Nearly 30 years ago the future came to a marshy swamp in the heart of Queens. For a year in the mid-60s, the former Corona garbage dump, located at the exact geographical center of New York City, was home to the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. It was a dramatic, fantastic and sometimes frightening vision of progress, courtesy of the city’s notorious public official.

Brashly elbowing its way in between the subdued Fair of ’62 and Montreal’s Expo 67, the New York Exhibit was never officially sanctioned. The party-pooping Bureau of International Expositions traditionally gave its blessing to only one American city per decade. As a result, the Fair was boycotted by many European nations, and the emphasis was less on global harmony than American corporate might. It was a shameless hard-on for technology starring a dream team of US industrial all-stars: Du Pont, IBM, Bell, General Motors, and others advertised their rosy visions for a plastic-coated, rocket-propelled Technicolor future. Underwater cities, electricity “too cheap to meter” and atomic powered “road-builders” were on show in a display of technological hubris that seems quaintly naïve in retrospect.

The idea was to celebrate the 300th anniversary of New York’s transformation from New Amsterdam back in 1664. For such a huge undertaking, the city turned to “The Man Who Gets Things Done” – the legendary, irrepressible juggernaut of municipal change, Robert Moses. The man who at one time held 12 different New York City and State jobs, and for years had his own personal fiefdom at City Hall. The force behind countless bridges, parks, throughways, tunnels and playgrounds, Moses got things done, but often with a cavalier disregard for the very residents he claimed to represent. After all, this was the guy who tried to run a highway through Washington Square Park and build a parking lot in Central Park. In a ten-year span between 1946 and 1956, his policies displaced over 300,000 New Yorkers, as their low-income dwellings were razed in the name of “urban renewal”.

In a way, the Fair was Robert Moses’ Xanadu: a gaudy palace of excess that reflected his worldview – the mastery of technology over nature. His description of the Fair was predictably grandiose: “Vast forces dormant in nuggets of imprisoned sunlight? Machines that fly, think, transport, fashion and do Man’s work? Spices, perfumes, ivory, apes and peacocks? Dead Sea Scrolls? Images divine and graven? Painted lilies and refined gold?…We have them all…

The pavilions on offer displayed a dizzyingly seductive glimpse into tomorrow. IBM sponsored a show created by Charles Eames called The Information Machine. A 12-tiered “people wall” hydraulically lifted 500 visitors inside the theatre. Once there, 14 projectors and 9 screens tried to draw comforting parallels between how computers and the human brain processed information. 

According to Du Pont, the future was definitely plastics. The envisaged a synthetic utopia portrayed in their musical The Wonderful World of Chemistry. Spectators marveled at the sight of orange leotard-clad performers belting out numbers like ‘The Happy Plastic Family’. The theatre itself was made entirely of DuPont products: Nylon carpets, Tedlar roof, Anton and Febrilite seat fabric and Mylar stage curtains.

The unfortunately named ‘Festival of Gas Pavilion’ featured one of the most intriguing inventions – the Norge Dish Maker. It washed and dried the plastic dinnerware and helpfully molded the pellets into new plates, cups and saucers. And what optimistically misguided corporate view of the future would be complete without an enthusiastic nod to nuclear power. At an exhibit called Atomsville, USA, visitors got to run a simulated reactor. The fuddy-duddies at the US Atomic Energy Commission nixed the idea of building and operating an actual mobile nuclear fission plant at the Fair.

In addition to the space-themed exhibits, General Motors presented Futurama – a peek into the cities of tomorrow. Huge skyscrapers were connected to each other by tunnels transporting thousands of computer-guided vehicles. People were non-existent, or at the very least an afterthought, in these models – a strangely prescient view, realized in the fate of many American cities in the years that followed.

Most intriguing was the apparently serious idea of a city under the sea. A short commute to work by atomic submarine and wet-suited hardhats would mine minerals with claw-handled “aquacopters”. There was even a Hotel Atlantis resort for the underwater beautiful people.

The pièce de resistance in this technological wet dream however, had to be the Jungle Road Builder – powered atomically of course. The length of three football fields, this five-story high monstrosity could make one mile of elevated four-lane highway each hour, 24 hours a day. Just for good measure, a 100-foot long insectiform laser tree-cutter preceded the road builder, spraying the cleared areas with chemicals to slow growth, like some industrial napalm. You can bet Mr. Moses peed his pants over that one.

Unfortunately, the Fair – like NYC’s first one back in 1939 — turned out to be a financial bust. One problem was the notoriously conservative Moses’ aversion to cheap carny entertainment and decadent discotheques, which only made their appearance in the second season.

The Fair’s enduring legacy is the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, its centerpiece the gleaming steel Unisphere, a still-impressive testament to a more utopian era. The nearby NY State Pavilion building hasn’t aged as well. Its Tent of Tomorrow structure has been shorn of its roof, exposing the rusting spider’s web of spokes beneath, like some giant broken umbrella.

The Fair was symptomatic of a nation and city at the height of its power, overcome with a sincere belief in the impossible. While today’s technology is all about making machines ever smaller and transparent, the 1960s was a time when man’s dreams of the future were writ large in steel and concrete. A decade later, the bankrupt city was panhandling for federal funds, and Robert Moses was a political exile, a dinosaur from a bygone era.

The L Magazine