1939 New York World's Fair

"1939 World's Fair" redirects here. The term can also refer to the Golden Gate International Exposition, which was held in San Francisco/Oakland at the same time as the New York fair.

Trylon, Perisphere and Helicline photo by Sam Gottscho

The 1939–40 New York World's Fair, which covered the 1,216 acres (4.92 km²) of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (also the location of the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair) , was the second largest American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people attended its exhibits in two seasons. The NYWF of 1939–1940 was the first exposition to be based on the future, with an opening slogan of "Dawn of a New Day", and it allowed all visitors to take a look at "the world of tomorrow". According to the official New York World's Fair pamphlet,

"The eyes of the Fair are on the future — not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines. To its visitors the Fair will say: "Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made. They are all interesting and much effort has been expended to lay them before you in an interesting way. Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future.'"

Planning

Trylon and Perisphere on US stamp from 1939.

In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, a group of New York City retired policemen decided to create an international exposition to lift the city and the country out of depression. Not long after, these men formed the New York World's Fair Corporation, whose office was placed on one of the higher floors in the Empire State Building. The NYWFC elected former chief of police Grover Whalen as the president of their committee. The whole committee consisted of Winthrop Aldrich, Mortimer Buckner, Floyd Carlisle, Ashley T. Cole, John J. Dunnigan, Harvey Dow Gibson, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Percy S. Straus, and many other business leaders.

Over the next four years, the committee planned, built, and organized the fair and its exhibits, with countries around the world taking part in creating the biggest international event since World War I. Working closely with the Fair's committee was Robert Moses, New York City Parks Commissioner, who saw great value to the City in having the World's Fair Corporation (at its expense) remove a vast ash dump in Queens that was to be the site for the exposition, and turn the area into a City park after the exposition closed.

Edward Bernays directed public relations of the fair in 1939, which he called 'democricity'.^[1] Grover Whalen, a public relations innovator, saw the Fair as an opportunity for corporations to present consumer products, rather than as an exercise in presenting science and the scientific way of thinking in its own right, as Harold Urey, Albert Einstein and other scientists wished to see the project.^[2] "As events transpired," reported Carl Sagan,^[3] whose own interest in science was nevertheless sparked by the Fair's gadgetry, "almost no real science was tacked on to the Fair's exhibits, despite the scientists' protests and their appeals to high principles."

Promotion of this great event took many forms. In 1938, the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, and New York Yankees baseball teams did their part to promote the upcoming fair by wearing patches on their jerseys featuring the Trylon, Perisphere, and "1939" on their left sleeve. Howard Hughes flew a special World's Fair flight around the world to promote the fair in 1938.

While the main purpose of the fair was to lift the spirits of the United States and drive much-needed business to New York City, it was also felt that there should be a cultural or historical association. It was therefore decided that the fair opening would correspond to the 150th anniversary of George Washington's first inauguration as President of the United States.

The Fair's two seasons

Grand opening

On April 30, 1939, a very hot Sunday, the fair had its grand opening, with 206,000 people in attendance. The April 30 date coincided with the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration as President in New York City. Although many of the pavilions and other facilities were not quite ready for this opening, it was put on with pomp and great celebration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the opening day address, and as a reflection of the wide range of technological innovation on parade at the fair, his speech was not only broadcast over the various radio networks but also was televised. NBC used the event to inaugurate regularly scheduled television broadcasts in New York City over their station W2XBS (now WNBC). An estimated 1,000 people viewed the Roosevelt telecast from about 200 television sets scattered throughout the New York area. In addition to Roosevelt's speech, Albert Einstein gave a speech which discussed cosmic rays. This was followed by the ceremonial lighting of the fair's lights. Dignitaries received a special Opening Day Program which contained their names written in Braille.

Exhibits

The Milkmaid, by Johannes Vermeer, ca. 1658

The PRR S1 on display at the fair. This engine ran continuously at 60 MPH (on a dynamometer) while the Fair was open.

