by James Mauro
For Heather,
who so quickly became my muse
And for Madelyn,
who will always be my World of Tomorrow
Anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.
—From “To Posterity,”
Einstein’s letter placed inside the Westinghouse time capsule at the 1939 New York World’s Fair
CONTENTS
MAP
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
THIS BRIEF PARADISE
FROM ASH HEAPS TO UTOPIA
PART ONE
THE DEVIL TO PAY
1. “WHY DON’T YOU DO IT, DADDY?”
2. MR. NEW YORK
3. A VOLUNTARY EXILE
4. THE GARDENIA OF THE LAW
5. NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR, INC.
6. THE $8 MURDER
7. WHY HAVE A FAIR?
8. 106 DEGREES IN THE SHADE
9. PANIC IN TIMES SQUARE
10. SELLING THE FAIR
11. “FOLKS, YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET!”
PART TWO
DAWN OF A NEW DAY
1939: THE FIRST SEASON
12. “THEY COME WITH JOYOUS SONG”
13. BLACKOUT
14. “I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE”
15. VISIONS AND DREAMSCAPES
16. PALESTINE VS. PANCHO VILLA
17. GERMANY YESTERDAY—GERMANY TOMORROW
18. ROYAL FLUSH
19. “I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT!”
20. “YOU TELL ’EM, MICKEY!”
21. THE STORM CENTER OF THE WORLD
22. “S’LONG, FOLKS!”
PART THREE
FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM
1940: THE SECOND SEASON
23. “HELLO, FOLKS!”
24. “THIS LOOKS LIKE THE REAL GOODS”
25. AFTERMATH
26. CURTAINS
27. WHALEN, GRAVISNAS, FORBINE, AND NOBILITY
EPILOGUE
ASHES TO ASHES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES AND SOURCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“The trouble with intellectuals is that they don’t know what a World’s Fair is all about,” wrote George R. Leighton in Harper’s Magazine. “A World’s Fair is an art form, a combination of beauty and bombast … and the universal hankering for a holiday.”
Mr. Leighton visited the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and later the 1964 version, and sums up one of the most important questions this book attempts to answer: “What makes a World’s Fair a ‘success’—money or love?” There’s something enduringly magical about a World of Tomorrow built on an ash heap and poised directly between two of the most catastrophic, and self-defining, events in twentieth-century American history: the Great Depression and World War II. No matter the cost, the result was a promise that life would soon be brighter, easier, and filled with more leisure time than anyone had ever known. And in that way the World of Tomorrow looked hopeful to a degree that it hasn’t ever since.
This book came about as the result of an accidental finding one day as I was strolling around the grounds of Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the site of both the ’39 and ’64 World’s Fairs. There, buried in the ground outside of the only remaining building from the 1939 Fair (which now houses the Queens Museum of Art), is a historical marker detailing the events of July 4, 1940. And yet, of the numerous visitors to the Fair that I spoke to, no one remembered anything about it. Several of them assured me that I must be mistaken.
But it’s true. In fact, every detail of this book is nonfiction; all of the quotes come from a letter, speech, or other documented source, and I have cited as many facts as seems reasonable without going overboard. There’s a temptation in research to footnote every sentence. But that’s impossible and, I feel, unnecessary. You can’t write history without filling in the blanks or you’ll leave a lot of blanks. For advice, I turned to a former professor, a true mentor and noted historian, Edward Chalfant. In the first of his three-volume biography of Henry Adams, he offers this perfect summation of the process:
“What the biographer does is tirelessly imagine story after story until a story comes to mind which is in every respect sustained and in no respect undermined by all the available evidence, precisely understood. Then the biographer tells that story.”
That is what I have done in this book. If there are nagging questions that arise in the reader’s mind: “How does he know what Grover Whalen’s mood was?,” suffice it to say that the answer lies in the body of evidence as a whole. That is, if attendance at the Fair was below expectation, I find it justified to state that its president was worried. The minutes of the Fair Corporation’s board meetings support that assumption.
In any case the reader can rest assured that I have analyzed the research, have documented as much as possible, and then taken a step back and filled in the pieces where necessary. To my knowledge, those pieces are as accurate, and as few, as possible.
PROLOGUE
This Brief
PARADISE
A world’s fair is its own excuse. It is a brief and transitory paradise, born to delight mankind and die…. International expositions do not prevent wars; they go on despite wars. They don’t solve the problems of depression and unemployment; they persist in the face of depressions. The world’s fair idea is tough and durable, and the reason is this: people think they’re just wonderful.
—GEORGE R. LEIGHTON,
Harper’s Magazine
The World of Tomorrow, 1939 (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)
FROM ASH HEAPS TO UTOPIA
On the Fourth of July1 1940, Detective Joe Lynch was enjoying a rare Thursday afternoon at home. Given the current situation, any day off from his frenzied routine with the NYPD’s Bomb Squad was a bonus. Ordinarily, on a big holiday like this, he might have treated his family to a picnic out at Rockaway Point Beach. He had his eye on a nice little cottage out there that he hoped to someday buy as a summer retreat for his wife and five children.
