by James Mauro
People scrawled their names along the base of George Washington’s statue and gazed up in silent reverence one last time at The Four Freedoms; made out of plaster, they were scheduled to be among the first items to come down beginning the next morning. For many, the sight of the Trylon and Perisphere was just too difficult to look at; few could believe such magnificent structures were slated for demolition. Men and women were seen wiping their eyes and shaking their heads at the very thought of it.
The official souvenir hawkers, who had been so busy and so eager on Opening Day, clamored to make their final sales pitches and were met with a fervor equal to that which had first greeted them on April 30, 1939. Special yellow-and-blue flannel pennants bearing the affirmation, “I Was There on Closing Day, October 27, 1940” were the most popular item. Thousands of visitors snatched them up for a dime.
At four o’clock, Grover Whalen made his final appearance in the Court of Peace. A “retreat parade” reversed its original route, exiting this time from the U.S. Federal Building and marching down Constitution Mall toward the Theme Center—more than seven hundred members of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps stepped bravely as twenty thousand gathered to watch.
Whalen, his voice catching, praised them all and began saying a few words about the Fair when the band surprised him by suddenly breaking into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” After that, he couldn’t continue. He retreated first to Perylon Hall, where a group of his “old guard” staffers was waiting to toast him. Later he attended a dinner at the Terrace Club, where five hundred of the original executive members were fighting off their gloom with wine and cocktails.
At six p.m., Futurama spun around on its tracks for one last go-round. The honor of the last ride went to Robert Murray, chief maintenance engineer, and his crew. After the final car had exited into the open square, Murray, visibly in tears, led his men back inside the exhibit on foot. Each of them began stuffing their pockets with cars, trees, bridges, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down. As the show at last went dark, they and a handful of GM executives headed for the nearest open bar and raised a glass to the new future, whatever that might be.
One final parade was scheduled for seven-ten in the Amusements Area. This one was meant to be a joyful, Mardi Gras–type celebration, sort of a funereal march that broke into song and dance in contrast with the gloomy event being celebrated. It never came off. The crowd in the midway was too big and had become somewhat unruly, many of whom were gleefully imbibing several of the one-dollar “Zombie” cocktails that were advertised as “one to a customer.” To make matters worse, concessionaires, overwhelmed finally at the masses, had run out of food sometime that afternoon. At nine o’clock, word came down that the parade had been canceled.
Inside the Perisphere, an invited group of tipsy guests made one last pass around Democracity, led by Whalen. As the lights came up for the final time, one of Grover’s friends drew a bottle out of his pocket, drained it, and leaned over the diorama’s protective railway. He cocked his arm as if to smash it into the center of Henry Dreyfuss’s utopian vision of America. Whalen, more than a bit tipsy himself at this point, threw his arms around him and held his buddy in a bear hug.
“Good old Grover,”4 his friend said, grinning. The two men looked at each other a moment, then embraced again and walked down the Helicline arm in arm, simultaneously giddy and despondent.
As if it had a mind of its own (and a sense of humor to match), the New York World’s Fair, a study in irony if ever there was one, declared for itself one final, victorious prank. On Opening Day, Albert Einstein had flicked a switch that blew out all the lights; at seven forty-five on Closing Day, a similar power failure5 struck the Great White Way, leaving most of it in darkness and stranding seven benches on the Parachute Jump in midair. The last of its passengers were eventually lowered by manual power, the workers slowly winching them back down to safety, and the ride was closed for good.
When the power came back on an hour later, the final Aquacade show began. Billy Rose stepped out into the spotlight and made a farewell speech. The man you should be thanking for all of this, he said, was Grover Whalen. He then led the audience in singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
Perhaps the most dramatic scene of the night, at least publicly, was the grand finale fireworks show at the Lagoon of Nations. It was dedicated, appropriately, to “The Spirit of George Washington,” and while the World’s Fair band played stirring patriotic melodies, the spectacle of fire, light, water, and aerial bombs played itself out in front of fifty thousand viewers. As if that weren’t enough to stir emotions, searchlights swept the sky overhead and then came to rest on the foreign pavilions in the Court of Peace.