One of the first exhibits to receive attention was the Westinghouse Time Capsule, which was not to be opened for 5,000 years, not until 6939 AD. The time capsule was a tube containing writings by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, copies of Life Magazine, a Mickey Mouse watch, a Gillette Safety Razor, a kewpie doll, a dollar in change, a pack of Camel cigarettes, millions of pages of text on microfilm, and much more. The capsule also contained seeds of foods in common use at the time: (wheat, corn, oats, tobacco, cotton, flax, rice, soy beans, alfalfa, sugar beets, carrots and barley, all sealed in glass tubes). The time capsule is located at 40°44′34.089″N 73°50′43.842″W / 40.7428025°N 73.84551167°W / 40.7428025; -73.84551167, at a depth of 50 feet (15 m). A small stone plaque marks the position.^[4]

Other exhibits included Vermeer's painting The Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,^[5] a streamlined pencil sharpener, a diner (still in operation as the White Mana in Jersey City, New Jersey), a futuristic car based city by GM and early televisions. There was also a huge globe/planetarium located near the center of the fair. Bell Labs' Voder, a keyboard-operated speech synthesizer, was demonstrated at the Fair.

British Pavilion photo by Sam Gottscho

The copy of Magna Carta belonging to Lincoln Cathedral also left Britain in 1939 for the first time to be in the British Pavilion at the fair. Within months Britain joined World War II and it was deemed safer for it to remain in America until the end of hostilities. It therefore remained in Fort Knox, next to the original copy of the American constitution, until 1947.

Other firsts at the Fair included color photography, nylon, air conditioning, the View-Master, and Smell-O-Vision.

The fair was also the occasion for the 1st World Science Fiction Convention, subsequently dubbed Nycon 1.

USSR Pavilion at night, photo by Sam Gottscho

Exhibition in the USSR Pavilion included the life-size copy of the interior of Mayakovskaya station of the Moscow Metro. Designer of the station, Alexey Dushkin, was awarded Grand Prize of the 1939 New York World's Fair.^[6]

On July 4, 1940 the fair hosted "Superman Day." Notable was the crowning of the "superboy and supergirl" of the day, and a public appearance by Superman, played by actor Ray Middleton, the first time any had played the role.

The Jewish Palestine Pavilion introduced the world to the concept of a modern Jewish state, which a decade later would become Israel. The pavilion featured on its façade a monumental hammered copper relief sculpture entitled The Scholar, The Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil by the noted Art Deco sculptor Maurice Ascalon.

Souvenir booklet

Although the United States would not enter the Second World War until the end of 1941, the fairgrounds served as a window into the troubles overseas. The pavilions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example, did not reopen for the 1940 season. Also on 4 July that same year, two New York City Police Department officers were killed by a blast while investigating a time bomb left at the British Pavilion.^[7]

Frank Buck exhibited his “Frank Buck’s Jungleland,” which displayed rare birds, reptiles and wild animals along with Jiggs, a five-year-old trained orangutan. In addition, Buck provided a trio of performing elephants, an 80-foot (24 m) “monkey mountain” with 600 monkeys, and an attraction that had been popular at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair: camel rides.^[8]

Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his work for harp and string orchestra Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus on commission from the World's Fair. The first performance was at Carnegie Hall in June 1939, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.^[9]

Themes and zones

The Fair was themed. It was divided into different "zones" (the Transportation Zone, the Communications and Business Systems Zone, the Food Zone, the Government Zone, and so forth). Virtually every structure erected on the fairgrounds was extraordinary (in a literal sense: "out of the ordinary"), and many of them were experimental in many ways. Architects were encouraged by their corporate or government sponsors to be creative, energetic, and innovative. Novel building designs, materials, and furnishings were the norm.

Many of the zones were arranged in a semi-circular pattern centered on the "Theme Center". The zones were distinguished by many color cues, including different wall colors and tints and differently colored lighting.

The "Theme Center" consisted of two all-white, landmark monumental buildings named the Trylon (over 700 feet (210 m) tall) and the Perisphere which one entered by moving stairway and exited via a grand curved walkway named the Helicline. Inside the Perisphere was a model city of tomorrow that visitors viewed from a moving walkway high above the floor level. The Theme Center was designed by the architect Wallace Harrison and his associate Max Abramovitz.

