Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  Although Moses had predicted that more than 250,000 attendees would pass through the Fair’s ninety-five turnstiles on opening day, the official tally was only 92,646—and of those, only 63,791 actually paid the $2 price of admission (the others being well-connected and/or VIPs). Never one to admit a mistake, Moses blamed the low turnout on the Novemberlike weather, the weather being one of the few aspects of life in Gotham that even the Master Builder could not influence—not that he didn’t try. Moses would write to local news stations urging them to downplay gloomy weather reports in their nightly broadcasts so that Fairgoers wouldn’t be scared off.

  But the weather was only half the story. The proposed stall-in—even though it hadn’t actually happened—had done its job: Tens of thousands of people had stayed away from the World’s Fair. The myriad demonstrations that had transpired—on the subway, the Farmer-led sit-ins at the New York State Pavilion, and the shouting down of an American president in front of political leaders and television camera crews—would not have happened had not a small group of militant Brooklyn CORE activists, with nothing more than bravado and homemade flyers, upped the ante. Although their planned stall-in failed, the day was hardly a failure for the group. President Johnson, Moses, Mayor Wagner, and Governor Rockefeller had all heard their message, even if the Brooklyn activists themselves had not delivered it.

  What they and the nation heard that day was that for some civil rights activists, the time for deliberation was over; now was a time for action. “Freedom Now!” was not a polite request; it was a demand. “Jim Crow Must Go!” was not a wish; it was an order. “Peace Through Understanding” was a worthy slogan, but they were empty words against the backdrop of the nation’s tumultuous political and psychic landscape. There would be no peace—not at the World’s Fair, not in New York City, and not in America—until their voices were heard.

  Outside the gates of Flushing Meadow, America was changing far more rapidly than Moses or any of his allies could fully comprehend. The 1964–65 World’s Fair marked the beginning of the end of an epoch in American history, the final vestige of the black-and-white conformity of Eisenhower’s 1950s and the brief so-called Camelot of Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen. It was all slipping away into the past and being replaced by the new vivid—and even garish—Technicolor of the 1960s.

  The future had arrived.

  22.

  The 1939 fair was a promise. The 1964 fair is a boast. . . . And somehow, in its jostling, heedless, undisciplined energy, it makes a person happy to be alive in the 20th century.

  —Time, June 5, 1964

  Shortly before the World’s Fair opened, Robert Moses and a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post, then one of the nation’s most popular magazines, stood on top of one of the Fair’s tallest buildings. The Master Builder, obviously pleased with himself and his handiwork, looked around, surveying the mesmerizingly diverse assortment of pavilions and space-age structures that now stood erect in Flushing Meadow Park—which, as he reminded many a journalist, he had created after clearing the soiled wetlands of the debris and garbage of Brooklyn. Then he spoon-fed his interviewer the article’s opening. “Well, I guess they’ll just have to say, ‘The old SOB did it again,’” he said.

  Despite the relentless hyperbole emanating from Flushing Meadow (“the single greatest event in history!”), few would dispute that Moses had essentially delivered on his promise to create a World’s Fair that had “something for everyone.” From Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece La Pietà to the Walt Disney Audio-Animatronics that brought the past to life—Jurassic age dinosaurs, wheel-building cavemen, and the slain sixteenth US president, Abraham Lincoln, the last of which was so lifelike that when it stood up to speak, one shocked five-year-old shouted, “But Daddy, I thought you said he was dead!”—to introducing the latest in consumer products, including color television, the Picturephone (preceding Skype by almost fifty years), and an IBM computer, something few people had ever seen up close before, the past and the future could be seen at the Fair. And right from the start the Fair seemed to be on solid financial ground: The exhibition had sold $35 million in advance tickets, making many New York officials involved with the project—Moses in particular—wonder if their stated goal of seventy million visitors was too low.

  There was much to choose from at the Fair. Despite the earlier outcry of critics, there was plenty of art representing several centuries and an impressive variety of styles: the aforementioned Michelangelo; Spanish old masters like Goya, Velázquez, and El Greco; modernist icons like Picasso, Miró, and Matisse; the landscape romanticism of the Hudson River School painters (which fittingly decorated the interior of the New York State Pavilion); a healthy sampling of the abstract expressionists; as well as the pop art stylings of Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and John Chamberlain, whose work—preoccupied with consumer culture as it was—seemed right at home among the Fair’s corporate pavilions.

