Were one to walk down the straight avenues of today’s Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, New York, it would be impossible not to come across major artifacts from the park’s previous life, that of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair as well as the 1939-1940 World’s Fair before it.
Sixty years ago this month, the World’s Fair took place in the borough of Queens, New York, in Flushing Meadows. What’s left is not a mere time capsule, but a living breathing 2024 World’s Fair experience, yours for the taking.
It’s not unusual for a single significant piece of architecture to remain after a world’s fair, to wit, one only has to look at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Space Needle in Seattle, and the Atomium in Brussels – all icons from world’s fairs past.
Someday, however, the park may be viewed by future generations as a more modern-day Stonehenge, but for now, the 1964 New York World’s Fair is by and large still there. One might have to close one’s eyes to imagine the international pavilions and the smell of the new-to-the-United-States Belgian waffles but a present-day excursion to the fair site is still an extremely rewarding one.
The Unisphere, a spherical stainless steel representation of Earth in Flushing Meadow built for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens
For starters, the two most iconic pieces of architecture remain in place, if not fully intact.
The New York State Pavilion, whose concrete towers and cable structures look straight out of a sci-fi film, was popular with visitors. They would ascend to the two observation decks of the pavilion and enjoy a 360° view of the fair below them. The Pavilion’s main exhibition space dazzled and delighted fairgoers with the world’s largest suspension roof and a 567-panel terrazzo road map of the Empire State. Today, our visit will have to be confined to looking up and imagining throngs of people.
Meant to symbolize the dawn of the Space Age, the Unisphere, a colossal, 12-story-high, stainless-steel model of the Earth, erected on the Perisphere site, which was a tremendous spherical structure, 180’ (55 m) in diameter, that originally in 1939 connected to the 610-foot (190-meter) spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world’s longest escalator.
Glimmering in the park’s orbital center, the Unisphere looks hyperfuturistic in the daylight, but it’s simply stunning when illuminated at night. During the fair, dramatic lighting at night gave the effect of sunrise moving over the surface of the globe.
The Queens Theater’s circular pavilion
Next to the Unisphere was the Theaterama, now the Queens Theater, designed by Philip Johnson. The theater was originally decorated with the artwork of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana. The audience stood and viewed a cycloramic travelog of New York State projected on screens lining the inside of the circular room.
The Theaterama was converted into a multipurpose legitimate theater in the 1970s, with the addition of a stage, public restrooms, lobby, and dressing rooms.
The Queens Theater currently offers cabaret, concerts, Broadway revivals, new productions, and film festivals. In the period 2008 through 2008, a circular pavilion was added to the theater to serve as a reception hall. The pavilion is quite dramatic at twilight and after dark when the sunset-colored, invert dome appears to hover and flow in the dark.
Another rather visible remnant is what is now called Terrace on the Park. Now a banquet hall where you can host your Bar Mitzvah or wedding reception and enjoy 360° views of the park and city, it was built as the fair’s heliport south of the Hall of Science. The bulk of the building is suspended in the air by four supports.
Prior to its rebirth as a catering establishment (my brother Greg’s Bar Mitzvah reception was held there as was at least one friend’s wedding), the Beatles’ helicopter landed there prior to its 1965 Shea Stadium concert and the venue was used for Park concessions upon the dedication of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in 1967.
The cast of ‘That Golden Girls Show – A Puppet Parody’ at the Queens Theatre
One thing the visitor won’t want to miss is Meadow Lake.
Meadow Lake has a boat house that remains from the 1939 World’s Fair and rental boats are available for rowing and paddle boating. Meadow Lake is also the site of rowing activities for non-profit Row New York, with teams practicing on the lake for much of the year.
Finally, Meadow Lake also hosts the annual Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival, and teams from New York practice in Meadow Lake during the summer months.
