by James Mauro
Back in his palatial office in the Administration Building, Grover Whalen sat at his enormous Empire desk and tried to sum up the triumphs and follies of the day. Throughout the evening, he had been wooing every reporter he could find and then grilling them on their first impressions of his Fair, and every one of them seemed wowed by the show. He expected glowing reviews in the papers, but he also braced himself for criticism. He knew his “one million visitors” prediction would come back to haunt him; nevertheless, he’d continued to brag to everyone within earshot that the day’s attendance would still exceed six hundred thousand.
(The next day, a reporter speculated that one reason the crowds stayed away was that “people were frightened by advance notices of the tremendous numbers expected on Opening Day.” Which made Whalen’s boast a double-edged miscalculation: Not only had the number doomed the day to failure under any circumstances, it may have actually scared away what might have been a decent-size crowd.)
Now, looking at the early returns, he slumped in his chair: If they were true, fewer than two hundred thousand17 had actually paid for admission. How could that be possible? Atop the forty-foot-tall National Cash Register building, whose digits were supposed to tally each day’s attendance, the numbers had been fudged18 to reflect his inflated six-hundred-thousand figure. Whalen had instructed that they count every guest, speaker, and employee, and had even demanded that staffers leave the grounds several times a day and return, each ticket punch counting as a new visitor.
Although the press had never really been his friend, Time, in its cover profile, called him “the Magnificent Whalen” and the greatest salesman alive; but he was smart enough to recognize the thinly veiled challenge that concluded the article: “[Whalen] has got the circus19 into his tent. Now he has to get the public into his circus.”
No kidding. He understood that the fortunes of the World’s Fair, and its place in New York history, rested squarely on his shoulders.
Whalen spun around in his chair and looked at the gigantic “Time Tears On” calendar he’d installed in his office exactly one year ago. Each page had counted down the days, one by one, as a constant reminder of exactly how many were left before this one. Now he saw that it was empty, and it left him feeling nostalgic. So much of this Fair was about time and new beginnings. Its theme song was “Dawn of a New Day,” and if ever anybody needed one, it was Whalen at that moment. The World’s Fair simply could not be allowed to fail.
Typically well-dressed visitors viewing Futurama from the comfort of their two-seated “opera boxes” (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)
14
“I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE”
The next morning, May 1, Grover Whalen rose early after a fitful half night of semitortured sleep. For the past two years, he had been practically living at the Fair, working as long as sixteen hours a day and then retiring to a bedroom he had specifically designed and built for himself in the Terrace Club, his exclusive lounge and restaurant for VIP investors. And while the noise of construction had never seemed to disturb him—he may have been lulled into happy dreams by the incessant hammering and riveting as his World of Tomorrow rose—the quieter din of the maintenance crews kept him tossing and turning until dawn. More than eight hundred men and women had been working all night on the mess left over from Opening Day.
“I hadn’t reckoned on1 the terrible noise cleaning operations made early in the morning—washing the streets down and so on,” Whalen said. “These started at one a.m., and after a couple of nights of it I always went home to bed. To me, the most exciting thing about the Fair was … its plans.”
He got up at six-thirty and, still recovering from his exhaustion and the fierce cold that had kept him bedridden the week before, decided on a massage instead of his usual appointment with his personal trainer. At eight, he grabbed a rare moment for himself and snuck away, all alone, to ride over the fairgrounds on the bicycle he kept just outside his office door. Other than the street cleaners and gardeners, he had the main area all to himself as he pedaled, circling up Petticoat Lane to Rainbow Avenue and stopping for a moment at the tip of Constitution Mall.
The sight never failed to give him a thrill: Behind him lay the Lagoon of Nations and beyond that the Court of Peace, where that afternoon he would host Prince Olav and Crown Princess Märtha of Norway as they dedicated the Norwegian Pavilion. Surrounding him on every corner stood The Four Freedoms, statues representing freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the press. Whalen took a moment to admire them all before finally letting his gaze rise upward to the towering figure of George Washington and, beyond him, the gleaming Trylon and Perisphere, “the stupendous,2 awe-inspiring heart of the Fair,” as he described them. “The tenth wonder of the world.”