  There were nearly seventy foreign nations (eighty including municipalities like West Berlin and city-states like the Vatican) that truly represented the world—not just the West. With most of the major European nations, including America’s key NATO allies (the United Kingdom, France, Italy, West Germany), sitting out, as well as its Cold War antagonists staying home (the USSR and its Warsaw Pact puppet states of Central and Eastern Europe), and other Communist enemies uninvited (the People’s Republic of China was off-limits, as was Cuba), the free nations of Asia and Africa, South and Central America, the Middle East and the island nations of Oceania, all answered Moses’ call to come to the Fair.

  Many of these countries were newly independent nations; some had just recently overthrown former colonial European masters. The 1964–65 New York World’s Fair presented the world in all its multicultural splendor: Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan (then called the Republic of China), Indonesia, Polynesia, the Philippines, and Samoa all built pavilions, as did Venezuela, Honduras, Panama, Mexico, and a slew of Caribbean countries which gathered under one roof in the Caribbean Pavilion. Other South American countries wanted to participate but were made to feel unwelcome. Moses all but kicked out Argentina when he discovered that the main investor was a Canadian company (he never forgave America’s northern neighbor for sitting out the Fair, in particular since the US government had decided to build at pavilion at the upcoming Montreal Expo ’67). Chile had intended on coming, but after Charles Poletti embarrassed their delegation at a press conference, the offended South Americans decided to stay home.

  Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and Morocco were represented, along with fifteen other independent African republics which united to form the African Pavilion, a project in which Moses took a personal interest. “We’ve devoted a lot of time to the new republics,” Moses said at a ground-breaking ceremony for the American-Israel Pavilion in 1963. “They are new, they are ambitious, they are enthusiastic. They want to send their new image around the world.”

  A few European nations—Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, and Greece—ignored the Bureau of International Exhibitions’ boycott of Moses’ Fair and built pavilions anyway, most of which were sponsored by private, nongovernmental organizations—chamber of commerce–type groups—passing through a technical loophole in the BIE’s bylaws.

  One major European nation that did not care about the BIE or its laws was Spain, which at the time of the Fair was still under the rule of the fascist regime of General Francisco Franco—former ally of Hitler and Mussolini (and now a staunch ally of the anti-Communist West). Franco, anxious to strengthen his political and economic ties with the United States, spared no expense in creating the celebrated Spanish Pavilion—hailed as one of the Fair’s architectural masterpieces—and filled it with cultural and artistic treasures ranging from Spain’s Golden Age to its twentieth-century masters.

  The world’s religions held court, too: The riches of Catholicism were on full di
splay at the Vatican Pavilion thanks to Pope John XXIII, who had died in June 1963. John’s successor, Pope Paul VI, was equally enthusiastic about the World’s Fair and its potential for fostering cooperation among the nations of the world. The Protestant and Orthodox Pavilion showcased a number of Christian sects, and Billy Graham, the most famous and beloved preacher in the United States, had his very own pavilion, where every night, seven days a week, he held court, trying to win hearts for Jesus. The Mormons built a scaled-down replica of their Salt Lake City Tabernacle, which represented a major public relations push for the enigmatic Utah-based church.

  The ancient culture of Judaism and its millennia of history were represented at the American-Israel Pavilion, a joint venture of American Jewish organizations, which symbolized the special relationship between the two nations. The pavilion also commemorated a bit of local history: In Flushing Meadow Park, Queens, in 1948, while its Manhattan headquarters was completed, a nascent United Nations made its historic vote to recognize the fledging state of Israel, just three years after the demise of Hitler’s Third Reich. The UN’s temporary housing was the old New York City Pavilion from the 1939–40 World’s Fair.

  Nearly half of the US states built pavilions for the World’s Fair. The South was represented by Louisiana, Texas, and Florida; the West by Oregon, Alaska, Montana (which sent an old steam locomotive carrying $1 million of gold across country to Flushing Meadow), and New Mexico; the Midwest by Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Missouri; the East by New Jersey, Maryland, and the various states that formed the New England Pavilion.