The colors blue and orange were chosen as the official colors of the fair, as they were the colors of New York City, and featured prominently. Only the Trylon and Perisphere were all white; avenues stretching out into the zones from the Theme Center were designed with rich colors that changed the further one walked from the center of the grounds. For example, the exhibits and other facilities along the Avenue of Pioneers were in a progression of blues, starting with pale tints and ending in deep ultramarine. At night, with the latest in lighting technology switched on, the effect was felt by many visitors to be a "magical" experience. (Outdoor public lighting was at the time of a very limited and pedestrian nature, perhaps consisting of simple incandescent pole lamps in a city and nothing in the country. Electrification was still very new and had not reached everywhere in the US. The Fair was the first public demonstration of several lighting technologies that would become common in future decades.)

These technologies included the introduction of the first fluorescent light and fixture. General Electric Corporation held the patent to the fluorescent light bulb at the time and approximately a year later, the original three major corporations, Lightolier, Artcraft Fluorescent Lighting Corporation, and Globe Lighting located mostly in the New York City region, began wide-scale manufacturing in the United States of the fluorescent light fixture, making fluorescent lighting possible and commonplace in most industrial, office, retail, and residential settings around the nation and the world in years to come.

Another theme of the fair was the middle class. The fair focused on the emerging new middle class represented by the Middleton Family --- Bud, Babs and their two children appeared in ads showing them taking in the sights of the fair and the new products being manufactured to make life easier and affordable, such as the new automatic dishwasher and Elecktro, a 7-foot-tall (2.1 m) walking, talking robot.^{[citation needed]}

Each day at the fair was a theme day. For example, May 18, 1939 was "Asbury Park, New Jersey Day". For each special day, a special button was issued. Some of these buttons are very rare today and all are very collectible.

In 1940, the theme of the fair changed to "For Peace and Freedom" as the War in Europe escalated. One poster from that year's fair, issued by Borden's Milk had Elsie the Cow proclaiming "makes you proud to be an American".

Transportation Zone

Ford pavilion

With its vast area and prominent location just south of the Theme Center, the Transportation Zone pavilions attracted widespread attention. Perhaps the most popular of the Transportation Zone pavilions was the one built for General Motors. There the 36,000 square foot (3,300 m²) Futurama exhibit, designed by famed industrial designer and theater set designer Norman Bel Geddes, transported fair visitors over a huge diorama of a section of the United States that was designed with a stunning array of miniature highways, towns, 500,000 individually designed homes, 50,000 miniature vehicles, waterways, and a million miniature trees of diverse species. These elements of the diorama gradually became larger as the visitors (who were seated in moving chairs overhead) moved through the exhibit, until the cars and other elements of the exhibit became life-size.

(video) Views of the "World of Tomorrow."

At the conclusion of the ride the visitors to the pavilion exited into an area that was constructed as a life-size city intersection with multi-story buildings and stores on all sides. The stores included an auto dealership and an appliance store where visitors could see the latest GM and Frigidaire products. As with almost all pavilions in the fair, these showcases were not only intended to get people to buy the sponsor's products, they were also intended to educate and inform the populace about basic materials and processes that were then very new and not well known. Many experimental product concepts and new materials were shown that were not currently available for purchase, but would become available in various ways over the next few years. In many ways the fair pavilions more resembled a modern-day government-sponsored science fair exhibit or a Discovery Channel program than they would resemble modern corporate advertising and sales promotions.

Adjacent to the GM pavilion was the Ford Pavilion, where race car drivers drove on a figure eight track on the building's roof endlessly, day in and day out. Not far from GM and Ford was the Chrysler exhibit group, where an audience in a theater with air conditioning, then a new technology, could watch a Plymouth being assembled right before their very eyes. (GM had used this same premise at the Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago a few years earlier. A visitor could go to the fair and buy his new GM in the morning, watch it being assembled, and drive it home that night.)