How could anyone stop in the middle of all this wonder and not feel a tremendous burst of pride in his country, so evidenced by what had been created here? “I rejoice3 that I was born in this country,” Whalen had told a reporter, “and especially that I was born on the Lower East Side of New York, where I witnessed the immigration … of people from all nations and learned the opportunities for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of action.”
For Whalen, the Fair represented everything his own life had come to symbolize, the ability of the “Everyman” so often spoken of here to rise up out of his native circumstances and achieve whatever he desired through dedication and hard work. “My father himself4 was a so-called foreigner,” he lamented wistfully. “I didn’t have blue blood to get along. Just red blood.”
Only three years earlier, the very spot where he stood had been a festering eyesore of refuse and the discarded waste of a city. Today, it was a gleaming model of the future, the promise of a better life to come risen, like a phoenix, out of the ashes. How could so few have shown up yesterday to witness its unveiling?
“The trouble is5 some people just don’t get the idea,” he had admitted a year ago. “It’s too big for them. Think of it—high-class people from all parts of the world. Force for international peace. Think of the moral lesson to foreigners in The Four Freedoms. It’s too big for small minds.”
Then again, maybe that was the trouble.
But for Whalen, the Theme Center alone was worth the price of admission. “Think of this huge ball,6 thousands of people inside of it, seeming to float on tons of colored water bubbling beneath it,” he would describe it, mimicking with his hands the fountains that hid the Perisphere’s support columns. Everything it stood for, everything it represented, excited him beyond measure. For the life of him, he could never understand how others could fail to share his passion, the stirring call he felt whenever he set his eyes on them. Already there were grumblings about the seventy-five-cent admission fee. Hell, he believed it was worth $25 just to get in.
Continuing his ride around Lincoln Square and down the Avenue of Labor, he could hear the early bustle and curses of workmen scrambling to complete construction in the Amusement Zone. At first the delay in finishing “the Loop,” as he called it (Whalen had officially banished the term midway because it reminded him of a hick-town country fair), had enraged him. Half the zone wasn’t even paved yet, and an electrical tug-of-war was going on: The Illumination Department sucked up so much juice just keeping the lights on until two in the morning that some of the rides were stalling from lack of power.
But maybe it was a blessing in disguise. The cold weather had already killed off a hundred primates on Frank Buck’s Monkey Mountain, and the Amazon showgirls in “No Man’s Land” were said to be turning blue in their revealing gladiator costumes. So Whalen had decided to postpone the official opening of the Amusement Zone until Saturday, May 13, hoping the occasion would create another boost in attendance. Yesterday was disappointing, surely, but now as he giddily rode around and around the Theme Center, passing between the Court of Power and the Court of Communications, Whalen liked what he saw. The weather, at last, seemed finally to be on his side. After the previous day’s freakish s
torm, nothing more sinister than a light cover of clouds hovered over the fairgrounds. It was a cool, crisp spring morning, truly the dawn of a new day.
The exercise felt good. After his third trip around City Hall Square, past the glass-brick-walled New York City Building, where Moses, who had built his career by skating on thin ice, wanted his indoor rink, Whalen rode over the Bridge of Wings into the Transportation Zone. Firestone was to his left, an eggshell-white structure trimmed in blue that looked like three separate buildings squashed together: an S-shaped main area cornered by a tire-shaped circle that curved into a second wing for some reason designed to look like the fuselage and tail of an immense aircraft.
Despite its odd character, Whalen loved this building because it featured an authentic, working American farm complete with livestock and animatronic farmhands. Sheep grazed in a city field for the first time since Moses himself had them banished from Central Park five years earlier, along with cattle, pigs, chickens, and ducks. What it all had to do with Firestone products was anyone’s guess, as was the Singing Color Fountain, although the main exhibit area did feature a working factory that turned out a new Tire of Tomorrow every four minutes.
