Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  Despite a number of seemingly irreconcilable differences with the Paris-based organization, none of its bylaws were deal-breakers. Prior to the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, Grover Whalen had managed to finagle his way around each of these same rules and get the BIE’s consent. That was what a flamboyant showman—known for his natty suits, easy smile, and interpersonal skills—could do. But Moses was no Whalen; he wasn’t interested in the BIE’s rules—or anybody else’s, for that matter.

  A few months before he took over the World’s Fair Corporation, Moses asked if anyone had inquired if “the so-called international body has any real jurisdiction or control.” He urged the Executive Committee to confront the BIE about hosting a two-year World’s Fair in New York. A two-year gate-receipt formula was an issue, Moses argued, that “can’t be ducked, dodged or left open . . . the entire financing and revenues plans are dependant on this decision.” Moses was not about to let a group of aging French bureaucrats derail his plans for Flushing Meadow Park.

  Publicly, the Fair’s planners played it cool. In February 1960 they announced their intention of hosting a two-year exposition, and tried to downplay the potential clash with the BIE. Behind the scenes, Moses was gearing up for a fight. He firmly believed that Whalen’s handling of the BIE was one of the many missteps his predecessor had taken. “Grover promised a lot of things [to the BIE] which didn’t happen,” he told one of his executives, “and the whole thing ended with correspondence between the BIE and the Department of State. The tone of which was far from friendly to say the least. It appears we are heading in the same direction.”

  And so, with all that in mind, Moses had flown to Paris, but not before he had hired a Wall Street law firm to analyze the BIE’s treaty to see if it was applicable to an American Fair. The law firm, Whitman, Ransom & Coulson, reported that the European treaty “had no application at all to a free enterprise exhibition.” From that moment on, Moses staked out his positions. He would seek an official sanction from the BIE but wouldn’t compromise to get one; if they refused his request, then at least they could look the other way—a “gentleman’s agreement,” as it were—while he and his team appealed to private corporations of BIE member nations to represent their countries on an “unofficial” basis. And, of course, should they oppose him, then he would treat them like he did anyone—politicians, community activists, private citizens—who got in his way: He would steamroll over them.

  It didn’t take long for Fair executives to understand that Moses’ meeting with the BIE hadn’t gone well. Still they hadn’t anticipated the BIE’s vote—twenty-three to zero (with four abstentions)—to officially sanction the Seattle exhibition. The BIE’s statement announcing the vote didn’t specifically mention the New York Fair, but it reiterated that no country could host two exhibitions in the same decade, nor could BIE members participate in a non-sanctioned exhibition. The message was clear: Thanks to Moses’ ham-fisted handling of the situation, the bureau and its thirty member-states were now effectively boycotting New York and Moses, which would make it difficult for foreign nations to sign up for the Fair.

  New York’s spin machine then went into overdrive, issuing a rebuttal dripping with condescension and contempt. “We could not possibly obey directives of the BIE and allow it to control a private, free-enterprise fair in New York,” read the release, which also called the notion of “a one-year fair in New York . . . impossible.” Moses’ statement openly, albeit subtly, mocked the BIE’s authority, declaring “the absurdity of operating a fair here [in New York] under control from a bureau in Paris,” and cast its ruling as inconsistent and arbitrary by recalling how the earlier New York Fair was officially sanctioned yet did not “follow [the BIE’s] rules and orders.” And in one last—and poetically poignant—dig, the statement noted that signing a BIE treaty “would surely do nothing to promote peace and harmony.”

  Even though the New York planners downplayed the BIE’s boycott, within months America’s closest allies, such as Britain, France, and Italy, all abided by the bureau’s decision. While publicly nonchalant about the brouhaha—“The Fair is going along nicely and does not require the support of the BIE,” Moses told the New York Times—behind the scenes it was another story.

