The World of Tomorrow

I have a geeky affinity for World’s Fairs that’s a tad anachronistic for a red. World’s Fair geeks are a bit like Disney fans or Michael Jackson supporters: optimistic naifs who believe in all that is good, pure and innocent and who view the future through rose-colored glasses. At their peak, World’s Fairs were heavily commercialized, globally competitive and naively focused on different themes of progress through technology. That’s why I find them so attractive.

The roots of my World’s Fair obsession lie in my last semester at Queens College, which, due to my dedication to activism over education was an autumn super-senior semester. The year was 2001. I had finished my courses in Labor Studies and Journalism, and budget cuts prevented me from taking that last Economics course, “Economics of the Labor Force,” (what the hell kind of economy would we have without labor?) that would have earned me a second Associates degree, so all I had left was to burn through 15 elective credits. I had fun and took art classes and studied urban planning, a budding interest at the time.

The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 is a hallmark of urban planning. It was the first World’s Fair held in America, and its theme center, the “White City,” a collection of gleaming white buildings of uniform height and roman architecture inspired civic leaders to ask “Why don’t our cities look like that?” Developed by disparate market forces, American cities lacked the thematic unity of European cities like Versailles and Dresden. The World’s Fair inspired cities to consider zoning laws that would emphasize aesthetics as well as practical usage. World’s Fairs continue to be influential on American society through the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The world as we know it changed forever two weeks into my final semester in college. Campus lore has it that dozens of students and faculty gathered below the Goodman-Chaney-Schwerner clocktower on Tuesday, September the 11th, and watched the Twin Towers collapse on the horizon. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t leave my basement for a week.

When I returned to campus, I began reading about the 1939 World’s Fair, New York’s first. The most striking physical element of the fair was its theme center: two perfect geometrical shapes in art deco style, the Trylon and Perisphere. The Perisphere was a 300 foot high globe, inside of which were held presentations on “the World of Tomorrow.” The Trylon was a three-sided spike that rose 700 feet in the air. It was a skyscraper, visible from Manhattan.

It is immediately reassuring, in a perverse way, to read of a skyscraper – a landmark – that was here and then gone. That is New York, after all. It’s always changing. It’s amazing that so many of us claim to love it. Love what? The memories of what used to be?

Beyond the iconography, the 1939 World’s Fair featured more of that naive faith in constant advancement through technology that is all the more shocking and enviable since it came right before the worst horrors of the century. Corporate exhibits extolled the virtues of automation, which would provide us all with more leisure. General Motors presented a working model of the city of the future (which looked a lot like Brasilia) in which cars and highways would zip us through our commutes. Television was publicly unveiled and promised to be the most amazing educational tool man had ever created. The people who went to the World’s Fair could not imagine that such inventions could have downsides. They certainly couldn’t imagine inventions of pure evil and destruction, like nuclear bombs. And I’m sure they couldn’t imagine objects of wonder like skyscrapers and aeroplanes could be converted into weapons of mass destruction.

It’s not like ugly reality didn’t come crashing in on this Fair. The second World War broke out at the end of its first season. The nations of Poland and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist in the rest of the world, although their pavillions continued operation at the World’s Fair. In the midst of the global tensions, the Soviet Union withdrew its exhibition, which featured a giant statue of a working man holding aloft a red star as though he was grabbing a strap on the Lexington Avenue subway.

When the Fair reopened for its second season, the theme became “For Peace and Freedom,” and advertisements emphasized the many flags of the world flying together. That, too, was endearingly naive.

In the end, the Trylon and Perisphere also became weapons of destruction. They were torn down, and their steel frames were converted to armaments for the war effort.

Fairgoers who attended General Motors’ “Futurama” exhibit were given a button to wear that bragged: “I have seen the future.” But they hadn’t, the lucky bastards.

For more information: The Iconography of Hope: the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair