Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  Architectural critics were less than kind. They had begun sharpening their knives years before when Moses disbanded the Design Committee and rejected its industrial doughnut design. At the time, one critic promised that the Fair would be “the most horrendous hodgepodge of jukebox architecture.” Years later, others rendered the same judgment: “Disconnected, grotesque, lacking in any unity of concept or style,” opined the New York Times’ Ada Louise Huxtable. Her assessment did allow, however, for the genius of Philip Johnson. “The architectural highlight of the Fair,” she declared the New York State Pavilion in the New York Times Magazine.

  Life ran a scathing review by renowned Yale architecture historian Vincent J. Scully Jr. titled If This Is Architecture, God Help Us. The article was even more belligerent than the headline. “I doubt whether any fair was ever so crassly, even brutally conceived as this one,” penned Professor Scully. Ironically, one of the handful of buildings that he found enticing was Chrysler’s kitschy Autofare, a sort of mini theme park. The main building was built in the shape of giant, colorful car engine, and the exhibit also featured a space rocket that doubled as a fountain and a larger-than-life assembly line, illustrating the ingenuity of Detroit. For the coup de grâce, there was a building some three stories tall, eighty feet long, and fifty feet wide in the shape of a car. “It is the surprise of the Fair,” said Scully, who called it “pop art at its best.” (An assessment that probably made Johnson, and the pop artists he collected, cringe.)

  Aesthetic assessments aside, the critics were right: The Fair was a hodgepodge of architectural styles, lacking any unifying theme—and that’s exactly how Moses wanted it. “In a fair like this one, you’ve got to have plenty of variety,” he told Reader’s Digest. “Five people coming here from five different parts of the country are looking for five different things.” In the end, according to Moses’ vision, the Fair allowed world-class architects to bring their artistic fantasies to life for millions to see; the result was a staggering mixture of immense highs (the IBM, New York State, Spanish, and Japanese Pavilions) and tacky, lowbrow lows (of which the Chrysler exhibit was surely one, as well as a good number of the state pavilions). And some critics even marveled at Moses’ handiwork, including world-renowned Italian architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, who after visiting Flushing Meadow was so impressed, he wanted to tell the planners of Montreal’s upcoming Expo ’67 to forget it. “I’m going to tell them to think twice, because I think everything has been done here,” he said. “I don’t see how anyone can do anything better.”

  But one of the most surprising critics to defend Moses was John Canaday, ornery and outspoken chief art critic of the New York Times, and one of Moses’ least favorite. When the other top art critics in town were putting together committees to denounce Moses the previous autumn, Canaday hadn’t joined the fray. Instead, a month before the opening of the Fair, he penned a defense of Moses’ decision to not include an art pavilion—even if he disagreed with the Master Builder’s reasons. (Canaday must have known he was swatting at a hornets’ nest; the piece was titled Pardon the Heresy.)

  When the Timesman finally visited the Fair, he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of art that could be found in Flushing Meadow. “Art is all over the place at the fair, in such quantities as to negate the outcry that went up when an art pavilion was vetoed,” he wrote. For Canaday, the artistic highlights included the New York State Pavilion with its Hudson River landscape paintings and its pop art murals, and El Greco’s masterpiece The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (a painting specifically requested by Moses). But he saved his most lavish praise for Masayuki Nagare’s abstract stone sculpture that doubled as the walls of the Japanese Pavilion. “This is high art by standards tested over centuries,” he wrote, “and it is contemporary art by the strictest contemporary standards.”

  Not that Canaday liked everything about the World’s Fair. “The only way to keep from crying at the fair is to keep laughing,” he wrote. “But I sort of love it. We have to . . . we’re stuck with it.” By the time the much-delayed Pavilion of Fine Arts finally opened in what would have been the Argentina Pavilion, Canaday pronounced the collection “perfectly respectable and lifeless.” It was exactly the kind of review that would send Moses into a tizzy. Before long he fired off another angry letter to New York Times publisher Punch Sulzberger.

