A Fair to Remember

“I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE,” proclaims a pin in the permanent collection of the Queens Museum, designed by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors’ Futurama Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair. At once endearing and eerie, the hubris of this tiny item evokes a colossal irony—especially in these grim times—a feeling heightened downstairs in A Billion Dollar Dream, an exhibition about the subsequent 1964 World’s Fair that offers a critical reinterpretation of the event and its checkered legacy. Eschewing (for the most part) MCM nostalgia, the collection of pamphlets, photographs, maps, and souvenirs is divided into five sections: Gender, Labor, Car Culture, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and “Peace Through Understanding.” The last was the fair’s official theme, symbolized by the Unisphere outside. Before descending the museum’s spiral staircase to the exhibition, I was greeted by the disembodied voice of Robert Moses, proclaiming his intent to bring visitors “together in our shrinking globe.” The nearby introductory text refutes Moses’s myopic ambition, explaining that this techno-utopian mindset “served to oppress, objectify, and marginalize wide swaths of the American population.”

A corner of the room dedicated to CORE makes this criticism boldest. Denouncing the use of city funds to build what was essentially an amusement park rather than aid disenfranchised communities, the Bronx and Brooklyn chapters planned a “stall-in,” calling for 500 drivers to block the entrance by idling their cars, an apt gesture of defiance. Demands included integrating the workforce, nondiscriminatory housing, desegregated schools, and an end to police brutality. Their message was clear: The fair did not, in fact, beget peace through understanding. Rather, it obfuscated the harm of Moses’s projects, dismissing the civil rights, women’s, and environmentalist movements in the process. The stall-in stalled (thanks to a convenient new law making it illegal to deliberately run out of gas on NYC highways), but picketers showed up nonetheless, leading to more than 200 arrests by a brigade of 3,000 Pinkertons who were deputized to act as World’s Fair policemen.

“It’s A Small World” tinkles in the background, accompanying projected footage of Walt Disney’s animatronic doll–filled boat ride of the same name, which debuted at the fair courtesy of Pepsi-Cola. At both New York expos, scale models were a major attraction. For the 1939 Futurama Pavilion, the tomorrow called forth by Geddes’s pin was displayed as a Lilliputian prototype—the nearly treeless, automobile-centric “world of 1960.” When the fair returned, Moses commissioned Geddes associate Raymond Lester to build his own small, small world, the Panorama of the City of New York, which remains the Queens Museum’s centerpiece. Revisiting this miniature version of my city reinforced the conviction that the complexity and fragility of life can’t be shrunk to a simple map, no matter how enthralling it may be. Any future advancing the vision of CORE over the vision of Disney must start with this fact. During the picket, protesters held a sign with a proclamation that seemed to answer Geddes: “A WORLD’S FAIR IS A LUXURY BUT A FAIR WORLD IS A NECESSITY.”