Railroads were a major form of transportation for both passengers and freight in 1939, as airlines are for passengers today in the United States. Many visitors to the fair would have arrived in New York by railroad, and most visitors had at least a moderate interest in the area. The centerpiece of the Railroad Conference exhibits (on seventeen acres) was "Railroads on Parade," a spectacular live drama re-enacting the birth and growth of railroads. In addition to the show, there were important historical objects on display by the various railroads and manufacturing companies, such as the Tom Thumb engine. The Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) had their S1 engine on display. This engine was mounted on rollers under the driver wheels, and ran continuously at 60 mph (97 km/h) all day long. The British London Midland & Scottish Railway sent their Coronation Scot express train with a locomotive LMS Princess Coronation Class 6229 Duchess of Hamilton, (disguised as sister locomotive 6220 Coronation), to the fair.^[10][11] GMs Electro-Motive Division had a Display of their then new streamlined Diesel-Electric passenger locomotives.

World's Fair exhibit Duchess of Hamilton, now preserved in York, England

Maurice Ascalon's "The Scholar, The Laborer, and The Toiler of the Soil" copper relief sculpture adorned the facade of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion of the 1939 New York World's Fair.

A visitor walking to the left of the Theme Center on the Avenue of Patriots would visit the Communications and Business Systems focal exhibits. At the AT&T Pavilion the Voder, a mechanized, synthetic voice, spoke to fairgoers, foretelling the widespread use of electronic voices decades later. (The Voder itself would be used in part of one of the most secret voice communications systems of World War II between Washington and London only a year or two after at it appeared at the fair.)

At the IBM pavilion, electric typewriters, and a fantastic machine called the electric calculator that used punched cards, were on display. IBM also had a fine art gallery with hundreds of artworks from 70 countries around the world. The exhibit for Firestone Tires featured the famous pygmy hippo, Billy, who had been a pet of U.S. President Calvin Coolidge.

Next door to these business exhibits was the "Masterpieces of Art" building housing 300 priceless works of the Old Masters, from the Middle Ages to 1800. This was no sideshow; thirty five galleries featured great works from DaVinci and Michelangelo to Rembrandt, from Hals to Caravaggio and Bellini. Whalen and his team were able to borrow priceless paintings and sculptures from Europe and hang them in a graceful, understated building in Queens for two years.

Food Zone

Continuing outward from the Theme Center one saw the Food Zone. Among the many unique exhibits was the Borden's exhibit, that featured 150 pedigreed cows (including the original Elsie) on a "Rotolactor" that allowed bathing them, drying them, and milking them in a highly mechanized way. While no such complete system has ever become common in milk production, many of its features are in everyday use in today's rotary milking parlors.

Next door was the Continental Baking exhibit, presenting a vast, continuous process of baking breads and other products. Consistent with the representative design sense of the Fair, this building was fashioned in the shape of a huge packaged bread loaf, white with red, yellow, and blue balloons on its curved facade. People today will recognize this as the packaging for Wonder Bread. Behind the exhibit was a bona fide wheat field from which wheat was harvested and used in the baking process. There was a sign in the field that noted that this was the first time in over 100 years that wheat had been grown within the incorporated bounds of New York City.

The sixty foreign governments that participated in this fair contributed a wide diversity of creatively designed pavilions housing a stunning array of cultural offerings to fairgoers. The Italian pavilion attempted to fuse ancient Roman splendor with modern styles, and a 200-foot (61 m) high water fall defined the pavilion's facade. Its popular restaurant was designed in the shape of the nation's luxury cruise line ships. The French pavilion, on the Court of Peace that was the grand open space northeast of the Theme Center, ran such a celebrated restaurant that after the fair closed and World War II ended, the restaurant remained in New York City – and soon established itself (as Le Pavilion) as one of the finest French dining establishments in the city.