  In the weeks following the BIE’s decision, Moses suggested to one friendly newspaper editor that he should assign a reporter and photographer to the bureau’s Paris office to give the public “a visual impression of the organization” that wants to run a New York Fair on a shoestring budget. The picture of the bureau’s simple offices, Moses suggested, “would be worth 10,000 words.” A short while later, he told William Berns, the vice president of the Fair’s PR machine, that “the great BIE explosion proved to be a very wet firecracker lighted by punks . . . I don’t underestimate the BIE zombies, but they never get far.” Either incapable or unwilling to hold his mouth or his temper, Moses even described the Parisian organization to reporters as “three people living obscurely in a dumpy apartment” and “that bunch of clowns in Paris.”

  By late 1960 he had instructed his staff that “the BIE announcement was a dead issue.” Nevertheless, when Moses was preparing for an upcoming meeting with President Kennedy, Charles Poletti urged him to remind Kennedy to have the State Department “put some pressure” on European ambassadors to ignore the BIE’s edict. And almost a year later, Moses was still waging a covert war against Leon Barety, the venerable director of the BIE, suggesting that Poletti “take steps to have our friends” in the organization vote him out of office. The truth is, Moses wanted an official sanction for his World’s Fair—he just wasn’t willing to do anything to get it. Just as Kopple had predicted, Moses was no diplomat.

  Moses’ real strengths were his organizational skills and his sheer desire to succeed where the 1939–40 World’s Fair had failed. He dedicated himself to avoiding the mistakes made by his predecessor, Whalen, who, Moses thought, had been more interested in creating a wondrous event than a profitable one. If someone had a fantastic idea for a pavilion, Whalen would build it and figure out how to pay for it later; he built no less than twenty pavilions with Fair money and then rented them to exhibitors (often taking a loss). Ironically, Moses—New York’s Master Builder—would build precious little himself, just a handful of permanent structures including a ten-thousand-seat outdoor theater, the Hall of Science, and the Port Authority Building, which featured a helipad on the roof and a top-floor restaurant with a panoramic view where VIPs could be entertained. Nor would Moses create a large bureaucracy, staffing his World’s Fair Corporation with approximately two hundred employees (Whalen’s organization had had 3,700 on the payroll).

  Another major decision Moses made was to dismiss the World’s Fair Design Committee, which was composed of five well-known architects: Henry Dreyfuss, Emil Praeger, Edward Durrell Stone, Gordon Bunshaft, and Wallace K. Harrison. Traditionally international exhibitions had a central plan to create a sense of architectural unity among the dozens of pavilions. Headed by Harrison, who had been chief designer for the 1939–40 World’s Fair, the committee proposed one massive square-mile circular structure—essentially a gigantic doughnut-shaped pavilion—1,800 feet in diameter. Exhibitors would rent “slices” of the doughnut. Moses wouldn’t hear of it.

  The idea was an old one, actually. It had been utilized in the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris—“That’s how new it was,” Moses noted dryly—and designed by no other than Baron Haussmann, the legendary urban planner who rebuilt Paris for Napoleon III and whose life and work Moses had studied closely. The Master Builder not only dismissed the committee’s idea—“constipating and stultifying” was Moses’ take on the plan—he also derided its members as unimaginative. “Such a single giant doughnut would have discouraged all freedom, originality, experiment, color and boldness in form and design,” he later wrote, “precisely the qualities which my avant-garde associates in the architectural field and their friends, the critics, always insist must be g
iven free rein in expositions which will determine the pattern of the future.”

  Moses declared that his Fair would have no central plan. Instead, pavilion creators were free to build whatever they liked, as long as it adhered to the Fair’s building codes, which retired Major General William E. Potter, the Fair’s executive vice president and Moses’ building czar, rigorously enforced. By building little, Moses thought he could save the Fair money, which meant more funds for his park, $23 million or so of which he would use to build his grand playground—“a new sort of super Central Park,” he claimed—that would be his “gift to the city.” Moses had a thing for Queens. Maybe because it was the direct link between his Manhattan home and his beloved Long Island, where he would go to relax and swim at the state park beaches that he had created; maybe because compared to the steel-and-glass towers of Manhattan and the old winding streets of Brooklyn, full of historic brownstones and church steeples of every denomination, Queens was something of a blank slate, an empty canvas upon which he could draw his master plan.

