Towards this end New York’s park and highway czar, Robert
Moses, gave his blessing. The fair corporation took as its site the once
beautiful tidal basin of the Flushing River, which had been turned into a
festering bog and ash dump by one Fishhooks McCarthy and his Brooklyn
Ash Removal Company. Miraculously it was transformed into Flushing
Meadow, the park of the future. Heralded as a “scientific victory,” it was the
most ambitious environmental reclamation project of its time.
Consistent with the theme committee’s precept that “super
civilization... is based on the swift work of machines, not on the arduous
toil of men,” the fair was a mélange of provocative, often symbolically
designed pavilions (some representing architecture parlante,or billboard
architecture—a building whose exterior look revealed its interior purpose,
such as the Aviation Building shaped like a dirigible hanger) that were
organized into thematic zones covering all aspects of human activity in
which man and machine were somehow wed: Transportation, Production
and Distribution, Communications, Community Interests, Government,
Business Systems, Food, Medicine and Public Health, Science and
Education, and Amusement.
Democracity, the Fair’s central theme exhibit, designed by Henry
Dreyfuss, was an idealized projection of America in 2039 ,an
interdependent network of urban, suburban, and rural areas. Viewed from
two moving circular galleries, the viewer was given a bird’s-eye view of
Centeron, a perfectly planned, modern, riverside metropolis that could
accommodate a million people but, in fact, had no inhabitants because it
was used exclusively as the hub of commerce, education, and culture.
The mellow yet authoritative voice of H. V. Kaltenborn in a recorded
narration, underscored by music written by William Grant Still and
conducted by Andre Kostelanetz, told visitors about a population that lived
in commodious high-rises amidst suburban garden developments, or
Pleasantvilles, and in light-industrial communities and satellite towns called
Millvilles, rimmed by fertile and profitable farming zones or greenbelts—
all linked, of course, by modern express highways and parkways. “This is
not a vague dream of a life that might be lived in the far future,” wrote
Robert Kohn, chairman of the Fair’s Board of Design, “but one that could
be lived tomorrow morning if we willed it so.”
Democracitywas suitably housed in the Perisphere, an enormous
white futuristic temple that also served as the fair’s indelible, architectural
trademark. Designed by Wallace K. Harrison and J. Andre Foulihoux—
who had also been involved in the design of Rockefeller Center—the
Perisphere was the largest “floating” globe ever built by man: 180 feet in
diameter and eighteen stories high, twice the size of Radio City Music
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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