  But, by far, the most popular and celebrated state pavilions were those from Illinois and New York. The first featured the pride of Disney’s technical staff, President Lincoln’s robotic doppelgänger, and the latter was an example of Philip Johnson’s postmodern architecture, a series of circular shapes with its three towers, the tallest of which allowed vistas of the entire Fair (and Queens) from 212 feet in the sky and was accessible by outdoor elevators. Even Moses—no fan of postmodernism in any form—was taken with the structure and earmarked it for his post-Fair park. “An outstanding example of originality in design, structural, and material experimentation and ingenuity in the selection and display of exhibits,” he proclaimed in front of the thousand invited guests at the pavilion’s official opening on the second day of the Fair.

  While the world and all of its racial diversity were exhibited at the Fair, corporate America and the gospel of consumerism it preached were really the stars of the show. This was, of course, the height of America’s postwar boom, and the American economy and its seemingly limitless horizons were the envy the world over. Many of the biggest names in American industry created eye-popping attractions, such as the IBM Pavilion, which looked like a huge industrial egg nestled among a forest of metallic trees. The structure was a collaboration between Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen (who famously created the TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy Airport, a paean to space-age architecture) and Charles Eames, the designer, architect, and filmmaker, who conceived of the pavilion’s “People Wall,” a five-hundred-seat indoor theater that, once “loaded” with an audience, lifted the crowd fifty feet into the air, where they were entertained by a multiscreen film.

  The Travelers Insurance Pavilion looked like a flying saucer from a 1950s sci-fi film, while US Royal Tires decided to make their product into an amusement park ride: a six-story Ferris wheel shaped like a gigantic rubber tire, a bit of marketing savvy and at the same time a nod to the baser commercialistic aspects of pop art. (Perhaps corporate executives understood Andy Warhol and his contemporaries better than some leading art critics.) Electric Power & Light’s Tower of Light was a series of rectangular panels that bore a striking resemblance to a child’s building blocks. However, once darkness fell, the scores of panels were illuminated in a rainbow of pastel hues that equaled some twelve-billion candlepower, reportedly the world’s largest (and presumably, most expensive) searchlight.

  But perhaps no industry was better represented than Detroit’s Big Three automakers. The Ford Motor Company chose the Fair to introduce its latest model, the Ford Mustang, which would go on to become one of the best-selling automobiles in American history, coupling it with the Walt Disney–designed Magic Skyway ride. For its pavilion General Motors gave a nostalgic nod to its legendary Futurama exhibit from the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, proclaiming in an ad that their pavilion would transport customers to “Tomorrow-Land.” Millions of adults who had visited the earlier fair remembered being dazzled by its prediction of the future—“the World of Tomorrow” that, according to the exhibit, would exist by 1960. Now inside its towering tailfin pavilion (a shape that would be recalled decades later in NASA’s Space Shuttle) there was a new ride titled Futurama II, which offered 1964 audiences a newer, twenty-first-century vision of “the City of Tomorrow.”

  According to GM, twenty-first-century cities would feature sleek modernist skyscrapers and smart superhighways—computers would regulate traffic and keep cars safely away from each other. But the great Metropolis of the future would allow for a relic of the past: A Gothic cathedral held a place of honor on one of the few people-populated plazas in the busy city. (Apparently, one of the few places that people walked to in the future was church.) Futurama II’s Tomorrow-Land was a lot like the world as it already existed in 1964, only an updated version of the landscape that Moses had been building since the end of the Second World War.

  Fairgoers sat three-abreast in slow-moving chairs as they viewed space-age daydreams of roving lunar vehicles, underwater hotels, and rotating space stations. They also saw an improbable gigantic highway-creating machine: a technological Leviathan that could convert Mother Nature, literally pulverizing earth and rock and tearing out trees, as it slowly crawled along its path, leaving only a smooth, paved highway—an earth-eating computerized Moloch that would have given Lewis Mumford nightmares (and put Moses out of work). This was the kind of sci-fi fantasy that fueled the very real Apollo missions to send a man to the moon and “return him safely to Earth,” as President Kennedy had declared. According to GM’s vision of the twenty-first century, even deserts were overgrown with vegetation, as they became the beneficiary of rerouted and desalinated ocean water.

