by James Mauro
All of this made certain that the buildings and exhibits would never be ready by Opening Day without huge payouts in overtime. The New York Times estimated that, in the end, costs for the foreign exhibits alone had soared more than $10 million over budget; local companies and concessionaires saw their costs increase by 50 to 100 percent.
Whalen, although he was fuming inside, did his best to minimize the controversy’s importance. “We have had only14 the usual amount of labor problems that any project such as this would have.” He shrugged in reluctant acceptance. “Many of these were caused by jurisdictional disputes over which we had no control.”
(The statement would come back to haunt him as he courted and cajoled and begged European countries to return to the Fair in 1940, despite the fact that war had, as Prince Olav feared, broken out and there was no more hope to hope against.)
Yet as the Fair settled in to its first month of business, most of the reports coming back to Whalen were positive. People loved the architecture, the layout, the “carnival of color” that was spread out before them. And if they thought it was something to see in the daytime, by nightfall the entire fairgrounds came to life.
Bassett Jones,15 the director of illumination who had badgered Einstein into giving his speech on cosmic rays, designed two impressive fireworks displays for the Lagoon of Nations and Fountain Lake. Just after dusk, the lagoon erupted in a “Ballet of Fountains”: Fourteen hundred nozzles shot twenty tons of water a hundred and eighty feet into the air, while four hundred flaming gas jets, almost six hundred multicolored drum lamps, and five giant spotlights danced and swirled in time with original music scores, all accompanied by roman candles bursting overhead. And the shows went on every night, free of charge.
Jones had also instructed that several hundred trees be illuminated from the ground with ultraviolet rays, to make them appear luminous. He banned floodlights on all buildings except the Trylon and Perisphere, designing instead a method that made them seem to emit light from within. “As darkness falls,”16 said Lewis Mumford, “a dream world becomes a reality. Then the buildings one by one awake with color and light; then the Perisphere is a blue moon hovering over the water; then the tower of the Glass Center shines crisply and the blue flanges of the Petroleum Building spread outward like an inverted pagoda…. The effect becomes just what a carnival should be—a splendid riot.”
“I’ve kept the intensities down,”17 Jones said. “You get an almost fairy-garden quality at night.”
If people complained about anything at all, it was the size of the place. The grounds were enormous, and at first, overwhelmed by it all, a lot of folks found themselves wandering around,18 not lost but seemingly without direction as they consulted their watches and guidebooks and tried to decide which exhibits they absolutely couldn’t miss seeing and how many they could squeeze in for their seventy-five-cent admission fee.
One woman, recording her voice on RCA’s MAKA Record (or “Make a Record”) machine, was asked how she was enjoying the Fair. “Well, my feet hurt,” was her first response. Quick to capitalize on the situation, Dr. Scholl’s and other companies began advertising remedies for sore feet in many of the trains headed out to the fairgrounds.
Grover Whalen had insisted that the Fair maintain a festive attitude, regardless of its intention to educate and enlighten. So the bright blue-and-orange trams that carted the sore-footed visitor around joyfully played “The Sidewalks of New York.” There were bands everywhere, and usually a dance floor thrummed with jitterbugs or kids from a local junior high school offering a tango exhibition. Rounding them out were dozens of clowns, jugglers, and strolling banjo and harmonica players, and crowds seemed to gather around wherever they went.
Jitterbugging in the Amusement Zone was one thing, but sometimes the connection between performer and location made little sense. A pair of “negro minstrels” was spotted sashaying in front of the Belgian Pavilion one afternoon, accompanied by a third playing an accordion.
“We’re not familiar19 with your country’s music,” one fairgoer called out, assuming, naturally, they had been imported from Belgium. “What was that number you just played?”
The accordion player, without missing a note or cracking a smile, answered, “‘Hold Tight,’” a current popular hit by the Andrews Sisters.
And as much as the commercialism of the corporate exhibits rankled New York’s crankiest critics, more folksy publications didn’t seem to mind. Life magazine even declared it was “a magnificent monument by and to American business.” And they meant it without irony. “It gets away from the immediate job of selling goods,” Harper’s agreed.
