I feel as though I visited the 1939 World's Fair, though I was born in 1940. Actually, I grew up with the Fair and my "memories" are really of the afterglow: hearing the family talk about it all through the 1940s, playing with the trinkets and souvenirs that were all around the house--the ashtrays and little Heinz pickles and scale models of the Trylon and Perisphere. We never threw anything out, certainly nothing that would remind us of that much-celebrated event.
For reasons of sheer size and expenditure, as well as its enduring place in popular affections, the 1939 Fair "could reasonably claim to be the greatest exhibition ever held," says Kenneth W. Luckhurst in The Story of Exhibitions. The Fair achieved its powerful impact in many ways: the classically symmetrical ground plan, detested by most architecture critics; the color-coded zones, which turned the fair into a large play-land; the vast size and attractive (if mysterious) symbolism of the Trylon and Perisphere, with their geometrical simplicity. Above all, the Fair succeeded in imagining a future after a decade of depression and scaling its wonders down to manageable size.
The most popular exhibits were notable for their brilliant effects of miniaturization. The Fair was full of breathtakingly detailed models of the World of Tomorrow. The General Motors Futurama contained, according to the 1939 guidebook, "approximately 500,000 individually designed houses; more than a million trees of eighteen species; and 50,000 scale-model automobiles, of which 10,000 are in actual operation over superhighways, speed lanes, and multi-decked bridges". "Democracity," within the Perisphere itself, was a "symbol of a perfectly integrated futuristic metropolis pulsed with life and rhythm and music." In Con Edison's immense diorama of New York, the City of Light, which was a full block long and three stories high, the effects of light, color, sound, and animation were used to play out a twenty-four-hour day, including a thunderstorm, in just twelve minutes.
Describing these colossal but seemingly pointless exhibits doesn't really do justice to them. Despite their sometimes blatant commercial goals, great fairs, like local ones, are pieces of popular culture, very much dependent on the excitement of crowds, on color, scale, and spectacle, on freakish feats of engineering, on special effects of illusion and verisimilitude, and on evoking a sense of the unusual, the marvelous, and the wonderful. For all the painstaking detail of the scale models, the Fair was a stunning piece of science fiction in an age poised at the brink of an economic and technological leap.
The Magic of the 1939 World's Fair
When I've asked people what they liked about the 1939 Fair, they say that there was something "magical" about it, especially at night when its dramatic lighting, ingenious color patterns, and spectacular fireworks played to maximum effect. The continuous movement of vast numbers of people was itself part of that magic--the interminable lines zigzagging toward the Futurama, in the two long escalators leading up into the Trylon, filling the ramps of the Helicline descending from the Perisphere--these crowds were built into the Fair's mesmerizing geometry. It was the end of a decade fascinated by the crowd, the collective--from Ortega's Revolt of the Masses to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, from Busby Berkeley's Choreography to the great Depression crowd scenes in Frank Capra films
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