  Regardless of what critics proclaimed, the public soon began to discover the Fair. As the weather improved throughout the spring, the number of visitors steadily increased—the second day of Fair was bright and sunny and 163,152 people visited—70,000 more than opening day. Along with more people came more controversy. The trouble began with the Protestant and Orthodox Pavilion, as Moses had feared. The pavilion was screening a film, Parable, in which Christ was depicted as a mime and the Apostles as circus performers. Clearly meant as an attempt to modernize the Christ narrative and provide an entertaining story with a moral to audiences of the sixties, the film gave Moses misgivings. While he didn’t see it, he had a trusted Fair executive, John V. Thornton, screen the film and issue a brief report. Although Thornton didn’t think Parable should be shown, he didn’t think “it was bad enough for us to veto.”

  Afraid of yet another series of negative stories in the press, and a backlash from Fairgoers, Moses wrote to the Protestant Pavilion’s board of directors urging them to drop the film, claiming that the Fair Corporation had “grave misgivings about the propriety, good taste and validity of the film.” But Reverend Dr. Dan M. Potter, the pavilion’s executive director, refused. “We are going ahead with it,” he told the Times, “because people want to see it.” A disappointed Moses nevertheless resisted the urge to invoke the veto power afforded to him in Article 27 of the Fair charter, which gave him “the right to censor all projects at the Fair site.” Parable evoked a wide range of reactions from viewers. In the end, despite the steady diet of complaints from religious groups and individuals, Moses dropped the issue, allowing the pavilion to maintain its own affairs as if it were a mini-corporation or a city-state.

  Further Holy Land troubles had been brewing ever since Moses and his international staff had tried desperately to get Israel to invest in a pavilion at the Fair. It would have marked the first time that the nascent nation exhibited at a US-based Fair. When efforts failed, a group of influential Jewish Americans banded together to create the American-Israel Pavilion. The handsome circular structure was forty-two feet tall, with a sloped roof extending into a ramp that reached ground level and finished in rectangular red mahogany panels; the 14,438-square-foot lot was landscaped with stones from Jerusalem. The pavilion—like the nation and people it represented—was modern and ancient at the same time. Inside visitors could see gold from the mines of King Solomon, view fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and eat at a kosher restaurant for the observant (or gastronomically curious).

  Just down the Avenue of Asia and Africa from the American-Israel Pavilion lay the Jordan Pavilion, created with the consent of King Hussein I of the Kingdom of Jordan, a sworn enemy of the Israeli state. Built as a series of raised domed roofs and covered in gold mosaic, the Jordan Pavilion looked like a cross between some ancient subterranean desert dwelling and a space-age structure. Like its Israeli neighbors, the Pavilion of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—its official title—also displayed a portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The various interior exhibits featured colored-glass windows (by Spanish abstract painter Antonio Saura) depicting the Passion of Christ, while the story of the heavenly ascent of the Prophet Mohammed from the Dome of the Rock was told in bas-relief (thereby emphasizing the link between Christianity and Islam, while snubbing Judaism—the other major Abrahamic faith). There were also television monitors screening photos of the ancient city of Petra, hewn from the sandstone cliffs, as well as belly dancers and a restaurant featuring Middle Eastern cuisine.

  On April 23, the second day of the Fair, news began to spread of a painting featured on the wall adjacent to the Jo
rdan Pavilion’s exit. Titled plainly The Mural of a Refuge, it depicted a poor Palestinian woman cradling her young son and illustrated the story of the birth of Israel from the ideological lens of Palestinian refugees. “Before you go, have you a minute to spare, to hear a word on Palestine, and perhaps to help us right a wrong?” read the poetic polemic, before claiming how “Christians, Jews and Moslems . . . lived in peaceful harmony” for centuries before “strangers from abroad” entered the Holy Land and “began buying up land and stirring up the people.” Despite its obvious anti-Israeli propaganda and selective view of history, the mural touched upon an inescapable fact: Far too many Palestinians were exiled to refugee camps, the collateral damage of the historical birth of modern Israel. “Many like my mother,” the text read, “wasting lives in exiled misery, waiting to go home.”