Most who attended the sponsored exhibits weren’t bothered at all by the fact that they were being sold something; in fact, very few seemed to notice or care. Even those who did pick up on all the commercialism understood that the price of free admission was being met by having to listen to General Electric’s talking appliances in the Kitchen of Tomorrow, or seeing how Firestone made the Tire of Tomorrow, or watching the parade of Lincoln-Zephyrs and Mercurys as they drove over Ford’s Road of Tomorrow.
Tomorrow, of course, was everywhere you looked. “We shall eat20 the sandwich of Tomorrow,” laughed The New Yorker. The Hall of Pharmacy even contained the Drug Store of Tomorrow, where you could enjoy a streamlined ice-cream soda at the Fountain of the Future. (Though what exactly constituted streamlined ice cream confounded even its soda jerks.)
And in case you didn’t get the point, there was even a Town of Tomorrow in the World of Tomorrow. An attractive, orderly cluster of fifteen “Demonstration Homes,” it was set in the Community Interests Zone along the edges of the Flushing River. If you swung north coming off the Helicline and headed up the deepening yellow path of the Avenue of Patriots, passing AT&T and RCA on your left, you couldn’t miss it. (Of course, hanging a right onto the Avenue of Pioneers may have been a more popular choice, since along this blue-tinged route you would encounter General Cigar on your left, American Tobacco on your right, and, directly in front of you, at Lincoln Square, the oasis of beer known as the Schaefer Center.)
The main problem with the Town of Tomorrow was that not many of its visitors could ever hope to live there. The Board of Design had attempted to create truly low-cost housing by utilizing prefabricated material. But once building material manufacturers began sponsoring the houses, and major department stores began furnishing them (all with proper recognition and signage, of course), the home prices soared. The design team struggled just to keep six of them from costing more than $10,000 apiece, which was still well out of reach of three-quarters of Americans. The highest-priced homes cost between $22,000 and $35,000, which was not only beyond their reach, but also beyond even the wildest dreams of almost everyone who toured them.
What was worse, in the Production and Distribution Zone’s Focal Exhibit, a graph spelled out in plain language just how poor everyone (or almost everyone) was at the time. Drawn from studies conducted by the Works Progress Administration, statistics showed an average family’s yearly spending habits broken down into four levels: $800 was considered “subsistence”; $2,000 was “maintenance”; $2,500 was the minimum needed to enjoy “the good life”; and anything above $5,000 was considered “luxury.”
The exhibit then went on to state that 90 percent of Americans fell into the “subsistence” category. Gardner Harding pointed out that 75 percent of people earned less than $3,000 a year, and complained that the Town of Tomorrow was “in point of fact a definite breach of faith.”21
Harding, writing in Harper’s, went on to criticize the Fair’s attitude regarding money, declaring that “the nickel is a coin22 no one recognizes at the Fair…. Hot dogs and hamburgers are all a dime. It would cost $14.10 to see all the attractions at the Fair.”
It wasn’t true, really. “The talk about23 the difficulty of getting food at reasonable prices is probably either Bolshevist or Nazi propaganda,” responded The Nation. “There are plenty of resting places, drinkin
g fountains and toilets.”
As for the Focal Exhibits themselves, most people hadn’t a clue what they were about, and several helpful journals advised their readers to skip them altogether. But they had been an integral part of the Board of Design’s concept, an acting out of surrealism and outright pretension. The job of creating them fell to seven of the top industrial designers of the day, working closely with the Board of Design and the Theme Committee. Originally planned as an entrée into each of the seven zones, they introduced the commercial exhibits and were supposed to spell out the functions identified within each zone.
At least, that’s what they were supposed to do. Raymond Loewy’s design for the Transportation Zone’s Focal Exhibit was probably the simplest and made the most sense. A large map with flickering lights demonstrated the distance you could travel in one day via various methods: car, train, and airplane.