A bit off the beaten path is the World’s Fair Marina, built for the fair but still in use today. It remains one of the largest public recreational boating facilities on the eastern seaboard and is located on Flushing Bay just south of New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
The Rocket Thrower statue, a divine depiction of a man launching a rocket from one hand and reaching for the stars with the other
There’s also the Rocket Thrower statue, a divine depiction of a man launching a rocket from one hand and reaching for the stars with the other. Yet just a few hundred feet from these popular attractions, hidden in a grove of maple trees, is a different kind of monument: a 16’ (4.9 m) Roman limestone column. Called the Column of Jerash, at nearly 2,000 years old it’s the second-oldest monument in New York, after Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park.
It was one of many columns erected for a temple in 120 B.C.E. in the Roman city of Jerash and King Hussein of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan presented it to the City of New York as a gift.
The New York City Building, now the Queens Museum, was the City’s official pavilion during both the 1939-40 and 1964-65 World’s Fairs. From 1946 until 1950, the New York City Building served as the headquarters of the United Nations General Assembly. The museum has in its holdings over 10,000 objects related to the two fairs held outside its doors and 900 of those objects are on display.
Perhaps the crown jewel in the museum’s holdings is the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335-square-foot (867.2 square-meter) urban model that includes every single building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs. Millions of people paid $0.10 for a nine-minute simulated helicopter ride over the city, narrated by Lowell Thomas. The model has been updated multiple times since the closing of the fair.
The New York State Pavilion’s two observation towers
Also in the Queens Museum is a scale model of the 1964 New York World’s Fair site. That model shows all the buildings and pavilions of the time, and is located in a separate area devoted to World’s Fair exhibits.
The Hall of Science was built for the 1964 fair and, at its time of opening, was one of the few science museums in existence. It remained open to the public after the fair ended. Immediately outside the Hall of Science is Rocket Park, home to two towering metal structures, relics of the fair’s United States Space Park and of the space age. The Titan-Gemini, which stands 110’ (33.5 m) high and has an aluminum alloy exterion, while the Gemini capsule is a fiberglass model that was used at the start of the U.S. space program for testing purposes. Meanwhile, the Atlas-Mercury, which is stainless steel, stands 102’ high (31.1 m) and is the same model that launched John Glenn into space in 1963.
Both were installed by NASA for the fair.
The year 1964 would be the 300th anniversary of the City of New York, dated to the time where the English took over the city from the Dutch, and renamed what had previously been New Amsterdam and, by holding the fair on the same site as the 1939 World’s Fair, many of that fair’s remaining buildings could be reused, it was reasoned.
The New York City Building, now the Queens Museum
Although the federal commission selected New York City to be the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, in part because it could then reuse multiple buildings from 1939 including the City of New York Pavilion, right at the center of the World’s Fair grounds, the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions had three objections to New York’s proposal, including the World’s Fair Corporation’s plans to do away with the custom of giving each country the first 5,000 square feet (465 square meters) of exhibit space at no charge. The corporation planned to run the fair for two seasons, even though most world’s fairs were just one. Finally, it was customary that a country could only host one world’s fair in a decade and Seattle had already been selected to host the 1962 World’s Fair, the Century 21 Exposition, which is what gave the city its iconic Space Needle.
The site in Flushing Meadows was originally a natural wetland that straddled the Flushing River. Flushing had been a Dutch settlement named after the city of Vlissingen and the wetlands had earlier been converted into the Corona Ash Dumps, which were featured prominently in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” as the “Valley of the Ashes.” After the 1939-1940 fair, the site was used as a city park.
Then New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. commissioned Frederick Pittera, an experienced producer of such fairs, to prepare the first feasibility studies for the 1964-1965 fair and he was soon joined by architect Victor Gruen, an Austria emigrant who left his homeland shortly after the Anschluß and he may very well have been the most influential commercial architect of the 20th century given that he invented the modern shopping mall with his design of the Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota.
