Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  Chicago again. Moses threw up his arms. He had already placed the designated $4 million in the parks department’s budget, and he intended to see every penny of it reclaimed and subsequently spent. Damn Whalen and his spendthrift ways. Way back in 1936, when all of this looked like such a promising dream, Moses had prompted Al Smith to write to the Fair corporation and urge them to put Grover Whalen in charge. “I suggest that there be no doubt9 as to the authority given him,” Smith had stated. Now, four years later, Moses thought he must have been out of his mind.

  It was only August, yet already the thought on everyone’s mind seemed to be Closing Day. Not wasting any time, Harvey Gibson decided to start selling off whatever pieces of the Fair he could. Everything from furniture to carpeting to lighting fixtures was suddenly up for sale to the highest bidder, as if the whole thing were already done with. He started by auctioning off the piano in the Terrace Club and the enormous copper-topped conference table in the board of directors office—two of Whalen’s most prized possessions, naturally. Included in the long list, way down at the bottom, were forty-nine blue silk cummerbunds, leftovers from the high-hat finery of days gone by.

  Bids would soon be going out to contractors for demolition estimates, and without a thought about public opinion, Gibson wanted everyone to know that the remnants of the World’s Fair would be perfectly suitable for building the machinery of war. “In fact, Fair officials10 would like very much to see some of our materials used for national defense,” he said through a spokesman.

  Then he got an even better idea: Why not convert the entire fairgrounds into one great big army or navy camp when all was said and done? “Common sense will tell you11 that we shouldn’t be tearing down millions of dollars’ worth of structures when there is a possibility that the country will have conscription shortly, bringing on an urgent need for barracks,” he said.

  Conscription, of course, meant drafting young men into the armed forces in preparation for war. For a World’s Fair that had done about as much as it could to be the purveyor of peace, Gibson was now publicly acknowledging that war would probably come to America and that the Fair could profit from it.

  It was, of course, a dual slap in the face: one for Grover Whalen, whose former “World of Tomorrow” he would turn into an ironic location for a military training ground; and an even harder one for Robert Moses. “There is a serious possibility12 that actual demolition may be delayed sufficiently,” Gibson acknowledged, putting a potential kibosh on Flushing Meadows Park for the foreseeable future. “To me it seems criminal to tear these buildings down with the state of the world as it is today.”

  This was Harvey Gibson at his best—acting as patriot when in fact his primary motive was to hand the government the keys to the World’s Fair and let them deal with the expense of tearing it down—possibly even charging them a little rent money in the process. He could envision the lease being drawn up, the young soldiers drilling in the former Court of Peace, transforming Whalen’s Terrace Club into a mess hall, using the Perisphere and Democracity as a giant map and strategy room. The irony of turning a world of beauty into a tool of war didn’t matter a whit to him if the taxpayer could wind up footing the bill and paying off some of his debts.

  Whalen, of course, was horrified at the thought. He stood witness as his dream was slowly dismantling before his eyes. The once glorious sight of the Trylon and Perisphere now held no great pull over him. If he tried, he could still see that glorious parade on Opening Day replaying itself—the long lines of multicultural marchers filing down the Helicline and up Constitution Mall, crisp in their uniforms, the flags of so many nations joined together and snapping in the wind as if they all represented a single, magnificent, unifying force.

  So long ago; a different world entirely. It had been a coming together of peoples then, the country’s wagon hitched to a star of freedom, of hope, and of peace. If Gibson had his way, men would be marching here again, but for an entirely different purpose.

  In the beginning, when it was all coming together, Whalen was the only member of the corporation who attended every single meeting, believing in the Fair’s purpose with every fiber of his being. Now, in the waning days of the Fair, he could barely force himself to attend a single one.

  The fortunes of the Fair—not merely its finances, but the very real possibility that in the end it would be melted down into bombs and ships and fighter planes—had a profound effect on him. He began to gain weight, no longer taking his morning exercises and forgoing his ritual early morning bike rides and brisk walks around the fairgrounds. More and more he enjoyed his cocktails at lunch and found that he waited for the dinner hour when he could renew his imbibing. The lines in his face grew deeper, and his cheeks began to sink in even as his waistline expanded.