  He even readily admitted that, to him at least, the post–World’s Fair Flushing Meadow Park was, ultimately, the “main attraction.” And the park he envisioned would be the centerpiece of a seven-mile stretch of parks that would cut across the borough of Queens, the largest—geographically—of New York’s five boroughs. “Parks are the big thing in my life, and I decided to turn this dump into a great park,” he told an interviewer in 1964. “When they started planning the 1939 World’s Fair, I saw my opportunity. Well, I made the fairgrounds all right but the fine park never materialized, because we didn’t have the money.” Naturally, with the new Fair’s profits, he would build the park himself, rather than hand the money over to city coffers. “With all due respect to City Hall,” he noted, “if we hand over our profits to the city government and ask them to make the park, the park will never be built.”

  Paying for pavilions was out of the question, but one area in which Moses would spend freely would be his beloved arterial highway system, particularly the roads right outside Flushing Meadow Park. Even before he assumed the presidency of the World’s Fair Corporation, Moses declared that the network of expressways in Queens and the city’s transit system needed an $85 million facelift. He initiated construction on the Clearview Expressway, a six-mile-long stretch of highway that connected the Throg’s Neck Bridge (for which Moses allocated $120 million in improvement funds) with the Long Island Expressway; he also worked on the Grand Central Parkway, a six-lane highway that stretched across Queens and led commuters from Long Island to Brooklyn (via the Interboro Parkway). Closer to Flushing Meadow, Moses improved the Van Wyck Expressway, a six-lane connecting highway. All of these roads would lead commuters directly to the World’s Fair and the new ballpark, Shea Stadium, that was being built at the same time. By lumping the funds that he spent on these projects with the Fair’s accounts, plus the money required for preparing Flushing Meadow Park, along with Lincoln Center (the premier cultural center that was under construction on the Upper West Side), the Moses PR team dubbed the Queens exhibition, with some creative calculating, “the billion-dollar Fair.”

  Naturally, all the massive construction efforts in such a concentrated area of Queens wreacked havoc on traffic. “New Yorkers are most aware of their Fair in terms of the bumper-to-bumper embolisms the highway expansion program is causing in the borough of Queens,” an October 1962 issue of Time stated. Queens, thanks to Moses, had become “the world’s biggest parking lot.”

  While Moses concerned himself with his massive construction efforts, his deputies flew around the world drumming up foreign exhibitors for the World’s Fair. With major European nations sitting out, Poletti and his team went after private foreign companies, who were not bound by the BIE’s bylaws since they were not officially representing their national governments. What’s more, by necessity, the World’s Fair Corporation would have to look outside of Europe and North America and seek pavilions from nations in South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The postwar world, Poletti pointed out, had changed dramatically. “A whole host of nations have come into existence since the last World’s Fair,” he said. After all, New York City—in part thanks to Moses—was the site of the United Nations,* which hadn’t existed in 1939. Why shouldn’t the Fair reflect the geopolitical reality of its time? It would be the peoples of these nations—many of which were dismissed as “small potatoes” by Esquire in an October 1963 piece on the Fair—who made the 1964–65 Flushing Meadow exhibition a truly global and multicultural event, a showcase of the postcolonial world.

  * While its Manhattan location was being prepared, the United Nations made its home in Flushing Meadow Park—another way for Moses to funnel funds toward his dream park.