But not today. Although he was officially on duty, the department had allowed him to spend the afternoon at home as long as he was available via telephone if something came up. Not that it mattered much; a miserable stretch of rain had been soaking the city for days and pretty much canceled out anyone’s plans for a summer outing. Despite the weather, Lynch, sitting in his cramped two-bedroom apartment in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, listened to the rumble of the elevated train outside his window and thought of the ocean.
This summer especially was not the time for leisurely fun, holiday or no holiday. The second season of the World’s Fair was in full swing, and every New York City cop knew what it meant to have something so large and so popular going on right in his backyard. There was a tremendous influx of tourists, for one thing—millions of them, if you believed the newspapers. And along with them came the usual cast of characters who made it their business to rob the rubes of their money and anything else they could think of. There were security issues,2 safety issues, vagrant issues, and vice issues: More crowded city hotels meant more men seeking more women who wanted company, both legitimate and otherwise. It was no secret that the Fair featured nude and nearly nude models3 cavorting in several shows in the Amusements Area. And that sort of thing couldn’t help but promote some inherent desire for an after-hours liaison between spectator and performer.
Lynch knew all this, but he had more pressing concerns on his mind. A World’s Fair of this magnitude attracted all kinds of agitators who would go to any extreme to make a political statement, especially now that war had broken out in Europe. And it had been just his luck that right before the Fair opened, he
and his partner, Freddy Socha, had been assigned to the seemingly dichotomous duties of what was known as the Bomb and Forgery Squad.
It was easy duty at first. They spent most of their time studying endless documents for signs of fakery—a repetitive and mind-numbing task. But it was also considered a good path for promotion, and at the time, Joe had been glad to get the assignment. Chasing down crackpot bomb threats was only a sideline, and thankfully they almost always turned out to be false alarms. On the few occasions when a suspicious package was found, especially if it happened to be ticking, standard procedure was to immerse the object in motor oil in order to defuse it. The squad’s most memorable moment had come when they’d successfully deactivated a cuckoo clock.
The two detectives got along well. Lynch, lantern-jawed and handsome, had more the look of a Hollywood star than a street cop. In fact, he bore a striking resemblance to manly actor John Payne, the singing boxer in that year’s hit Kid Nightingale but better known a few years later as the defender of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street. Socha, from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was less than two years older but had five years’ more experience on the force than Joe and was nowhere near as good-looking. With his round face, receding hairline, and double chin, he reminded his fellow officers of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
To each man’s pleasant surprise, the Fair’s inaugural season the previous summer had passed without a major incident. Earlier that year, however, the partners began investigating a string of bomb threats against ocean liners, bridges, and foreign consulates. Lynch and Socha were kept busy in the scramble to investigate every claim, however dubious the source. Despite the fact that as winter turned to spring no actual bombs were found, their boss, Lieutenant James Pyke, was clearly concerned. He urged Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine to double the security around all piers, convinced that it was only a matter of time before the threats became acts.
He wasn’t wrong. In May 1940, the World’s Fair reopened. By June, the bombings turned deadly.4
It began as a waste-management project.5 From the turn of the century through the early 1930s, the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, owned and operated by a tightfisted Tammany man named John “Fishhooks” McCarthy,* dumped more than a hundred railroad cars of ash, trash, and even animal carcasses a day into its repository in a Queens neighborhood called Flushing Meadows Corona Park. From 1909 to 1935, the area became known as “the Corona Dumps”—a fetid, foul-smelling swamp of decay that stank in summer and choked in winter. Mountains of ash were known to rise as high as one hundred feet.
In a novel6 he had originally called Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires (until his editor, Max Perkins, convinced him to change it to The Great Gatsby), F. Scott Fitzgerald described the scene as “a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.”
And then, something just short of a miracle happened. An out-of-work Belgian engineer named Joseph Shadgen suggested the site as the perfect location for a World’s Fair, and the idea caught on like wildfire. Mayor La Guardia banned all privately owned dumping grounds within city limits; Fishhooks sold his dump to the city for $2.8 million; and out of the ash heaps, City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses saw a new kind of Promised Land: a World’s Fair that would build a dream city quite literally out of garbage.
Groundbreaking ceremonies were held on June 29, 1936, and even the officials who attended were shocked by the stench and squalor of the site. Nevertheless, in three years’ time the Fair would open, and it would be bigger, grander, and more spectacular than any exposition to date—more than three times the size of Chicago’s “A Century of Progress” World’s Fair just six years earlier.
More important to the people of 1930s America, it boldly, bravely presented a mind-boggling vision of the Future (usually with a capital “F”). General Motors spent a whopping $7 million (around $100 million in today’s dollars) on its Futurama exhibit, a fantastic ride through the wondrous world of 1960. In fact, the Fair presented an astounding number of inventions and new technology that would change the culture in decades to come. Television made its debut on Opening Day with a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt;* AT&T introduced “Pedro the Voder,” a synthetic human speech device; and over in RCA’s “Radio Living Room of Tomorrow,” the New York Herald Tribune was transmitted over a “facsimile” device at the rate of one page every eighteen minutes.