  His name was hardly ever in the papers now, and his picture was almost nowhere to be found anymore. He still gave speeches on various occasions, since Gibson was admittedly never very good with the public, but he was almost never quoted. During a rare interview that summer, a reporter actually noticed the hint of a shine on his suit, indicating that Whalen no longer took such great care in his appearance. That summer, he was dropped from the list of best-dressed men in the country.

  Only La Guardia seemed able to bring him out of it. Since he had grown nearly desperate for any kind of coverage, Whalen suggested that August 19 be declared Working Press Day. Gibson grudgingly gave him the okay, but only if it was held on a Monday, the emptiest day of the week. The day was to be a great big “thank you” to the newspapermen and columnists who had given the Fair so much praise over the years. And, true to Whalen’s luck, it poured all afternoon.

  For once, he decided not to let the weather spoil his fun. After a formal luncheon at Perylon Hall, where the booze flowed freely, the entire group toured the drenched fairgrounds in one of the sightseeing buses, whooping it up and raising all kinds of hell. Whalen had even arranged for a police escort just out of mischief, and when the reporters egged him on, he gleefully returned to the days of his commissionership and blared the lead car’s siren repeatedly for them. It was a complete violation of World’s Fair rules, but he honestly didn’t care anymore.

  La Guardia, out of sympathy for his old friend, agreed to play the role of a haggard, hard-drinking journalist in an impromptu performance the two of them put on during a dinner at the Terrace Club.

  “Ho, hum!” the mayor began ad-libbing. “I wonder what that louse, Grover Whalen, is doing today? I gotta have a drink!”

  Guzzling a Scotch and soda, La Guardia got in a dig at Whalen’s nemesis. “Harvey D. Gibson.13 Who the hell is he? I asked Grover Whalen who he was, but Grover Whalen didn’t seem to know…. He’s the only man in public office who has been given sufficient notice before he is photographed to take a bath, have a face massage and get dressed up.”

  La Guardia and Whalen poked fun at the Fair, at the city itself, and at the treacly sentimentality of all this “super country” atmosphere. “‘Know your money,’”14 the mayor said in laughing reference to one of the films shown in the U.S. Federal Building auditorium. “This theme was dedicated to the bondholders of the World’s Fair!”

  They kept it up late into the night, drinking and laughing with the reporters at the wonderful spectacle of it all. Finally, after years of rebuke by the press, “Gardenia” Whalen had become one of the boys.

  The weather remained abysmal, and heavy rains continued to keep attendance to a minimum. In between the storms, a heat wave pushed temperatures up into the mid-nineties. It stayed that way for eight days, until a fresh wave of showers soaked everything down again. By now, it was blatantly obvious that the only rise in business the World’s Fair seemed to attract was from the war-torn countries and their native sons and daughters. Five thousand Polish Americans gathered again in the Court of Peace as a memorial to that nation’s World War I veterans. The same afternoon was also National American-Hungarian Day.

  The theme may have been “For Peace and Fr
eedom,” but if it weren’t for the war, the Fair wouldn’t be doing any business at all.

  Needing a new enemy, Robert Moses was now battling openly with Harvey Gibson in the press, stating that the Fair was “bankrupt and busted,15 and everyone knows it.” He accused Gibson of trying to save $750,000 for the bondholders by handing the site over to the government, but by the end of August, both the army and navy had turned down the idea of using the fairgrounds as a military encampment. Still, it didn’t stop Moses from threatening to “find out why the Fair16 can’t meet its obligations.”

  Desperate for cash, Gibson increased the fire sale of World’s Fair items to include limousines and horses, flags and uniforms. He economized further by firing everyone he could and replacing them with cheap labor, leaving in his wake a steady stream of disgruntled workers who wondered when their turn would come. The message it sent seemed antithetical to the Fair’s once-lofty purpose.