Communications, designed by Donald Deskey, got a little weirder. On one end of the hall was a twenty-foot-tall plastic head that represented Man; on the other end, a thirty-foot globe represented the Earth. When Man spoke, telling of the glory of the postal service, for example, the globe lit up with images of a mail plane caught in an electrical storm. Its forward-thinking finale ended, ironically, with the globe turning into a gigantic TV tube. Viewers were left speechless—which, considering the focus, was probably not Deskey’s intent.
Russell Wright’s Food Zone exhibit featured a room painted entirely in dark red. At one end of a long hall, projected on a huge, sixty-foot egg, were images of an avocado (bedecked with jewels, no less) scaling a mountain. Then a flock of flying lobsters winged out of the sea and soared overhead, a cauliflower with a boxing glove pounded on a giant bug, and finally, a blinking eye and a clock racing backward inside of a dark can.
Gilbert Rohde had a solid idea for the Community Interests Zone’s exhibit, but, so as not to be thought any less creative than the flying lobster inventor, he ended it with a bang. Simply, the exhibit attempted to show how much easier life had become since 1789, when George Washington had taken his oath. Lights rose and fell on five different theatrical sets, from an eighteenth-century colonial village to a modern suburban housing project. As the lights dimmed on the last scene, a narrator summed up the pleasures and pitfalls of 1939:
“At last man is freed—freed in time and space,” the deep, sonorous voice called out as the room faded to complete darkness. Suddenly a spotlight flashed across the length of the hall, shining directly on two words:
“For what?”
Bang. Big finish.
The odd thing about the Community Interests Zone is that it seemed to be a catchall place for anything that didn’t exactly fit in the other six zones. Visitors had their choice of the American Radiator Company or the Christian Science Building, the Electrified Farm or the House of Jewels, Gardens on Parade or the Palestine Pavilion, which Albert Einstein would officially open at the end of May. Whalen had even placed his future employers, Maison Coty, here, conveniently right next to the Hall of Fashion.
There were other Focal Exhibits, of course, but word of mouth quickly spread about these bizarre visions and dreamscapes, with their floating crustaceans and their Freudian warnings, and after a while the Board of Design noticed something unusual: People weren’t following the well-laid-out paths they had expected them to. Worse, they didn’t seem to get the whole “landscaping as color-coded map” guide, and they had the absolutely appalling tendency to turn right as often as they possibly could.
Exhibitors with buildings to the left of main entrances would watch as swarms of visitors systematically refused to head their way. Moreover, the exhibits that were doing well—RCA, AT&T, and General Electric among them—seemed to attract even more business simply because people naturally flocked to wherever they saw a crowd or a long line. Thus, the snaking, slithering queue outside Futurama inevitably drew even more customers eager to stand around for three hours.
“The designers found out24 that the crowd’s greatest pleasure is in the crowd,” one reviewer noted.
Still, throughout May those crowds never came in the numbers that were expected; but it wasn’t exactly a disaster yet, either. True, the Fair expected a minimum of three hundred thousand paid admissions per day, with attendance reaching as high as eight hundred thousand on weekends, and on its best Saturdays and Sundays, no more than a quarter million showed up. (Weekday attendance was typically less than half that. A lot less.) Through June 15, basically a quarter of the way through the season, Whalen reported that just under six million people had paid their way inside, with eight million total, including those on passes and invited guests. Which was still okay, he reckoned.
“Naturally, we’ve had25 a few kinks to iron out, a few changes to make,” he stated optimistically at the one-quarter mark. “But that is all done with now. The Fair is firing on all cylinders. Everyone tells us we have a magnificent exposition!”
He went on to reassure the press that attendance thus far had come within 1.5 percent of preopening estimates. But this again had been calculated on fuzzy math, and like the population comparison with Chicago, it made an awful lot of assumptions based on nothing more than what they hoped was going to happen. And in any case, it had better happen soon.