But of course not every futuristic prediction would come true. The Westinghouse exhibit paraded a seven-foot-tall cigarette-smoking robot named Elektro who “talks, sees, smells,7 sings and counts with his fingers.” Westinghouse also buried a time capsule containing millions of pages of microfilm along with such everyday objects as a pair of Mickey Mouse ears and a pack of Camel cigarettes. And at what point in the future was this time capsule to be opened? Not in the year 2039, or 2539, or even 2939. No, this “cross-section of today’s civilization”8 was buried with the intention of its being unearthed in 6939—a full five thousand years hence.
In 1939, when they said the Future, they meant the Future.
It was called many things:9 the Mad Meadows, the Whalensian Wonderland (after its grandiose president, Grover Whalen), and the Flushing Follies. Some described it as “a dream city of the future,” others as “a nightmare of design gone bad.” Visitors to the Fair remembered it as either “one of white enchantment that extended my knowledge of the world” or “the twilight of darkness that would encompass the world and my own life for the next six years.” One astute witness noted it simultaneously as both “a vision and a warning.”
The Dickensian dilemma that was the 1939 New York World’s Fair is perhaps best summed up by writer Sidney Shalett in an essay for Harper’s Magazine:
It was the paradox10 of all paradoxes: It was good, it was bad; it was the acme of all crazy vulgarity, it was the pinnacle of all inspiration. It had elements of nobility, features so breathtakingly beautiful you could hardly believe they were real. It also had elements of depravity and stupidity, features that were downright ugly. It proved that Man was noble … then it turned right around and proved that Man could also be a simpleton.
In other words, it ran the gamut of civilization—the intended and unintended result of five years’ planning, unprecedented expense, and the contribution of a multitude of creative geniuses and the talents of Grover Whalen, “the greatest salesman alive.”11 It gave the American people “an unforgettable opportunity12 this summer to see themselves as they would wish to be,” while at the same time it was “a better Fair than the American people deserve, and probably a better one than they wanted.” That these last two observations came from the pen of the same critic, in only the third month of its existence, shows just how puzzling this great Fair was from its very beginning. No one, it seemed, knew what to make of it.
Grover Whalen did. By 1939, he had made a name for himself as New York’s dandiest police commissioner, a top-hatted top cop who loved racing after fires in his specially outfitted touring car that allowed him to gleefully blare the siren from his backseat perch. But he was better known as the city’s “official greeter,” practically inventing the ticker tape parade13 for visiting celebrities, including Albert Einstein and Howard Hughes. When Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, Grover Whalen was the last man to shake his hand before takeoff at the Roosevelt Field airstrip on Long Island and the first man to welcome him upon his return to the city.
For Whalen, this World’s Fair was the culmination of a career defined by maximum public exposure and grandiose spending (though never with his own money). It also capped a life filled with odd coincidences and crosscurrents, an intersection of lives and biographical happenstance that had led him to believe he was living a charmed life. It was almost, he sometimes mused, as if the whole thing—his career thus far, those he had chosen to befriend and model himself after, the odd trajectory of fate that had put him in charge of this Fair—had been planned out in advance.<
br />
His singular devotion to bettering himself, and his unflinching surety that greatness was his birthright, had led him out of a life of ordinary hardship and into the realm of the truly exalted. Through hard work and obsessive glad-handing, he had built a World’s Fair beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. And now, at fifty-two years old, nothing less than the measure of his life depended on its success. His legacy was leveraged solely on the spinning of its turnstiles, and he was never more keenly aware of that fact than on April 30, 1939, Opening Day of the Fair.
True, he had been a New York celebrity for years. In 1930, Cole Porter had immortalized him in his song “Let’s Fly Away”:
I’m tired of having Texas Guinan greet me;
I’m tired of having Grover Whalen meet me.*
Even Groucho Marx had gotten into the act, adding a line to his famous “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” and singing, “Here’s Grover Whalen unveilin’ the Trylon …”
He was, according to one journalist, “recognized on the street14 by more persons than any other New Yorker except Al Smith, Babe Ruth, and Jack Dempsey.” But with his leadership of the Fair, Whalen was finally getting the national recognition he felt he so richly deserved.
The whole thing lasted15 a mere eighteen months, from the end of April 1939 to late October 1940, but during its brief life span the New York World’s Fair could be considered the most extravagant folly of its age: a $160 million “World of Tomorrow” built on twelve hundred acres of primeval bog. That it was constructed on a notorious garbage heap stood as a prime example of unintended irony and unbridled optimism for the future, despite the looming certainty of war. That such an undertaking could be conceived at all during the height of the Great Depression is staggering, but no less indicative of the acute hope for a better life to come. And that such enormous sums of money ($2.3 billion today) could be spent for its construction seems callous, rather like throwing a party while your neighbor’s house is burning down. Nevertheless, its purpose was pure: More than a billion Depression-era dollars was expected to flow into the local economy via tourism.