The imagery was not lost, especially on those who had family in war-torn Europe, for whom searchlights and night skies held an entirely different meaning. And when the lights settled down to illuminate the British Pavilion—and beyond that Italy, and beyond that Poland; then swept right to flood the space where the USSR had stood, and next to her Czechoslovakia, and next to her Japan; then came full circle to Belgium and France—a hush fell over the crowd. Captain Eugene La Barre lifted his baton, and the band filled in the silence with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
When the music ended, the people, as if on cue, began wandering slowly toward the exits.
At the stroke of midnight, a lone bugler was supposed to play “Taps” from the top of the Helicline, signaling the formal closing of the Fair, but this too was thrown off schedule. By eleven p.m., with most of the exhibits already closed and the crowds streaming out (it was Sunday, after all, and tomorrow was just another workday), he stood, alone and without much of an audience, and played a final, if early, tribute.
It was over.
There were two men who had some final words to say. One was Dave Driscoll, a radio announcer for WOR who was known for his comic ability to speak in gibberish. From the dais at the Court of Peace, now almost empty, he addressed his microphone:
“In this vast amphitheater millions from all the Americas and from all corners of the world have heard addresses by statesmen, Whalen, gravisnas, McAneny, cabishon, Gibson, forbine, and nobility. Here was the pledge of peace which might well have been the fiederness, bedistran, and grodle of this great exposition. Now that pledge is forgotten. Sleedment, twaint, and broint furbish the doldrum all over the world. Alas!”
In short, he had inadvertently summed up the great folly that was the New York World’s Fair with language as florid and incomprehensible as the Fair’s original intent had been. Behind its beauty, there was a message that had somehow been missed, something of immense importance that no real words could capture. “Have you caught6 the magnificence of it all?” Whalen had asked a reporter exactly one year before Opening Day. When the newsman responded that, well, no, he hadn’t, not quite yet, Whalen nodded. “Of course. Of course. It’s too big. It takes time to grasp.”
No one could understand it all, really. As he had once noted, in a way it was all too grand an undertaking.
The second set of last words came from Grover Whalen himself. In the late afternoon on the last day, after a “spirited” final lunch at Perylon Hall, he looked out the windows from atop the Hall of Pharmacy at the grand, skyward-reaching Trylon—the finite; and the endless, floating globe of the Perisphere—the infinite; and he spoke with great emotion of that which he had built.
Whalen was thinking of the day, eighteen months ago, when the lights first came on. “It was a crossword puzzle7 on paper up to that moment,” he said, lifting his glass and gesturing out toward the fairgrounds below. “Then the lagoons caught fire and the buildings glowed in color and the trees were lighted with that mercury vapor.
“We dreamed dreams,” he said, misty-eyed, “and the dreams all came true. We stimulated the world. We did our best to prove that nations can live in peace and freedom.”
His eyes came to rest again on the Trylon and Perisphere, still bright in the October sun.
“I
think we’re stopping at the right time,” he said. “But I’ve cried more than once, just thinking of it.”
After the Fair, Flushing Meadows sat once again as a vast wasteland, lacking the funds to build Robert Moses’s “Versailles of America.” (© Bill Cotter, worldsfairphotos.com)
Epilogue
ASHES TO ASHES
In the end,1 it was a banker’s Fair after all, and the numbers crunching went on for quite some time after the gates were closed for good. Although attendance for the second season was approximately 73 percent of the first—nineteen million as compared with twenty-six million (in round figures)—paid admission revenue in 1940 was only about half that of 1939. So on the one hand, Harvey Gibson’s discounts might have cost the Fair about $2.5 million; then again, it’s possible that many fewer people might have shown up if the price hadn’t been dropped.