Because most of the foot traffic showed up on weekends, and most of the early visitors were from New York, it was assumed that as summer settled in and the kiddies were let out of school, the weekdays would soon do as much business as the weekends, and the weekends themselves would explode. People would begin their summer travels, piling in their cars and heading north and east toward this great American World’s Fair. There was no reason to panic yet, regardless of the fact that a six-million “gate” one-fourth of the way through meant only twenty-four million paid admissions in 1939 if things stayed the way they were. Which would be a disaster by anyone’s calculations.
Suddenly the World’s Fair Corporation’s estimates of forty and then fifty million seemed impossible, and forget about Whalen’s sixty-million boast. Even if business doubled over the next ninety days of summer vacation, between the middle of June to just after Labor Day, it still wouldn’t equal forty million. Attendance in July and August alone needed to reach a staggering thirty million in order to make up for the slow start and anticipated drop-off when school started again in September. That equated to half a million people per day, every day, with a little padding thrown in over the long Fourth of July weekend.
“This Fair has already gone26 over the top,” Whalen nevertheless insisted, smiling. Privately, he was worried. Not only weren’t they coming, they weren’t spending as much as he’d hoped they would when they got there—less than a dollar per person. It was about a fourth of what he’d thought they’d spend, and he worried that if they were cheapening out here, what was happening throughout the city, where the average visitor was expected to spend $56 on hotels, entertainment, and meals? The whole idea was to bring $1 billion, if not more, worth of business into New York. If you cut three-quarters out of that, you barely had an excuse to spend $160 million in the first place.
Whalen began to brood, watching the Fair wind down day after day, the nightly fireworks seeming more like a dirge for the end of something than a celebration of a happy, successful evening, with another just like it to come tomorrow. Time was tearing on again, only this time working backward, down to the Fair’s closing in October.
He knew what was at stake. Regardless of how much the public loved his show, and whatever history would write of it, bankruptcy would taint his reputation for the rest of his life. There would be no more big parades, big spectacles, big projects ahead; this would be the absolute high point of his life. And unless he did something about it right now, it would be over in a year and a half. If that.
Two ideas came to him: He would authorize immediate payment of 5 percent of the debenture bonds as a show of good faith to investors and, subsequently, good reports in the newspapers; and he would get back out there and sell thi
s Fair all over again. Hell, he’d sell the damn tickets himself if he had to.
* In today’s dollars, imagine paying someone about $100 to change a lightbulb.
Einstein and his sister Maja inspect the Haifa diorama in the Palestine Pavilion. The exhibit’s trick-mirror effect perpetually fascinated him. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)
16
PALESTINE VS. PANCHO VILLA
Gerald Wendt, director of the American Institute of New York City, had put together the Science Advisory Committee1 to the World’s Fair at the beginning of 1938 and immediately asked Albert Einstein to become its honorary chairman. Einstein accepted, though somewhat reluctantly. Science was taking a wrong turn2 in the 1930s, he and many others felt. In January 1939, in a speech praising Nobel Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann, Einstein made several astounding statements that revealed his disappointment with the purely introspective life, particularly in the face of current events.
“The standard-bearers of intellect have grown weak … and the powers of darkness have been strengthened thereby,” he declared. “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character; it becomes lack of power to act with courage proportionate to danger.”
Moreover, corporate science, geared essentially toward the singular goals of new technology, new products, and a greater desire for consumerism, was the dominant force of the day. Right or wrong, science in general lost a great deal of prestige after the Depression hit. As Einstein had predicted several years earlier at Caltech, in 1939 as many as one in four unemployed Americans believed they had lost their jobs because a machine had taken it over.
Despite Wendt’s assurances that Corporate America would not dominate the scientific approach at the World’s Fair, it became obvious rather quickly that that wasn’t going to be the case. Although the Theme Committee was full of designers, artists, and architects, it was sorely lacking in scientists. As early as 1936, Whalen had been fielding questions about how the World of Tomorrow was going to be conceived with “the apparent omission of science … in connection with the plans for the Fair.”