  “Honorable Mr. Gibson,”17 wrote Pablo Albortt, one of the disposed. “Tuesday the 13th I lost my job as porter at the American Jubilee. Myself and all other porters but three were suspended from the job and replaced with sanitation men…. Your Fair and your American Jubilee advocate freedom and peace. But how could there ever be freedom and peace … as long as we the negroes continue being discriminated in our own America the beautiful?”

  Albortt enclosed two photographs of himself taken at the Fair and asked Gibson to sign one and keep the other for himself. Gibson, through a secretary, responded that there was nothing he could do and returned both photos.

  By the end of the month, General Motors announced that Futurama, that glorious ride into the future, would not be preserved. Norman Bel Geddes’s grand vision for 1960 was just too big, too intricate and delicate, “constructed like a jigsaw puzzle.”18 Anyway, by that point, the future was no longer something to look forward to—except, perhaps, as a means to leapfrog over the next two decades, past a war that might conceivably last that long and into the bright vision of high-speed travel and the peaceful suburbia that awaited on the other side. As the Fair’s second season ground slowly to a finish, many people who had “seen the future” most likely decided they wanted no part of it.

  Only the bomb frenzy continued, nearly unabated. One week in August summed up the madness:

  On August 6,19 La Guardia watched as Lieutenant Pyke carefully opened a ticking black suitcase that had been found under a bench in the Long Island Rail Road station. This one had been immersed in oil as a precaution, and, as Joe Lynch had done, Pyke sliced it open with a pocketknife while the mayor stood not ten feet away. Inside, they found an alarm clock and some travel clothes.

  On August 9, six Bomb and Forgery Squad detectives scoured two freighters after a caller threatened that a bomb “might go off at any moment”20 on Pier 4 in Brooklyn.

  On August 10, they were back at the World’s Fair, where another suitcase had been found hidden in some bushes outside the Bell Telephone exhibit. Ignorant of the fact that water conducted electricity (and therefore might set off a bomb’s timing device), the exhibit’s director chucked it into a nearby pond just as its owner showed up to reclaim it.

  “Hey, fellows, that’s my bag,”21 said Arthur Elder, a teenager who had hitchhiked from Dallas for six days to get to see the Fair. “Gosh, my only shirt and pair of pants!”

  As recompense, Elder was given a free lunch and dinner and allowed to call his mother long-distance from the nearby exhibit at no charge (and with no one listening in).

  On August 14, a series of calls came in threatening that “another bomb22 will be placed in the World’s Fair today.” Shortly after, a package found in a subway station was investigated and turned out to contain nothing more than garbage.

  But the real scare occurred later that same afternoon when a “bomblike” piece of iron pipe was discovered in Rockefeller Center. Certain that it contained nitroglycerin, more than twenty detectives, firemen, and army explosives experts took it carefully to DeWitt Clinton Park over on deserted Eleventh Avenue, where they babysat it for more than seven hours while trying to decide what to do with the thing. The iron casing prevented both a fluoroscope examination and the motor-oil-disarming tactic.

  Commissioner Valentine finally stepped in and ordered that it be taken out to the Hudson River and dumped overboard. A reluctant procession of nervous officers carted it around on a feather pillow, took it aboard a police launch, and headed out for deep water. Two detectives, two firemen, and two of Pyke’s bravest stood on deck and wondered how far duty called for them to sail before they could drop the thing gently into the river. A second launch followed “to pick up survivors23 if the bomb exploded on its way to sea.”

  When the crew finally decided they’d gone far enough, the pipe was gingerly lowered into the water. By the time the boats returned, full of emotionally spent but joyously relieved men, they learned that the supposed bomb actually belonged to an air-conditioning company that had been making an installation that morning. They had just given a ceremonial and terrifying burial at sea for a dollar’s worth of mercury.

  The hunt for the World’s Fair bomber continued nonetheless. A suspect named Rudolph Klein, a restaurant worker at the Fair, was arrested and then released. Another mass was held for Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha, after which the Board of Estimate granted each of their widows an award of $3,200, the equivalent of one year’s salary. Up until that point, Easter Lynch had received only $550 from the Riot Relief Fund; Jennie Socha was given only $300 because she had no children to feed.

