylon and Perisphere logo plastered somewhere across it—the slightly phallic image having been burned into American consciousness for over a year now. And the public craved it: They wasted no time buying up hand soaps, compacts, perfume bottles, Bakelite thermometers, sewing kits, hats, scarves, tablecloths, pencil sharpeners, kazoos, and Kan-O-Seats—walking sticks with fold-out seat attachments that allowed the footsore fairgoer a chance to sit down while waiting in long lines (however dubious its support structure seemed).

  Even Superman and Batman saluted the T&P on a commemorative issue of World’s Fair Comics.

  This initial burst of buying done, the typical visitor hurried straight to the Theme Center—the magnificent “ball and spike,”1 as Time magazine called them. The structures were indeed arresting, even at first glance. Harrison and Fouilhoux had started with the basic geography of a pyramid and sphere, advertised as representing the finite and the infinite. (Or the other way around—no one was ever quite sure.) But for many their visual appeal may have sprung from the more subliminal seduction of their undeniable resemblance to the male anatomy. E. B. White called the Trylon “the white phallus” (apparently without concern that he may have been referring to his own).

  Some likened them to a vision of heaven;2 Grover Whalen said they were “a glimpse into the future, a sort of foretaste of the better world of tomorrow,” and that their simplicity was “the keynote of a perfectly ordered mechanical civilization.” Robert Moses saw it differently. “Barnum had his sacred3 white elephant and every Fair is entitled to at least one theme tower,” he grumbled.

  Built at a cost of $1.7 million, the Theme Center required that 1,272 piles, each a hundred feet long, be driven deep into the Flushing Meadows muck in order to support its crushing thirty-thousand-ton weight. Four thousand tons of steel had been used to construct its skeleton, but then the whole thing was covered in cheap gypsum in order to save money. In harsh daylight, its bumpy imperfections gave the Perisphere the appearance of an autumn gourd, but come nightfall hidden projectors spun clouds across its surface, making the globe appear to revolve slowly and majestically.

  To complete the illusion, the Perisphere also seemed to float mysteriously in a reflecting pool—eight gushing, multicolored fountains hid its mirrored supporting columns, making them all but invisible to the casual viewer. Inside, occupying an area twice as large as the recently opened Radio City Music Hall, lay the exhibit everyone was hurrying to see.

  “Democracity,”4 as it was called, was a grand diorama that depicted a utopian landscape of the future—a dreamy vision of a world in which people lived in countrified splendor while having easy access to urban industry via convenient planning and a broad highway system. Five satellite towns (including “Pleasantville,” which eerily predicted the suburb of the future) surrounded “Centerton,” the industrial core. For the overcrowded city dweller as well as the isolated farmer, Democracity represe
nted the ideal promise of a better world they so eagerly craved.

  “As day fades into night,” said the exhibit’s narration, provided by the familiar and fatherly voice of CBS radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, “each man seeks home, for here are children, comfort, neighbors, recreation—the good life of a well-planned city.”

  Henry Dreyfuss, one of the most celebrated industrial designers of his day, not only had created a unique interpretation of a modern American city, but had devised an ingenious method for viewing it. After gliding up the “longest moving electric stairway in the world,” you boarded “one of two revolving balconies which hung, seemingly unsupported, in space.” The two platforms circled in opposite directions, and it took a full six minutes to make one complete revolution. No one, not even the most sophisticated New Yorker, had ever seen anything like it.

  “The idea,” said publicity man Dudley Britton, “is that you are two miles up in the air, on a magic carpet…. Spectators will find themselves cast in the role of the gods of old, from Olympian heights, to pierce the fogs of ignorance, habit and prejudice that envelop everyday thinking, able to gaze down on the ideal community.”

  Democracity, Kaltenborn’s narration continued, was “a brave new world built by united hands and hearts. Here brain and brawn, faith and courage, are linked in high endeavor as men march on toward unity and peace.”

  Dreyfuss’s vision painted so moving a portrait of the future that many visitors gasped at first glance. Their emotions were further stirred by its theme music, composed by an African American classicist named William Grant Still and conducted by André Kostelanetz. The total effect was mesmerizing. The show was timed so that after two minutes of wide-eyed gazing and slow progression, night began to fall and the tiny windows and streetlamps, painted with a new material called Poroseal, glowed under ultraviolet lights. Five hundred pin-dot holes in the exhibit’s dome created the illusion of starlight.