1939/1940 New York World’s Fair^339“Sometimes at night I lie awake
in the dark and try to recapture
the vision and the sound of the
World of Tomorrow,” wrote
Meyer Berger in 1940 , shortly
after the World’s Fair closed. “I
try to remember how the pastel
lighting glowed on Mad
Meadow in Flushing: soft
greens, orange, yellow, and red;
blue moonglow on the great
Perisphere and on the ghostly
soaring Trylon. I think with a
sense of sweetened pain of nights
when I sat by Flushing River and
saw the World of Tomorrow
reflected on its onyx surface, in
full color, and upside down.... ”
The 1939 / 1940 New York World’s Fair was an extraordinary
experience for the reported fifty million visitors who passed through its
futuristic gates and gazed at its majestic centerpiece, the Trylon and
Perisphere. It was the most ambitious international exposition since the
phenomenal Crystal Palace housed the first New York World’s Fair in 1853.
Not just a trade show, it was endowed with mythic qualities; it was the
“Fair of the Future,” the “World of Tomorrow,” and the “Dawn of a New
Day.” It was a masterpiece of showmanship, the epitome of stagecraft—a
real-life Land of Oz indelibly etched in the memories of those who
attended and in the imaginations of those who did not. It was more than a
collection of exhibits; it was a wellspring of innovation in corporate identity
and promotion.
In 1935 the fair’s 121 incorporators decided to put an end to a
decade of municipal malaise, marked by the stock market collapse and
subsequent economic depression, with the most elaborate demonstration of
scientific, technological, and human ingenuity that the world had ever seen.
As the guidebook announced: “This Fair of Tomorrow is a promise for the
future built with the tools of Today, upon the experience of Yesterday.”