I was a lucky kid, I guess. I got to go "on vacation" almost every year. July unfailingly reminds me of those road trips in our Bel-Air or Catalina, arising before dawn and sliding onto the rear seat-bench, my dad backing into the driveway, the first few yards on the road to that year's Mandalay. We never went anywhere that exotic, of course. I was 16 before my parents decided to drive clear across the country, stopping along the way in a pre-Mandalay Las Vegas.
I have them to thank for my wanderlust, nourished by that annual mid-summer jaunt. Three times we visited world's fairs, which had the bonus of turning a trip to one city into a grand tour. I've been thinking of this lately, partly because it was 40 years ago this July that we visited the New York World's Fair, and partly because I've been reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, an account of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The brainchild of Gotham planning czar Robert Moses, the 1964-65 New York World's Fair was built on the Flushing Meadows site of the 1939 World's Fair. Where the earlier fair had sought to dazzle with progress a nation still mired in depression, its latter-day incarnation aimed both to marvel at the pace of progress since then and to wonder where it might take us.
Looking back at the fair is a little like watching one of those period sci-fi flicks that had us jet-packing to work in the far-off future of 1995. The most popular exhibit, General Motors' Futurama, whisked visitors in moving chairs along displays of moon exploration, undersea living and a multi-level, mostly vertical "City of Tomorrow"—imagined at a time when the nation was well on its way to becoming mostly horizontal and suburban, largely abandoning cities. (For this and other revived memories, I rely on nywf64.com, the amazing online chronicle of the fair.)
GM, Chrysler and Ford (which introduced the Mustang) anchored the Transportation area, and no doubt neither they nor their visitors imagined a future barely a decade hence when they would cede much of their market share to imports. AT&T could not have pictured fragmenting into "Baby Bells," either. Its vision of the future was vision—the Picturephone, which fizzled in the '60s due to cost and lack of bandwidth, but which is with us in another form today thanks to the Internet.
IBM, at least, mostly got it right with its exhibit, which raised a slanted platform of seated visitors into a light-and-sound show extolling the future of computerized information. In this case, though, as with others, the treat was not so much the message as the medium. I've heard similarly lucky kids around my age describe the fair as inspiring, or at least eye-opening, because it was a media wonderland. Whether you were gliding past moving dioramas or stationed before a wall of screens, the fair was flinging pictures and noise at you from all angles.
Visitors to Chicago's 1893 Exposition got a little taste of this, hearing an orchestra play in New York via telephone wire. But mostly they were wowed by products, including the debuts of Cracker Jack and Shredded Wheat, as Larson notes. More significant, they were awed by the so-called "White City" on the lakefront, an assembly of mostly immense, neoclassical buildings in a splendidly appointed park, effects that were superintended by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted.
Starting with the 1851 World Exposition in London, whose centerpiece was Joseph Paxton's iron-and-glass "Crystal Palace," world's fairs have been showcases of technological and industrial might. The idea was both to impress foreigners and to soothe the home population. Some scholars see in this the sinister power of "elites" to set the agenda and to lull the masses. Burnham's Beaux-Arts White City bespoke both order and tradition. Louis Sullivan, as Larson notes, later blasted it for restraining architectural innovation. And as in 1939, the 1893 fair masked a deep financial crisis.
But the key word in "world's fair" is the second one. They are, or at least used to be, state fairs with nations and corporations vying for prizes instead of farmers and pie-bakers; the floating market squares of the global community. Over the years, as technology advanced, so did the razzle-dazzle. Even as the New York fair anchored its ideas of the future in automakers and steel producers, its emphasis on presentation, media and entertainment helped usher in a world dominated by those factors.
RCA demonstrated then-novel color television, while Walt Disney organized the General Electric pavilion's show. Eventually General Electric would acquire RCA, and with it NBC, while Disney would take over ABC. More important, though, Disney would put its animatronics and other wizardry to work in Central Florida, where it would establish a permanent world's fair, of a sort, in DisneyWorld.
And is that not, in its way, what Las Vegas has become? It is a Not-So-White City of simulated architectural wonders, endless bedazzlements, and boundless faith in the American ideal of making money make more money. Among its icons is a replica of the highlight of the Paris World Exposition of 1889, the Eiffel Tower. Why, it even has a monorail.
All that's missing is the high-minded idealism, which, for better or worse, is the central ethic of a world's fair. But that has become as much a relic as the motto of the New York World's Fair: "Peace Through Understanding."
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.