Several key facts are worth noting, however.
First, despite Gibson’s insistence on promoting the concessionaires’ need for business, the Fair grossed $500,000 less from these sources under his tenure than when Grover Whalen was in charge, despite the fact that the Fair took a much higher percentage of their profits in 1940.
Second, expenses for Fair-owned operations nearly doubled the second year, owing to such unprofitable new enterprises as the “American Jubilee” and “Streets of Paris” shows. And because of all the layoffs, the Fair eventually spent considerable sums of money for more expensive contract work that had previously been done by Fair employees.
Finally, since the comparison to Chicago’s Fair was always on everyone’s mind, the simple fact was that A Century of Progress had drawn twenty-two million visitors in 1933 and sixteen million—or exactly 73 percent—in 1934, Elmer or no Elmer.
But whatever the cause, the bottom line was undeniable: From its date of incorporation in 1935 to December 31, 1940, the World’s Fair took in around $48 million and spent around $67 million—not including the foreign pavilions and corporate exhibits, which were paid for by their sponsors—a deficit of $19 million. Which meant that the bondholders were paid back an average of about forty cents on the dollar when all was said and done.
Both Gibson and Whalen agreed on one thing, however. Most of the investors were “very happy in their experience2 with the New York World’s Fair,” Gibson stated.
“The bonds,3 which paid forty-eight cents on the dollar,” Whalen said, inflating the figures a bit, “were bought by companies that participated in the Fair. Those companies were more than repaid for their investment.”
The city itself couldn’t4 make up its mind about the Fair’s overall benefit to business. The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau estimated that seven million out-of-towners traveled to the Fair over both seasons, spending around $40 each. Meaning the anticipated $1 billion in new business actually turned out to be only $280 million, still an impressive sum. Theater, nightclub, and restaurant owners weren’t quite so thrilled, however, and griped that the competition had robbed them of customers. You just couldn’t make everyone happy.
Least of all Robert Moses. In the first weeks after the Fair had closed, he enjoyed going out to the site and watching the wrecking crews do their work. In fact, he seemed almost as happy as he had been when they were clearing out the ash dumps four years earlier. One bright winter afternoon5 in 1940, strolling around the midway and still laying out park plans in his head, he spotted a concession booth where customers had once tossed baseballs at crockery, three for a nickel. Moses looked around, thought no one was watching, then scooped up an armful of rocks and smashed every last row.
He walked away grinning like a mischievous kid.
But that was before the New York World’s Fair Corporation defaulted on its $4 million promise for Flushing Meadows Park. After scaling down his plans significantly, he settled on a few baseball diamonds and bicycle paths and laid out a football field where Futurama once stood. He did, however, finally manage to build his skating rink in the New York City Building; after the war was over, the building became temporary housing for the United Nations until the permanent structure was built along the East River in Manhattan. Then it returned as a skating rink again.
Moses, now disgusted with the whole affair, rarely visited the park. The sight of it left a bad taste in his mouth that would linger for two decades—until 1960, that magical year once envisioned by Futurama, when the prospect of another World’s Fair arose and Robert Moses, as its president, set out to fulfill his great dream all over again.
As General Motors had announced, most of Futurama was destroyed, although a few sections of the diorama were preserved and displayed for a while at Rockefeller Center’s New York Museum of Science and Industry. But because there was no simulated flight mechanism to whisk viewers over its peaks and valleys, visitors who simply stood and gaped at the now stationary highway system tried hard to remember what all the fuss was about.
Various parts of the Fair6 wound up all over the place. For several decades, visitors to the Bronx Zoo could still hear “The Sidewalks of New York” being tooted by the blue-and-orange tractor trains, and the sight and sound of them flooded former fairgoers with long-forgotten memories. Sixty of the American Express sightseeing chairs were bought by a resort in Long Beach, Long Island, for transportation along its boardwalk. The Parachute Jump was carefully dismantled and reassembled on the beach at Coney Island, where it continued to lift and drop (and occasionally strand) terrified passengers for years.*
Some of it just wound up in the garbage. In 1943, a reporter7 strolling along the junk shops of Lafayette Street noticed a large electrical device sitting on top of a scrap heap. He bent down to read the inscription: “Control Board, Fountain Fireworks, Lagoon of Nations.”