Paddle boats awaiting park visitors
The fair’s organizers then went on to hire American urban planner Robert Moses, known both as a master builder and power broker since his 1924 appointment as chairman of the State Council of Parks and president of the Long Island State Park Commission. At one point, Moses held 12 governmental titles at the same time and built Jones Beach State Park, the most-visited public beach in the country, and was responsible for the New York State Parkway System, the Triborough Bridge Authority, which gave me control over bridges and tunnels in New York City, as well as the tolls collected from them, and multiple major highways including the Cross Bronx and the Long Island Expressway.
The bureau, of course, failed to give the New York World’s Fair the green light but Robert Moses went ahead with the fair anyway, as was his custom. President John F. Kennedy broke ground for the fair in 1962.
When it opened on April 22, 1964, the fair covered 646 acres (2.61 square kilometers) and held over 140 pavilions, 110 restaurants representing 80 nations, 24 states, and 45 corporations with numerous exhibits and attractions, some of which remain standing to the present day.
The New York World’s Fair’s theme was “Peace Through Understanding,” dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe,” a theme illustrated by the Unisphere, which served as the basis of the fair’s logo and identity.
Snickers the Wonderdog, accompanied by a friend, explores the grounds of the 1964 New York World’s Fair
The fair is considered to have been a major showcase of mid-twentieth-century American culture and technology, and many of the pavilions were built in a mid-century modern style that was heavily influenced by Googie architecture, the futurist architectural style that had been influenced by the Space Age, Atomic Age, jet aircraft, and the evolution of modern automobile design.
Some pavilions were explicitly shaped like the products they were promoting or a company’s corporate logo, such as the US Royal tire-shaped Ferris wheel, Sinclair ‘s Dinoland which included multiple dinosaurs including its signature Brontosaurus in what was a misguided attempt to play on the now largely discredited link between the formation of petroleum deposits and the time of dinosaurs, and Johnson Wax’s corporate logo. Other notable buildings included the oblate-spheroid shaped IBM pavilion and the General Electric circular dome-shaped carousel of progress.
Children enjoying a fall leaf pavilion on the former fairgrounds
The Underground World Home was designed to represent a bunker one might wish to have in the Cold War period. The home was a complete three-bedroom house, located completely below ground level. It was presented as the forerunner of future dwellings that offer advantages including more control over air, climate, and noise than conventional houses, as well as protection from such hazards as fire and radiation fallout, something of great concern at the time of the fair.
Popular exhibitions included General Motors’ “Futurama I” that portrayed the world of 2064, AT&T’s new and working Picturephone, IBM’s presentation of basic computers, the New York State Pavilion, The Ford Motor Company Pavilion, designed by Walt Disney to design a “unique and memorable entertainment adventure,” the Magic Skyway ride. Guests sat in Ford convertibles and traveled through a Disney-designed show.
Disney also offered the “It’s a Small World” ride-through attraction, presented by Pepsi-Cola and UNICEF and President Abraham Lincoln made his Audio-Animatronics debut in “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” in the State of Illinois pavilion.
The New York State Pavilion up close.
Other fair favorites included as the Vatican Pavilion, which featured Michelangelo’s Madonna della Pietà. Today, a small plaza and exedra mark this pavilion’s location,a section of a mock Belgian village that included the “Bel-Jam Brussels Waffle,” and the 7-Up International Sandwich Garden that featured complimentary 7-Up and a menu with culinary specialties from 16 countries.
The garden’s dining pods featured furnishings designed by the futuristic Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, known for the TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport and his timeless Tulip Armchair among other creations, and were enclosed by twenty-four futuristic fiberglass domes that were topped by a commanding clock tower that soared more than 107 feet (33 m) above the pavilion.
The fair was, however, not short on controversy. While the Column of Jerash remains as evidence of the Jordanian Pavilion, few remember the international controversy the pavilion triggered. The controversy was not the column but a mural installed that presented what the Jordanian government termed “the plight of the Palestinian people” and its presence led to protests, arrests, vandalism, and the cancellation of at least one foreign leader’s visit, all within the first few weeks of a world’s fair whose official slogan was “Peace Through Understanding.”
(Photos: Accura Media Group)
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