World's Fair, celebrating its 50th anniversary April 22, was a barometer of change
Photos: 1964 New York World's Fair
In 1964, it would seem, the future could be seen just about everywhere but the one place that promised to give visitors a glimpse of it: the New York World's Fair.
The expo in Queens, fondly remembered by many who were taken there as children, conjured up a white-bread utopia of rocket ships, superhighways and futuristic kitchen gadgets.
Meanwhile, the real world of tomorrow was being forged, with startling speed, in the world beyond the fairgrounds: in Bob Dylan songs, in civil rights protests, in changing demographics and changing attitudes toward gender, race, consumerism and the environment.
"People were looking for a future of gadgets and space, but meanwhile, the real future, unknown to them, was right there," says Joseph Tirella, whose new book "Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World's Fair and the Transformation of America" (Lyons Press, $26.95) puts the fair in context as a key barometer of 1960s social change.
This particular world of tomorrow — dreamed up by men whose ideas and tastes had been formed a generation earlier — celebrated cars, steel, plastic and atomic energy.
Guy Lombardo, not The Rolling Stones, was featured in the Tiparillo Band Pavilion. Housewives at the Norge exhibit learned that the dinner dishes of the future would be newly created each night, and then just thrown away (April 22, the day the fair opened in 1964, was consecrated as "Earth Day" six years later). Men, meanwhile, would be out "conquering" the Moon and the oceans, and paving over the jungles, heedless of any environmental consequences.
"There were going to be underwater hotels," Tirella says. "Think of the environmental impact of that. Do people need sharks as neighbors? Do sharks need us as neighbors?"
The fair did get one key thing about the future right, Tirella says. But it happened almost by accident.
It goes back to the bulldozing nature of the fair's president, the obstreperous Robert Moses. The "master builder" who rammed the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway through residential neighborhoods was now determined to have a 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows — site of his earlier 1939 fair — in direct violation of the Bureau International des Expositions rule that no country could host a fair more than once in 10 years (Seattle had its fair in 1962).
As a result, the never-officially-sanctioned New York World's Fair was not, in fact, a true world's fair – and it was boycotted by many countries that would otherwise have had pavilions. That void was filled, in part, by corporations. Sinclair's "Dinoland," GM's "Futurama" and Ford's "Magic Skyway" were among the many attractions that dazzled kids and troubled critics of consumerism.
But the void, Tirella points out, was also filled by pavilions from second-world and emerging nations. India, Pakistan, Mexico, Korea and 15 African republics were among the nations that were represented. And they gave a glimpse, not just of the future players on the world stage, but of the future population of Queens. "In 1964, you could walk around the fair and get a glimpse of multiculturalism," Tirella says.
This futuristic fair clashed with the real future in other ways, too, he says.
New York's bohemian and gay population alarmed the planning board, who feared that tourists from Dubuque might accidentally hear a four-letter-word, or catch sight of a drag queen. So the boom was lowered.
"The East Village was changing at that time, all these artists and filmmakers were down there, and there was this growing, visible gay component to downtown life," Tirella says. "They realized this could hurt tourism, because part of the attraction of the fair is the additional tourist dollars. So they would try to take away the coffeehouses' operating licenses. Gay bars started getting busted. They busted Lenny Bruce in April 1964 [the month the fair opened]."
Though the planners tried to keep controversy out of their fair, the controversy came in spite of them.
The Brooklyn chapter of CORE – Congress of Racial Equality – demonstrated, not too effectively (and not so much to protest the fair, but because the event gave them a platform). And 200 unruly students heckled President Lyndon Johnson during an opening day speech: a foretaste of the 1960s protests to come. "It was the first time anyone could remember college students ridiculing a president, literally shouting him down," Tirella says.
To be fair, there are also photos of Martin Luther King Jr. and his kids on the "Magic Skyway." They seem to be having a good time.
A Queens native, Tirella is too young to have experienced the fair firsthand. But he grew up marveling at its remains, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
"The truth is, I wish I could go back in time and see it," he says. "It must have been something. What is that Chinese curse: 'May you live in interesting times'? I think the fair, and that period in America, was interesting."