  Even with the BIE’s boycott, some of its members were still planning on exhibiting national pavilions at the World’s Fair, including Lebanon, Israel, and the Soviet Union (though under the auspices of its All-Union Chamber of Commerce). The latter was the Fair’s earliest triumph, the first nation that Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., with the permission of the State Department, invited to New York. The Soviet Union readily accepted. But given the temperature of the Cold War at the time, the Soviet Union’s satellite states’ decision to build a pavilion in Flushing Meadow seemed, according to Moses and Poletti, doomed from the start. “I can tell you without reservation that the State Department did not want the Soviet Union at the World’s Fair,” Poletti recalled years later.

  The Soviet Union sought multiple variances to build an immense pavilion at the Fair, threatening to steal the show from the United States, just as they had in Brussels in 1958, according to some observers. Then, after beginning their plans for the Fair, the Russians insisted that America commit to building a pavilion at the proposed Moscow World’s Fair of 1967; this tit-for-tat policy was officially known as “reciprocity” and it ruled all cultural exchanges at the time between the Cold War enemies. The United States hesitated but ultimately said they would consider it. That was good enough for the Soviets, and in March 1962 they signed an agreement with the World’s Fair Corporation to build a pavilion. But much to Poletti’s chagrin, the State Department wanted some say over the exhibit in the Soviet Pavilion. “Governor Poletti . . . has been asked by Washington for information and assurances regarding the USSR exhibit which we do not have,” Moses wrote Secretary of State Dean Rusk. “We cannot dictate to the USSR what it shall do in its pavilion.”

  When in April the Soviets dropped their bid for a Moscow Fair, the State Department demanded the United States be allowed to stage a one-nation exhibition for two six-month periods in the Soviet Union. The Russians balked. Negotiations were now moved from Queens to Washington, DC, where the State Department dealt directly with the Kremlin—exactly what Moses did not want.

  On September 29, 1962, Moses got a telegram from the Soviet Foreign Minister informing him that the need for a Soviet pavilion “had lost its force.” Moses complained to Rusk that the State Department’s “ill-advised” negotiations had damaged the World’s Fair’s chances of securing a Soviet commitment. His protests were ignored, and just as Moses was about to dispatch Poletti to Moscow in October 1962 to see if a deal could be worked out, the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded and Poletti was barred from traveling to the Soviet Union. Any hope that the World’s Fair could remain above the Cold War was gone.

  Meanwhile, one of the world’s newest nations, Israel, had signed up for the Fair and showed no signs of yielding to BIE pressure to withdraw. Staunch American allies that they were, the Israelis even informed the State Department that Great Britain had sent diplomatic cables inquiring why the Soviets and Israelis weren’t adhering to BIE guidelines. However, political instability would ultimately doom Israeli participation, too. Poletti flew to Tel Aviv in January 1962 and secured a verbal commitment from his hosts. Israeli planners then flew to Queens the following month to pick a site and discuss logistics. But while the delegation wa
s still in New York, they received news that the Israeli parliament had voted against participating in the Fair. Then August came, and officials were told the Israeli government had reconsidered: They would erect a national pavilion at Flushing Meadow after all.

  Poletti and his group welcomed the Israelis back with open arms. A new site had to be chosen (their previous one had been rented to another nation), but a deal was quickly sorted out. Israel announced that their World’s Fair exhibit would display portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A week after the announcement, Poletti was informed that the Israeli government had decided the $2 million earmarked for its pavilion “could be put to better use.” Israel was out. “We kept a lamp in the window for Israel for a long time,” Poletti said, “but now we’ve pulled down the shade.”

  Most of the United States’ western European allies abstained from the fair; only Spain, still ruled by fascist dictator General Francisco Franco, and Ireland sent government-sanctioned pavilions. Poletti’s International Division managed to secure “official” pavilions from Nationalist China* (President Kennedy barred Communist China’s participation), Guinea, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippine Republic, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, Thailand, the United Arab Republic, and Venezuela. They also secured “unofficial” pavilions from private companies or industrial organizations from Austria, Denmark, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Morocco, Polynesia, Sweden, Switzerland, and, as a symbolic gesture of its strategic Cold War importance, West Berlin.