The Aviation Building, just beyond, was likewise an example of architecture gone mad—the enormous airplane hangar with an arrow-shaped protrusion jutting out made the sexual symbolism of the Trylon and Perisphere seem tame and innocent. At least the façade of the Marine Transportation Building made sense; the twin prows of two enormous ships flanked either side of its entrance, sixty feet high.
Whalen rode on, past Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors, then back over the Grand Central Parkway on the Bridge of Wheels. It was nearing nine o’clock, another hour until the gates reopened, and Whalen checked the traffic: heavy on the westbound lanes heading into Manhattan for an ordinary Monday commute, light coming eastward out toward the Fair. It was early, but he stood there a moment, admiring the skyline of the city, his city, almost willing them to come—if not for Olav and Märtha today, then for Crown Prince Frederick and Princess Ingrid tomorrow, when they would dedicate the Danish Pavilion. Or for television or Benny Goodman or designer Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama behind him or Geddes’s other creation, the Crystal Lassies (or Crystal Asses, as some crude critics called them), where you could peer through two-way mirrors at a naked girl reflected sixty times over. He didn’t care what reason they chose, just as long as they came.
Whalen rode on, hanging a left at Masterpieces of Art and returning to the Administration Building, where he could shower, take a shave in the private barber’s chair he’d had once again installed in his office, and get ready to meet the Norwegian royalty and whatever else might come his way that day.
The lines of people waiting to get into Futurama, the General Motors exhibit, snaked down the curved pathways leading up to the building’s entrance. Since the Fair had opened its doors that morning at ten a.m., they had been spilling out halfway down to the Bridge of Wheels.
Futurama was the dream7 of Norman Bel Geddes, a onetime Broadway set designer who, like Whalen, had developed a reputation as a man who never let financial considerations get in the way of his vision. In 1929, after abandoning the theater in favor of industrial design, he had laid out plans for what he called Air Liner Number 4, a nine-story flying hotel with sleeping accommodations for more than six hundred passengers, a three-story atrium, five dining rooms, several cocktail lounges, a gymnasium complete with tennis courts, and a library. He figured it could be built for around $9 million; whether it could fly was another matter.
“His head is in the clouds,8 but his feet are certainly not on the ground,” one of his friends remarked.
Short, thick-bodied, and wild-haired, Geddes also carried eccentricity to the extreme. Every Easter he picked out several friends and sent them pregnant rabbits, laughing for weeks at his own joke. Nurturing a lifelong fondness for American Indians, he often greeted guests in his Park Avenue apartment wearing nothing more than a loincloth and a pair of moccasins. Some said he was obsessed with sex; for several years, his hobby was filming all sorts of wildlife in the act of copulation. He kept more than two thousand reptiles in his apartment and delighted in running blue movies of them in midcoitus to whichever dinner companions had made it past the loincloth.
He also considered himself something of an expert on the future.9 In 1931, he had written an article for the Ladies’ Home Journal entitled “Ten Years from Now,” in which he’d predicted such science-fiction-like ideas as double-decker sidewalks and controlled rainfall, but which had also foreseen startling future realities such as photoelectric cells that would automatically open doors, television as the main conduit for national news, and a combination Dictaphone and typewriter that would eliminate the need for stenographers.
Geddes developed his idea for Futurama after advertising giant J. Walter Thompson hired him for an ad campaign involving traffic problems in a fictional city twenty years hence. When the World’s Fair came along, he set out to sell a similar concept to General Motors, who promptly turned him down on the basis of expense. For New York’s Fair, GM vice president Richard Grant explained that the company was going to replicate the assembly line exhibit it had displayed at the Century of Progress exposition.
“Can General Motors afford10 to spend two million dollars to admit it hasn’t had a new idea in five years?” Geddes asked at a meeting with Chairman of the Board Alfred P. Sloan.