  And if Fairgoers wanted to see what NASA was really up to, they simply had to walk over to the US Space Park. A fifty-one-foot-tall replica of the Saturn V Boattail rocket engine, the stage-one propulsion jet that would help various Apollo missions reach space, mesmerized crowds. NASA also sent a life-size Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM, the actual craft that Apollo 11 astronauts would use to touch down on the moon’s surface. If that wasn’t enough for Fairgoers, the Transportation & Travel Pavilion had a huge half-moon dome as its roof, complete with a crater-encrusted lunar landscape. Although it wasn’t completed on opening day, the Hall of Science (which would eventually become a permanent museum in the post-Fair park) would continue the Fair’s space exploration theme decades after the Fair permanently closed.

  New Yorkers also got a glimpse of their own future: The World Trade Center and its “Twin Towers” were first displayed in miniature in the Port Authority Building, a modernist rectangular box that sat on four stilts, where the much-maligned “Top of the Fair” restaurant was held, its roof serving as a helipad. Designed by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki, who had created the US Science Pavilion for Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, the 110-story Twin Towers would have fit seamlessly into GM’s Futurama II exhibit. Many critics would lambast the architect’s Twin Towers when they were completed in April 1973. Moses, however, was a huge fan of them, marveling at their sleek modern design that seemed to recall the geometric abstractions of the Trylon and Perisphere, iconic symbols of the 1939–40 Fair.

  Many shows—especially Disney’s—were sentimental and aimed to entertain, especially the swarms of children who attended. One such child was seven-year-old Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the recently slain p
resident, who was so convinced that the puppy in the Carousel of Progress was real, she pleaded with her mother, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, to take it home. Still grieving and clad uniformly in black, Mrs. Kennedy’s visit to the World’s Fair was one of the first public appearances she had made with her family since the murder of her husband in Dallas five months earlier. Her former brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy, in the midst of a Senate race (trying to unseat New York’s Republican Senator Kenneth Keating), also visited the fair with his family. Ever the campaigner, Kennedy allowed photographers to snap away as he planted a kiss on each of his kids as they boarded a ride.

  The Kennedys weren’t the only politicians at the fair. Their old nemesis, Richard Nixon, added the exhibition to his busy itinerary. After losing his 1960 bid for the White House and then being humiliated by Governor Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, Nixon was in political exile. By April 1964 the former vice president was working as a corporate lawyer in a Wall Street firm, making frequent trips abroad to keep his name in the papers and slowly rebuilding his political base. But even Maurice Stans, one of his top fund-raisers and most loyal friends, didn’t believe Nixon could ever redeem himself in the eyes of the American voter. That is, until September 1965, when Stans would accompany Nixon to the World’s Fair and witness the mobs in Flushing Meadow—the same conservative-minded, middle-class citizens that Nixon would later dub “the silent majority”—pleading with the former vice president for his autograph. Right there in Queens—literally the center of Democratic New York City—Nixon was treated like a hero. After that Stans began a massive fund-raising effort, and launched Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign in the process.

  Although Moses was pleased with his own handiwork, his many critics were less than enthusiastic. Time devoted a cover story to the Fair, and despite the seemingly disapproving title—The World of Already—it was a balanced piece detailing the Fair’s many highs (the Ford, GM, and Spanish Pavilions) and undeniable lows (the number of unfinished pavilions and the plethora of uninspiring exhibits). Moses, of course, was incensed by the piece and, as he was apt to do, wrote to Time-Life Inc. founder Henry Luce, a World’s Fair director, to register his displeasure. “Henry Luce is a strange character,” Moses complained to a friend, refusing to understand Luce’s strict separation-of-church-and-state editorial policy. Many more such letters, over the course of the Fair, would find their way to Luce’s desk. “Henry Luce didn’t give a damn what people said, he loved his magazines and he loved his writers,” said Richard J. Whalen, a former writer for Fortune.