  In addition, each widow was awarded a pension of $1,600 a year for life, provided they never remarried.

  One by one, the other detectives and policemen who had been injured in the blast began to recover. On the last day of August, Detective Bill Federer finally returned to his home. He had spent the summer recuperating at Flushing Hospital, just a few miles from the fairgrounds. He was thirty-six years old and would spend the remainder of that year on crutches, but he was alive. Aside from the other injuries to his body—his left leg was still in a cast from his hip to his ankle eight weeks after nearly being blown to bits—he was haunted by two sounds: a constant ringing in his ears that came as a result of his concussion; and the recurring sound of a suitcase full of dynamite exploding.

  At night, unable to sleep, he didn’t know which sound was louder.

  * The breakdowns became so well reported that Alfred Hitchcock added a scene to his 1941 film Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in which Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery get stuck on the ride, in the rain, with the Trylon and Perisphere swaying behind them.

  The Administration Building, site of heated debates over the Fair’s finances (© Bill Cotter, worldsfairphotos.com)

  27

  WHALEN, GRAVISNAS, FORBINE, AND NOBILITY

  In October, as if getting in one final snub at the idea of a World’s Fair, a cold snap descended on the city and the temperature plummeted to near freezing for five straight days, setting a record low for that time of year. Nevertheless, perhaps finally sensing the Fair’s importance, the crowds began turning out en masse, not wanting to tell their children and grandchildren that they had missed out on the greatest show the world had ever seen. Gibson made sure that even lower bargain rates would compete with their curiosity and compel them to come. He needed every customer.

  Aside from all the buildings that needed to be pulled down, the problem arose as to what would happen to hundreds of foreign pavilion workers who no longer had homes to return to. In the final weeks, cooks, waiters, guards, and custodians gathered every day in cafeterias to bemoan their fates. Six Czechoslovakian employees and twenty Poles told reporters they would “forfeit their lives”1 if they were forced to return; and seventy-five Belgians, some of whom had wives and families who had not been heard from since the Nazi invasion, said they were driven “almost wild”2 over what to do next.

  The Fair was scheduled to close for good on October 27, and with two weeks to go, Mayor La Guardia made one final pitch
to his fellow New Yorkers to come out and see the show. “I can assure you3 that not in the lifetime of anyone living today will there be anything equal to the New York World’s Fair,” he said. “When you come here you will wonder why millions of other people in other parts of the world are suffering the horror of war…. You will leave here with the conviction that here in America we have accomplished something. We believe we have done a great public service in presenting the World’s Fair.”

  Tuesday, October 15, was declared “I Am an American Day” at the Fair. More than five thousand people gathered in the Court of Peace to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In an effort to attract a crowd of half a million visitors, Gibson had issued a special bargain ticket that sold for $1.00 and offered $6.37 worth of value, including admissions to many attractions previously omitted from such promotions. Ticket takers at the most popular paid exhibits “literally prayed for rain to relieve the congestion.”

  At four o’clock, their prayers were answered and the skies opened. Only about a quarter of the estimate showed up.

  Finally, on Closing Day, Gibson, Whalen, and the rest of the executives got what they had been looking for over the last two seasons: more than five hundred thousand showed up to bid farewell. To commemorate the occasion, Gibson had his paper badges reinstated, this time with “Goodbye, Folks!” printed on them. Paid attendance for the 1940 season reached 19,115,269, compared with 1939’s 25,817,265. In all, almost forty-five million had paid their way into the World’s Fair, far short of its goal and only six and a half million more than Chicago had attracted. But those who visited had witnessed a thing that, as La Guardia had stated, would not come again in their lifetimes, if ever.

  There was little vandalism, but a lot of souvenir hunting. Plants and flowers were the most popular targets, along with some street signs and even wastebaskets. Special police patrols at the gates made the pilferers give everything back, and at every exit huge mounds of debris piled up as the guilty were made to empty their pockets of whatever goodies they might be carrying.