He finally convinced its president, William Knudsen, by promising to bring the whole thing together for around the same $2 million they had spent in Chicago. Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep his promise. At a preview for the New York press several days before opening, Knudsen good-naturedly admitted, “It cost us six million,11 seven hundred thousand dollars. I hope you like it.”
Operating expenses, and Geddes’s $200,000 fee, brought the total up over $7 million.
Geddes not only designed Futurama, he personally supervised its construction in an old movie studio in upper Manhattan. The enormous diorama featured five hundred thousand miniature buildings, more than one million trees, and, naturally, fifty thousand cars, ten thousand of which moved along motorized tracks. His obsession for detail became legendary among his workmen when Geddes insisted on exact scale dimensions of such minor details as patties of cow manure.
Even the building itself was something to see. Designed by the architectural firm of Albert Kahn, Inc., it was situated on seven and a half acres in the Transportation Zone. And given the size of GM’s financial investment, Whalen had made sure it received one of the Fair’s prime spots in terms of foot traffic. Visitors entering through the Corona Gate were deposited almost at its front door; it was directly adjacent to the New York City Building in the main area and clearly visible from those descending along the Perisphere’s Helicline.
Two monumental entrances had been designed to arrest anyone’s attention. The entire structure was painted a glossy, futuristic silver gray. The northwest façade was simply an enormous, hook-shaped wall that rose from forty feet to more than ten stories high, at the end of which were projecting vertical letters spelling out “Highways and Horizons,” the technical name of GM’s entire exhibit, of which Futurama was only one part. Two sinewy, ascending ramps led up to a narrow slit accented in bright vermilion two-thirds of the way up the hook, allowing entrance into the building.
On either side as you passed through the narrow cleft were the huge, sculptured initials “G” and “M.” No other ornamentation could be found along the wall, and the imagery was both imposing and stark. “The conception was one of immense power,” noted Architectural Record.
Finally inside the building (the waiting time in line fluctuated between one and three hours throughout the run of the Fair), visitors, walking two by two, descended into a sixty-foot-high chamber, dimly lit as if in “an eerie blue twilight.” Geddes had designed the lighting in order to hypnotize the audience into hushed reverence after the long, probably overheated wait in line. Sl
owly, a sixty-by-one-hundred-and-ten-foot map floated into view. The room was virtually silent; extra-thick carpeting had been laid to hush even the sound of footsteps. Then a soft, intimate voice, “as though it were a friend at [your] shoulder,” explained the current problems of traffic congestion as shown on the map, followed by the imposition of superhighways designed to relieve the pressure.
Continuing in the half-gloom, the guests, always in pairs, stepped onto a platform moving at the same speed as a row of winged, double-seated chairs (often likened to love seats or opera boxes) opposite them. They sank deep into the plush blue velour upholstery, and then the real show began.
Futurama itself was a thirty-six-thousand-square-foot scale model of an American landscape as Geddes imagined it would look in 1960. He had based his re-creation on aerial photographs of actual cities and towns captured by, among others, Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace. The eighteen-minute ride simulated a flight of several hundred miles over mountains, countryside, industrial centers, farms, and half a dozen towns and cities.
Through changes in the model’s scale and lighting (and by periodic rises and dips of the ride itself), the chairs seemed to fly at various altitudes, swooping low over the details of an agrarian community and then climbing high above jagged mountain peaks, where artificial frosting on the observation window completed the illusion of altitude. “You somehow get an almost perfect illusion of flying,” said The New Yorker.
From tiny speakers embedded in the upholstery, a resonant, whispery voice (Business Week likened it to “a disembodied angel”) began the narration: “Now we have arrived12 in this wonder world of 1960. Sunshine, trees, farms, hills and valleys, flowers and flowing streams—this world of tomorrow is a world of beauty…. But man has forged ahead since 1939. New and better things have sprung from his industry and genius…. Here we see one of our 1960 express motorways.”