Life Saver Parachute Jump photo by Sam Gottscho

Beyond the corporate and government zones, the wildly popular but less uplifting Amusements Area was not integrated into the thematic matrix, and was a mere Area rather than a Zone. Despite the high-minded educational tone that Grover Whalen attempted to set, the "Amusements Area" was the most popular part of the Fair and included roller coaster, the Life Savers parachute jump (which was later moved to Coney Island where it still stands), and carnival acts such as a collection of performing midgets. A number of the shows provided spectators with the opportunity of viewing women in very revealing costumes (for all intents and purposes topless) for instance the Frozen Alive Girl, the Dream of Venus Building, and the Living Pictures. While there were a number of protests by prominent politicians over the course of the fair about the "low minded entertainment", and the New York Vice Squad raided shows in the area on several occasions, the public generally accepted this form of entertainment. The Billy Rose Aquacade, was a spectacular musical and water extravagnaza, foreshadowing the form of many popular Hollywood musicals in the ensuing years. The Aquacade facility itself served as an entertainment venue in the park for many years and was finally demolished in 1996.

Lama Temple girlie show

The Bendix Lama Temple was a replica of the 1771 Potala in Jehol, Manchuria brought back by the explorer Vincent Bendix.^[12]

The Temple contained a girlie show. The 19-year-old barker Herbert I. Taffae delivered the following spiel at the 1939/1940 World’s Fair and repeated for recording in 2007. Mr. Taffae went on to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942–1945.

It might sound strange and a trifle incongruous having lovely girls in front of the million dollar temple of Jehol whose gold leaf roof you can see over the top of this façade, but the fact is that we have a girlie show in here and a good one.

The author of the book, Forbidden Tibet, Horizon Hunters and technical advisor of the picture, Lost Horizon, he doesn’t want his good name associated with this scandalous enterprise as brought back from the land of the lost horizon, those Terpsichordion aphrodisiacs, the love temptation dancers from the lamaseries of Tibet. A lama is a Buddhist priest and as such he must remain celibate. He must be deaf to the calls of the flesh, immune to the pangs of passion, and adverse to the charms of beautiful women. In other words he must not marry or anything.

Once each year he is given a test. The questions of which are the unquestionable figures of questionable young ladies, courtesans brought from the outside world to corrupt the young lama and seduce him from his holy way of life.

Now ladies, this show has been approved by Good Housekeeping, but in case a stray moron seeking a racy spicy girl show is in this otherwise obviously intellectual audience, he too can go in there and not know the difference, but you, you lovers of art will surely recognize this show to be the apogee of oriental choreography.

The whole thing rises to a climax when Sasha and her hilarious horde of vivacious vestal virgins unite in that unclad climax, that orgiastic ecstasy at the tail end of our performance, the passion dance of love. It’s terrific. Now once inside sit down as long as you like and admire the bare beautiful temple but those beautiful bare forms and they I say are not too formal. Go on right away. This being the first show of the afternoon I am going to cut the price of admission in half.

Everybody goes.

Oral interview with Herbert Taffaee, October 2007, Albuquerque, NM^{[citation needed]}

Aquacade

The Aquacade was put on in a special amphitheater seating 10,000 people and included an orchestra to accompany the synchronized spectacular swim show. It featured Johnny Weismuller and Eleanor Holm, two of the most celebrated swimmers of the era, and dazzled fairgoers with its lighting and cascades and curtains of water, pumped in waterfalls at 8,000 gallons a minute. The cost of admission: eighty cents.

Transportation

A special subway line, the IND World's Fair Railroad, was built to serve the fair. World's Fair (now Mets–Willets Point) station on the IRT Flushing Line was rebuilt to handle fair traffic on the IRT and BMT. A Long Island Rail Road station (now Mets–Willets Point) was built next to the Flushing Line station. The IND line extension departed the Queens Boulevard line east of the 75th Avenue Station and before the Union Turnpike station. The World's Fair station was at the east side of the Meadowlands at Horace Harding Boulevard. The period system route map and Fair maps display this temporary extension.^[13][14] The World's Fair station was an alternate terminus of the E train, and ran at ground level, separated from the Fair grounds by a fence, past the Jamaica Yard (which is still in use).