  The executives of the American-Israel Pavilion were incensed, quickly lodging a complaint with Moses. The existence of such an openly anti-Israeli polemic, they said, was an improper “use of the fairgrounds for the dissemination of such propaganda” and one that made a mockery of the Fair’s theme of “Peace Through Understanding.” It also cited Article 16 of the Fair’s constitution, which stated that no exhibit will be allowed that “reflects discredit upon any nation or state.”

  Moses was quick to respond, informing the American-Israel officials that despite his veto power, he would not use it. “The Fair cannot censor the mural you refer to, even though it is political in nature and subject to misinterpretation,” he wrote in a telegram the next day. “We believe no good purpose would be served by exaggerating the significance of this reference to national aims or attributing racial animus to it.”

  The New York City Council disagreed, and the following month they denounced both the mural and Moses. It didn’t take long for Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. to see where this was headed, and so he issued a statement that Moses had agreed to remove the offensive mural. That was news to the Master Builder. He fired back with a statement that he had never asked for its removal and would not do so. A spokesman at the Jordan Pavilion told the New York Times that they would close the pavilion before removing the mural. “We are in the United States, a country of freedom, not Israel,” he said. “We are here to show the American people what our problems are.”

  Americans, it turns out, wanted to make up their own minds. The controversy was box-office gold for the Jordanians, as people—including many Jews who wanted to see the artwork for themselves—lined up to pay the fifty-cent admission. “It leaves me with the feeling that I don’t know what the truth is,” one man from Chicago told the Times. A Baptist preacher from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, said, “Let’s give them the right to state their case.” However, at least one New Yorker wasn’t impressed. “What chutzpa. First they charge you 50 cents. Then they insult you. Then they thank you for listening to their story. Typically Jordanian.”

  The tension only escalated from there. In May, Dr. Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, requested the right to stage a protest demonstration outside the Jordan Pavilion. Moses, as he did with all such requests, refused. Then Dr. Mohammed Mehdi, secretary general of the Committee on American-Arab Relations, wrote the Master Builder insisting on the right to picket the American-Israel Pavilion that same month. “We would not have raised the issue except for Zionist totalitarianism which is as intolerant as fascism or communism,” he wrote. Moses also refused his request and urged him to drop the issue and instead “work for friendship and peace.”

  In May the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith filed a lawsuit to have the Jordan Pavilion closed on the grounds that the disputed mural was “anti-Semitic.” Then, ignoring the Fair’s “no demonstration” policy, Dr. Prinz led a group of one dozen protesters to the Jordan Pavilion on May 25 and was arrested (although well-behaved, the group was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest; all charges that were dismissed the following month). Meanwhile, his lawyers filed a suit alleging that the Fair’s no-pickets-allowed law was unconstitutional, which they eventually won. There would be protests outside both pavilions, much to Moses’ chagrin.

  And just to add a dose of true international tension to the problem, the Israeli premier, Levi Eshkol, cancelled his scheduled May 11 official visit to the Fair to protest Moses’ refusal to remove the mural. A month later, someone removed the national flag of the Kingdom of Jordan flying from the flagpole outside its pavilion, replacing it with a blue-and-white flag inscribed with the words “American Israel.” This prompted the Jordanian ambassador to the United Nations to lodge a formal complaint with the UN.

  It was in this atmosphere that the World’s Fair Corporation’s board of directors met for the first time since opening day. On June 22 they gathered inside the Beech-Nut Theatre in the Better Living Center. Despite the headlines, there was actually good news: The Fair was averaging one million visitors a week, and fixes for general problems were being developed. Charles F. Preusse, the Fair’s lawyer, quickly asserted that due to the two outstanding lawsuits regarding the Jordanian mural, a motion be adopted to not discuss the matter. Moses, gavel in hand, quickly accepted the motion.