But of course a lot of the wreckage, as Gibson had predicted and Whalen had feared, wound up in the service of war. The decorative Greyhound buses that had once shuttled future-fixated passengers around the World of Tomorrow were soon carrying draftees away from their hometowns and off to distant army camps. Lumber, electrical equipment, and plumbing fixtures were transported for use in army and navy stations up and down the East Coast. And after it had been stripped of its gypsum covering, the four thousand tons of steel that had gone into the construction of the Trylon and Perisphere went into the making of ships, shell casings, gun forgings, and the like.
In the end, the World’s Fair would yield forty thousand tons of salvageable steel; almost all of it would go toward the war effort.
On December 7, 1941, listeners who tuned in to the CBS radio broadcast of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor heard a familiar voice: that of H. V. Kaltenborn, narrator of Democracity, telling them that America was now at war. Throughout the conflict, he would become one of its most famous commentators.
On April 15, 1941, Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, presided at a ceremony held at City Hall to honor the detectives who were killed and wounded in the Fourth of July bombing. Expressing his government’s “profound thanks8 and deep respect,” he presented Easter Lynch and Jennie Socha with an engraved silver plate.
“In the name of9 His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, I here salute the honored memory of those gallant officers who gave their lives in the public cause,” the ambassador said.
Mayor La Guardia, in a statement that left no doubt as to who he thought was responsible, said, “The perpetrator of that crime,10 the maker of that bomb, the one who placed it there, must have enjoyed it in the same state of mind as the head of a government invading a defenseless Denmark.”
Furious at what she considered to be a meaningless gesture, Easter wrote to the queen and told her what she could do with her “kitchen utensil.” She never remarried.
In the wake of the explosion, Lieutenant James Pyke issued a report detailing better procedures for the handling and investigations of bombs. Subsequently, the La Guardia–Pyke Bomb Carrier was developed—a vehicle designed “to take a bomb from11 a congested area to a remote or suburban district and to
do so in a manner that will protect the public and the police. In this way it will eliminate the risk that occurred at the World’s Fair where an attempt was made to defuse the bomb in place….”
Pyke’s innovations, brought about by the heroics of Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha, led to countless improvements in the practice of defusing bombs, saving untold lives in the process.
On the ten-year anniversary of the explosion, Chief of Detectives William Whalen (no relation to Grover) reported that he was still working on the case, that the reward was still in effect, and that his file was “bulging with reports from every corner of the world.”
No further arrests were ever made, and the case remains unsolved. On the Fourth of July 1964, a requiem mass was held for Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha in the Vatican Pavilion of the new New York World’s Fair. Detective Philip Walsh, who had been a Police Academy classmate of Joe’s, stood solemnly in attendance as a plaque was lowered into the ground just outside the New York City Pavilion.
THIS PLAQUE IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF DETECTIVES JOSEPH J. LYNCH AND FERDINAND A. SOCHA, BOMB AND FORGERY SQUAD, WHO WERE KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY WHILE EXAMINING A TIME BOMB TAKEN FROM THE BRITISH PAVILION OF THE WORLD’S FAIR IN FLUSHING MEADOW PARK AT 4:45 P.M. ON JULY 4TH, 1940.
The plaque is still there today. The reward, upped to $26,000, remains in effect.
Because he’d been named a security risk, Albert Einstein was never asked to contribute to the Manhattan Project. In December 1941, shortly after it had been created, one of the project’s directors, Vannevar Bush, did ask his advice regarding the separation of isotopes. Einstein happily complied and handwrote a solution to the problem for Frank Aydelotte, the new head of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
