Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  In March 1936, the war of the design world reached its critical peak. At what must have seemed a rather posh setting for such a gathering, the Municipal Art Society held a luncheon at McAneny’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel to debate the long-standing issues between the so-called modernist and traditionalist schools. Its general stated purpose10 was to present a plan that would make sure the Fair was “more beautiful, more comfortable and more inspiring than any of its predecessors.”

  The problem was, no one who attended the luncheon could agree on exactly how that goal should be achieved.

  Michael Hare stood up to denounce the idea that the Fair’s main focus should be to allow its visitors “to dodge life” by merely having a good time there. “If this World’s Fair11 is to be anything but just another big ballyhoo with a lot of canned art, classic or modernistic, and blatant advertising dished out to an unsuspecting public,” he warned, “we must go back to the beginning and ask ourselves, ‘Why have a fair?’”

  No doubt it was a good question, although Whalen and McAneny would have had something to say in response—something about profits and $1 billion worth of revenue to the city, to be sure. Hare dismissed this with the astounding statement that he believed the Fair’s investors would in any case “probably lose their shirts.” The only profit he cared about was that of the millions who were to be shown a better and more enriched way of life.

  “What are we going to do12 to prevent the horrible chaotic jumble of exhibitions that reduces the visitor to a state of coma?” he asked. “How are we going to do away with both museum fatigue and architectural eyewash?”

  Then, because he knew which side his bread was buttered on, Hare applied the art of finance as tied directly to the presentation of art at the Fair. “What is going to induce American citizens to spend their money on another Fair … What is going to make this a paying proposition for the industrialists?”

  Although he stated that his viewpoint represented the collective judgment of the eighty architects and industrial designers of the Fair of the Future committee, he may as well have attributed its essence to Grover Whalen. “There is a way13 for New York City for the first time to present to the world a vivid and well-integrated expression of the possible American life,” he said, “and that is by this integration alone that this Fair will achieve significant architecture.”

  The fireworks started when Royal Cortissoz, a well-known art critic for the New York Herald Tribune, stood up and berated McAneny, who had unfortunately been seated next to him at lunch. Cortissoz pointed his finger down at the banker and charged, “If the 1939 Fair14 is not a landmark in American taste … then it will be sunk. I don’t care how much money or amusement comes out of it.”

  He further recommended that a small group of artists be given sole discretion over the Fair’s layout and design and warned that they must be “absolutely ruthless” in its presentation of what he considered a “prodigious job.”

  “Anyone who introduces15 politics into the 1939 World’s Fair, I solemnly think,” he sniffed, “ought to be shot.”

  McAneny reassured everyone that the sponsors’ aim was to make the World’s Fair “a thing of great architectural beauty” that would attract a worldwide audience. As such, he agreed that a board of control should be established to plan the scope and layout of the grounds and supervise all design work. The artists, for the time being, were mollified.

  Impressed with Whalen’s speed16 in solving the Corona Dumps crisis, the board of directors of the World’s Fair Corporation called a special meeting and gave him total control on May 4 by making him president. The corporation’s bylaws imbued its president with sweeping powers that put him in charge of the overall business of the Fair, including design and construction, as well as sales and supervision. Whalen had been chairman of the board exactly two weeks, after which he and McAneny exchanged titles and McAneny assumed what was now a figurehead position as chairman of the board. To save face, McAneny insisted that most of his work in getting the whole thing started had been accomplished and that the Fair was taking up too much of his time. He needed to get back to the duties of Title Guarantee and Trust.

  Whalen, of course, got right down to business, claiming that “headquarters will be established17 by the end of the week” and that “the permanent organization will be functioning in less than ten days.” As far as Flushing Meadows was concerned, “the contractor will actually go to work about June 1.” It was eight months after the first announcement of the Fair, but better late than never.

  Privately, however, Whalen began to address a larger issue that had been brought up since the very beginning. The original steering committee had been hell-bent on the idea that a World’s Fair in New York would do for the city what the Century of Progress had done for Chicago, but they had overlooked a major cause for concern—namely, the notoriously bad reputation18 that New York City held in the eyes of the rest of the country.

  “The big town19 never had been held in affection,” reported The Saturday Evening Post. “People in Dubuque and Birmingham pretended to despise New York, called it a foreign city, and said they wouldn’t live there if somebody gave them Rockefeller Center.”

  No doubt the sentiment was true, and had been for quite some time. In 1929, well-known novelist and newsman Elmer Davis had written, “We knew that our town20 was not popular in the rest of the country…. The back country hates all cities, but especially it hates New York.”*

  At first, Whalen had been startled by the very idea of such loathing. He simply could not believe that anyone wouldn’t want to come to New York, which was then one of the safest cities in the country in terms of homicide and other major crimes. As police commissioner, he had stated publicly that there was less open vice in Manhattan than in any other large city in the world. Yet he understood that part of the hatred of New York stemmed from its reputation as a “wicked city” lacking any semblance of morals whatsoever. Another part of it was Middle America’s resentment that most of its citizens could never hope to live in Manhattan, “the most expensive spot on earth.” Adding fuel to the fire was the belief that New Yorkers didn’t care about anything but themselves, and that the rest of the country didn’t matter a whit in the minds of the sophisticated city dweller.