  However, Alex Rose, vice chairman of the Liberal Party of New York and a union leader, wouldn’t hear of it. He stepped up to a microphone and declared the Jordanian mural “a war slogan against Israel.” The two men testily exchanged words, until Senator Jacob K. Javitz, one of the Fair’s (and Moses’) original backers, took the microphone from Rose and suggested that the matter deserved a vote. Board members fidgeted in their seats or sighed, making little to no effort to hide their displeasure. A vote was taken and Moses’ no-discussion faction (which included all of the Fair’s top executives and General John J. McCloy) easily won.

  Just then Harry Van Arsdale, a powerful union leader, stepped forward to offer his still unvoiced vote to the minority “if I thought that my vote would help Israel.” Moses repeatedly slammed his gavel, drowning him out, and instructed General William E. Potter, the Fair’s executive vice president, to issue his report. When New York State Senator Joseph Zaretzki interrupted Potter again, Moses repeatedly banged his gavel.

  “You can’t gavel this resolution down!” Zaretzki shouted as Moses ignored him. “I’m raising a point of order. Under Article Six of—” But gaveling him down is exactly what Moses did. Potter went on to give his report, and that was the end of the meeting. Within a week, Zaretzki had resigned from the board and began referring to the Master Builder as “Boss Moses.” “Although he is a benevolent despot,” Zaretzki told the Times, “[he] is a despot just the same.”

  With the situation rapidly devolving into a political blood sport, the New York City Council couldn’t resist the urge to jump into the fray (1964 was an election year, after all). They passed a unanimous resolution demanding the mural’s removal because it was “gratuitously insulting.” Moses released a statement saying the City Council “asks suppression of free speech” before going on to say that the US Constitution “assumes that ideas will be tested in the intellectual marketplace. Opinions are not to be blue-penciled because some censor, however well intentioned, finds them ‘controversial,’ ‘irritating’ or ‘offensive.’ ” Moses argued, essentially, that there are two sides to every story—even preferred historical narratives of a nation’s birth. Noting that the American-Israel Pavilion was now planning a parody of the Jordanian mural in its courtyard—free of charge to the public—that was unabashedly pro-Israel, Moses pointedly asked the City Council if it would “now demand that an iron curtain be drawn around the unofficial American-Israel pavilion?”

  Regardless of who asked him to reconsider—including his friend Senator Keating—Moses refused. When it came to censoring pavilions, Moses was remarkably consistent. Just as he had when the US State Department demanded to know the details of the Soviet Union’s exhibit, Moses refused to get caught in the middle of a political tug-of-war. No lover of Communism by any stretch of the ima
gination, Moses noted that if the Soviets were paying for their pavilion, then they could put on any exhibit they wanted, a remarkably laissez-faire approach for such a renowned micromanager.

  Up until the early summer of 1964, Moses was reluctant to veto anything or be seen choosing one side over another, particularly when it came to religion or politics. Choosing sides meant alienating someone. And with his designs for Flushing Meadow Park, he would need millions of dollars in public funds and profits from the Fair; there wasn’t time to alienate anyone who could be in a position to help him.

  To date, the only exhibit that Moses had censored was Walter Keane’s haunting painting of zombie-eyed children titled Tomorrow Forever, which bizarrely enough was chosen to hang in the Hall of Education despite the painting’s reminiscence of the 1960 British horror film Village of the Damned. “His product has become synonymous among critics with the very definition of tasteless hack work,” Canaday wrote in the New York Times. Moses thought so, too, and on the grounds that the painting was in “bad taste,” had it removed. But what upset him even more was realizing he was simpatico with his least favorite art critic. “I hate like hell to agree with that crab Canaday who never loses a chance to toss mud at the Fair,” Moses complained to a friend, “but this time he’s right.”