Closure

The fair was open for two seasons, from April to October each year, and was officially closed forever on October 27, 1940. To get the Fair's budget overruns under control before the 1940 season and augment gate revenues, the fair management in the second year replaced Whalen with a banker, Harvey Gibson, and placed much greater emphasis on the amusement features, and less on the educational and uplifting exhibits. The great fair attracted over 45 million visitors and generated roughly $48 million in revenue. Since the Fair Corporation had invested 67 million dollars (in addition to nearly a hundred million dollars from other sources), it was a financial failure, and the corporation declared bankruptcy.

Countries under the thumb of the Axis powers in Europe, e.g., Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France, ran their pavilions in 1940 with a special nationalistic pride. The only major world power that did not participate for the 1939 season was Germany, citing budget pressures; the Soviet Pavilion was dismantled after the first season, leaving an empty lot called "The American Commons". When the fair closed, many among the European staff were unable to return to their home countries, so they remained in America and in some cases exercised a tremendous influence on American culture. For example, Henri Soulé moved from the French Pavilion at the fair to open Le Pavillon, taking Pierre Franey along as head chef.^[15][16]

World War II presented additional problems with what to do with the exhibits on display in the pavilions of countries under Axis occupation. In the case of the Polish Pavilion, most of the items were sold by the Polish Government in exile in London to the Polish Museum of America and shipped to Chicago. A notable exception was made for a monument of the Polish-Lithuanian King Jagiełło to which Mayor Fiorello La Guardia took such a liking that he helped spearhead a campaign to have it installed in Central Park, where it still stands to this day.^[17]

Another building which was saved was the Belgian Building. It was awarded to Virginia Union University in Richmond, Va., in 1940 and shipped to Richmond in 1941. The school still uses the building for its home basketball games.

Influence on later literature and popular culture

The 1939 World's Fair made a strong impression on attendees and influenced a generation of Americans. In the film, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) a comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Carole Lombard and Gene Raymond visit the fair after a dinner date and find themselves stuck high in the air on the fair's popular parachute ride when it malfunctions. In the Charlie Chan film Murder Over New York, there is a reference to the World's Fair. E.B. White recounts a visit to the fair in his 1939 essay "The World of Tomorrow."

Later generations have attempted to recapture the impression it made in fictional and artistic treatments, sometimes seriously, as in 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, a mixed non-fiction and fictional book by David Gelernter, or World's Fair, by E. L. Doctorow, but often with ironic intent, notably in Matt Groening's show Futurama which was named after the GM exhibit. The first episode has a cryogenicist say, "Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!":

• Doc Savage, the most popular character of the Pulp Era and an adventure series based on scientific detection, was seen as a perfect match for the Fair's "world of the future" concept and hence tapped by the World's Fair President Grover Whalen to do a Grand Opening cross promotion with publishing house Street & Smith. The still under-construction Fair appeared in the finale of The Giggling Ghosts (1938), and then was the focus of the entire book The World's Fair Goblin (1939), which was written in the fall of 1938 after the editors and authors were given a private fact-finding/research tour of the Fair. The original draft of The World's Fair Goblin was called The Man of Tomorrow, but it was considered better advertising to include the World's Fair name in the title.
• An episode of Pinky and the Brain takes place in the 1939 World's Fair.
• DC Comics published a 1939 New York World's Fair Comics comic book, followed by a 1940 edition in the next year. It became the precursor of the long-running Superman/Batman team-up book World's Finest Comics. The 1939 and 1940 comics were sometimes referenced in All-Star Squadron. Early Superman was described as a result of natural evolution from the inhabitants of his native world, leading to his alias "Man of Tomorrow", which reminds one of the "World of Tomorrow" theme of the Fair.
• In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, one of the main characters breaks into the abandoned fairgrounds and the Perisphere itself, where he has a significant sexual experience.
• "Fifty Years After the Fair", written and recorded by Aimee Mann describes the Fair from the current vantage point of "tomorrow", with a mixture of nostalgia and remorse.
• The producers of Batman: The Animated Series took their basis for the architecture of the series from the World's Fair. The reference is appropriate as Batman made his debut in comics in 1939. In the animated spin-off film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a young Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend attend the Gotham World's Fair, dubbed "The World of Tomorrow" and full of 1930s' style architecture.
• The fair is featured prominently in the graphic novel "Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?" by Brian Fies. In it, a father takes his young son to the fair which inspires him to a lifelong fascination with the promise of a hopeful, wonder-filled future.