  Which was probably true. “So of civic pride21 as America understands it,” Davis went on, “New York has almost none.”

  And that was indeed a genuine concern for all those entrusted with the creation and eventual success of the Fair. Moreover, the planners worried that maybe New York was past its prime; lack of business in the city’s ports had been Shadgen’s original motivation for getting the whole thing started in the first place. What if New York was no longer “the goal of American dreams”? Would its residents turn out for an exhibition they might actually resent—either because they felt the city needed no advertisement, or they couldn’t care less what the rest of the world thought about their beloved city, or they didn’t want the invasion of yokel tourists crowding out their summers?

  “A New Yorker is inclined22 to be complacent about New York,” mused The Saturday Evening Post. And the Post was the chronicler of homespun Americana, the journal of the Everyman whose Norman Rockwell covers featured the very essence of small-town fantasy life. “If you have to fight night and morning for a foot of space and a strap in the subway,” the magazine suggested, “you’re not likely to cheer for a bigger population.”

  After a while, even Whalen had to grudgingly admit that this was indeed a problem. Or it could be if they let it go unchecked. What was needed, he said, reassuring the corporation that the Fair would be greeted with open arms, was exactly what the Fair of the Future committee was proposing: a nationwide, if not global, shift in perspective regarding the city.

  “It is infinitely23 more important to think of how the people of this country and the world feel about New York,” Whalen stated in a speech to the Foreign Commerce Club. “In short, we must put our city on the map, psychologically.”


  The Fair would do more to sell New York, he repeated to the Merchants Association, than “anything the city has ever done” by bringing so many people here to see for themselves, firsthand, that it was not a highhanded, overpriced, stuffed-shirt metropolis. The goal, Whalen said, was the same as when he had organized his grand parades as official greeter: “to portray New York24 in a true light; to show the world that it is not a cold and indifferent city, but has a warm heart and a sympathetic hand.”

  His idea to “re-glamorize” New York was not met with overwhelming applause. In fact, he recalled, it almost “landed me in the street.” The directors thought it was a ridiculous notion at best; at worst they thought he was crazy. Initially, some were worried that the city itself would ignore the Fair, if only out of protest; the rest of the country, despite Chicago’s success, “would smell a rat.” After all, they reasoned, New York’s only other Fair, the Crystal Palace of 1853, had been a financial flop.

  And just how was a World’s Fair supposed to change the country’s long-held perception of an entire city in just two short seasons? Whalen reasoned it this way: Chicago’s Fair, without costing a dime, had all but eradicated the lingering association with Al Capone and the lawlessness of its gangster reputation.

  Nevertheless, it was written into the backbone of principle thought that the Fair had better be more spectacle and sensation than dreary enlightenment. Regardless of what the Municipal Art Society would suggest, the World of Tomorrow must be eye-popping as well as educational, high-minded but not high-hat. And that meant keeping it affordable to the average Joe while at the same time presenting him with wonders beyond belief. It also meant plenty of hot dogs and free bathrooms, an issue Whalen would comically refer to over and over again as “the Battle of the Turnstiles.” Americans would spend their dollars, Whalen knew, as long as they felt they were getting their money’s worth.

  Actually, it was less a matter of profits than what financial failure would mean to the Fair’s overall legacy; bankruptcy would forever shroud the endeavor with questions about its inherent value and subsequent impact on the real world of tomorrow. Future generations would remember only that the 1939 New York World’s Fair must not have been very important after all, if no one came; and if no one came, then its very premise must have been erroneous. And that would make the whole thing purposeless. They may as well quit now.

  As it turned out, they were right to be concerned. Once reports about the Fair began to spread nationwide, newspapers in the Midwest, including the Omaha World-Herald and the Detroit News, sniffed that the city was holding a Fair only because “effete, sophisticated New York” didn’t want to be shown up by Chicago. Even closer-to-home publications like the Albany News warned that Whalen had probably “bitten off a very big chew, and may have a bad case of indigestion before it is swallowed.”

  And within the city itself, the New York smart set delighted in sneering at it over cocktails as a country fair whose garbage dump odors would be covered only by the manure smell of its livestock. “It is just like New York,”25 said, appropriately, The New Yorker, “to invite the world to a big party, and then set up the tables next to the finest garbage dump in town.”

  And, cruelly for Whalen, all the “high hat” criticism about New York was channeled into the public’s long-held image of him as a gardenia-wearing stuffed shirt.26 Oddly, for all his promotional skill, the one great failure in his life seemed to be that he could not sell the idea of himself—at least not in a way that ever satisfied his snickering public.

  “The fashion amongst27 the New York smart-crackers,” wrote The Saturday Evening Post, “is to ridicule Whalen; a practice that puzzles and pains him…. There is a feeling, expressed in the periodicals aimed at the intelligentsia, that Grover is slightly comic, that … he doesn’t quite know what it’s all about.”

  He didn’t make it any easier. At his own insistence, all World’s Fair promotional material went out in his name and carried his title first, preferably in the opening paragraph. “We’ve got just one thing to sell at this Fair—Grover Whalen,” said Director of Publicity Perley Boone. And it backfired. The whimsical catchphrase “Will it play in Peoria?” yielded to grim reality when the editor of that city’s Journal-Transcript stated, “When Grover Whalen smiles it may be news in New York, but we just don’t give a damn.”

  Whalen, it seemed, was the very embodiment of the smug, superior New Yorker he was trying to downplay. Unlike the “glib, fun-loving city,” the Post admitted, “[Whalen] is a bit inarticulate and solemn. He does have a rather impenetrable front.”

  It was exactly the portrait of New York they were trying to dispel: the man in the top hat and spats looking down at the average farmer off the fields, taking his money while at the same time snickering at his overalls and pointing out the hay in his hair. On top of that were the “twentieth-century Barnum”28 comments that kept cropping up here and there and which made Whalen even crazier with the criticism, wishing that the naysayers would pick one or the other complaint: that the Fair was going to be either a stuffy, high-hat affair or a huckster’s circus designed to pick the nickels out of unsuspecting visitors’ pockets. Either way, it seemed, he couldn’t win.

  * Mr. Davis himself enjoyed a peculiar love-hate relationship with New York. “I have spent eighteen minutes traveling three blocks (about 700 feet) in a Fifth Avenue bus,” he wrote. “A few years more, and the actuaries can safely calculate just how many thousand New Yorkers in the course of a year will starve to death in taxicabs on their way home to dinner, while they wait for the red light to turn green.”

  Mayor Fiorello La Guardia swearing in Robert Moses (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  8

  106 DEGREES IN THE SHADE

  Robert Moses was at it again. In June 1936, after compiling several bids by construction firms to begin work on the World’s Fair site, Moses raised the ire of the Fair corporation by rejecting the lowest bid—and the next lowest. His decision would cost the city an extra $342,000, and he defended it in familiar terms. “Time is of the essence,”1 he said, “and if there are any further delays the completion of the basic structure so as to permit the opening of the World’s Fair in 1939 will be impossible.”

  The two less costly firms, he stated definitively, “lack the essential qualifications to complete this work on time.”

  His old nemesis, Bronx borough president James Lyons, citing the city’s long-held practice of awarding contracts to the lowest bidder, tried to block the decision at a special meeting of the New York City Board of Estimate. “I refuse2 to be stampeded into wasting … the taxpayers’ money just because a speed demon like Mr. Moses comes in here and tells us how important speed is.” The board disagreed with Lyons and sided with Moses.

  Throughout the meeting, La Guardia remained silent, seemingly exhausted, and buried his face in his hands. His aides said he had been suffering from “severe pains in the back,” without making specific reference to the parks commissioner.

  In July, the mayor recovered some of his old backbone and was forced to call out the police to stop Moses from tearing down the municipal ferry terminal at Ninety-second Street on the East River. “The city cannot,3 of course, submit to have any of its services or departments interfered with by force,” La Guardia stated firmly. The next day he relented, agreeing to consider immediate termination of the ferry service so that Moses could begin building an extension from the East River Drive to the about-to-open Triborough Bridge.

  “All is quiet4 on the Eastern Front,” La Guardia sighed.

  And yet. As soon as work began in Flushing Meadows, no one could have a bad word to say about Robert Moses. On June 3, 1936, eleven World’s Fair Corporation officials climbed to the top of a seventy-foot tower constructed to enable a bird’s-eye view of the proposed fairgrounds. From where they stood, on a small platform, mountains of ash quivered over their heads. For most of them, it was their first trip out to the dumps, and they were not impressed by what they saw
.

  Whalen had tried to put them in good spirits by journeying to the site in well-appointed yachts across the East River and transporting them by car as far as they could go before being stopped by all the garbage. The rest of the way they had to travel by foot “over rolling hills of ashes to the tower.” Still, he made the most of the event, christening the site by swinging a bottle of 1923 champagne against the tower’s girders. It was a silly moment, really, and would prove to be a telling one. Whalen had timed it to occur precisely at sunset, when the sky would be lit by the orange glow of a late spring evening—the dusk of the old day before the dawn of a new one.

  The trouble was, just as the group reached the platform and stood, transfixed by the difference between what they saw and what they envisioned, “the sun was hidden5 behind clouds that already had begun to drop rain.”

  Whalen decided against using that as a photo opportunity. Instead, on June 29 he herded La Guardia, Moses, McAneny, and a handful of other dignitaries out to Flushing Meadows to officially break ground on the site. To ensure that the ceremony held proper historical context, Whalen had gotten hold of a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old spade from a man named George Powell, whose farm George Washington was supposed to have visited. It may have been a second- or thirdhand relic twice removed as far as the anniversary was concerned, but at least its age was correct (according to the Flushing Historical Society, anyway).

  Whalen invoked Washington’s spirit again, if somewhat ludicrously, by solemnly declaring that Flushing Meadows might have actually become the nation’s capital, since the first president had inspected “the ground upon which6 we are standing this minute” when he was looking for a permanent seat of government. Then he lightened it up a bit by joking that Washington himself had complained of all the mosquitoes in the area.