References

1. ^ The Century of the Self part 4
2. ^ Peter Kuznick, "Losing the World of Tomorrow: the Battle over the presentation of science at the 1939 World's Fair", American Quarterly 46.3 (September 1994), pp341-73.
3. ^ Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World1996:404.
4. ^ Westinghouse Electric Corporation (1938). The book of record of the time capsule of cupaloy, deemed capable of resisting the effects of time for five thousand years, preserving an account of universal achievements, embedded in the grounds of the New York World's fair, 1939. New York: Westinghouse Electric Corporation. OCLC 1447704. http://www.archive.org/details/timecapsulecups00westrich/. Retrieved 2007-03-01. 
5. ^ "Vermeer's Masterpiece The Milkmaid". Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2009. http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={EC38F2E1-BA19-4D5F-845F-A5C44. Retrieved 2009-09-23. 
6. ^ Ström, Marianne (1998). Metro-Art In The Metro-Polis. Paris: Art Creation Realisation. pp. 96. ISBN 286770068X. http://books.google.com/books?q=1939+Majakovskaja+station+fair. 
7. ^ "POLICE DIE IN BLAST; Timed Device Explodes After It Is Taken Out of Pavilion" (fee). The New York Times. 1940-07-05. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F2081EFB395A11728DDDAC0894DF405B8088F1D3. Retrieved 2007-09-02. 
8. ^ "Frank Buck's Jungleland". Archived from the original on 2009-09-22. http://www.pmphoto.to/worlds_fair/wf_tour/zone-7/jungle_land.htm. Retrieved 2009-09-20. 
9. ^ Simon Heffer, Vaughan Williams. Northeastern University Press (Boston, 2001), p. 98 (ISBN 1555534724).
10. ^ http://www.pmphoto.to/worlds_fair/wf_tour/Zone-6/trains_of_the_day_3.htm
11. ^ Rogers, Colonel H.C.B. : "The Last Steam Locomotive Engineer: R.A.Riddles", George Allen & Unwin, London 1970 : ISBN 0-0438-5053-7
12. ^ [New York World’s Fair/1939/1940 in 155 Photographs by Richard Wurts and Others (New York, Dover Publication, Inc. 1977), p. 137]
13. ^ www.nycsubway.org
14. ^ http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/maps/sf-1939b.jpg
15. ^ "Restaurants: The King". Time. 1966-02-04. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898950,00.html. Retrieved 2010-04-20. 
16. ^ Franey, Pierre (1989-10-18). "DE GUSTIBUS; Innocence Abroad: Memories of '39 Fair". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE2DE113AF93BA25753C1A96F948260&sec=&spon=. Retrieved 2010-04-20. 
17. ^ "Quid plura? | "Moja droga, ja cię kocham..."". Archived from the original on 2009-07-22. http://www.quidplura.com/?p=307. Retrieved 2009-07-19. 

• Twilight At The World of Tomorrow by James Mauro

External links

• Tour of the 1939 World's Fair
• Images from the '39 NY World's Fair
• Welcome to Tomorrow
• Iain Baird (Television Historian), Television in The World of Tomorrow
• Future Vision: NY World's Fair 1939 – slideshow by Life magazine
• http://www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine3/items.html
• The New York World's Fair Community
• nywf64.com (1964/1965 New York World's Fair Website)
• Westinghouse Electric's public relations film about the fair: "The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair" (1939).
• Silent color home movie footage shot in 1939 at the San Francisco and New York World's Fairs
• The Greek pavillion at the 1939 New York Worl's Fair (PDF)^{[dead link]}
• 1939-'40 New York page on ExpoMuseum.com