Spain, Part Six

I think I come to my interest in world’s fairs honestly, if not necessarily uniquely. When I was a kid, the Disney TV show was a Sunday night fixture, and I trundled off to bed immediately afterward (it was a school night, after all). Walt was talking up Disneyland (the original name of the TV show) from day one, and the show was structured along the same lines as the park, so how many little kids weren’t pulled in by the whole thing? Of course I wanted to go to Disneyland, which was on the other side of the country, and seemed some combination of Paradise and Eden and eternal summer and quintessential kidness. Even Nikita Krushchev wanted to visit Disneyland, and he was some old Commie apparatchik, while I was a little kid, the absolute target audience. Walt had no trouble hitting that target.

And I did go. My mother insists we went the year it opened; I demur and claim it was a few years later, but I was a kid, so what do I know. In any case, the target having been hit, the bell was rung, and Young Menick (a concept not unlike Young Indiana Jones) went to Disneyland. A few times, off and on, as it turned out. My father worked for an airline, which meant free travel, usually first class. Nowadays most of my travel is on school buses. My just desserts, I guess.

I was a teenager in the 60s, so if I was ripe for the quintessential kidness of Disneyland a decade earlier, I was just as ripe then for the quintessential futurism of the 64-65 World’s Fair in New York. Instead of being far away in California, it was right across the street from (its contemporary) Shea Stadium, an easy trip for a Westchester kid. (Same site as the 1939-40 Fair, by the way, and same site as the garbage dump in THE GREAT GATSBY; eliminating the dump was one of the infrastructural goals of that earlier event). I went, I don’t know, maybe a dozen times over the course of the fair’s two years. Saw everything over and over. There was, of course, a Disney connection, so the two ideas are clearly united in my mind, and I still look forward to the Carousel of Progress as some sort of teenage nostalgia, while I do demur a bit from claiming that It’s a Small World or the Lincoln robot evoke quite the same sense. World’s Fairs of the 20th Century often talked about the future, and usually they attempted to provide a blueprint for it. Sometimes those blueprints are amazingly accurate (1939’s blueprint for 1964 was right on) and sometimes they’re totally inept (1964’s blueprint for our times missed almost all the boats completely, including the internet, atomic energy and the environment in general). Historically World’s Fairs have also acted as barometers, allowing us to collect all the stuff we have as nations to show it off and share it. The 19th Century fairs were boasting exercises to a great degree: Look at our technology. Look at our art. Look at our exotic colonial natives. They were not so much forward-looking as present-proud and pointed toward whatever future might arise. The Smithsonian in Washington used to house a recreation of the 1876 Philadelphia fair, the closest you could probably ever get to the sense of the real 19th century thing, and it was all machinery and tools, the arrival of the last blast of the industrial revolution, where everything was possible thanks to engineering. Futurists of the 20th century kept to that idea, claiming that future engineering would solve all our problems, but went further and attempted to describe that future. Disney was certainly that kind of futurist himself, and that kind of futurism was rife in the 1964-65 fair, and simultaneously in Disney’s original plans for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The EPCOT that actually came about, while no longer a city, did still reflect that brand of futurism. (That kind of thinking today is long past its expiration date.) One can visit EPCOT with a nostalgia for the future, if you will, not as with Tomorrowland (The Future that Never Was) but as with the old World’s Fair promises that never came true.

One thing I like about fairs is their aspiration. In their attempts to stake a claim on either the present or the future, they have always made big statements in their physical presence, either symbolically or in toto. The Crystal Palace of 1851 (Prince Albert’s idea) was grand in its execution, its exhibition hall itself symbolizing an architecture of modern times. The White City of Chicago in 1893 is a classical revivalist version of Christmas morning. The Eiffel Tower, the Tryon and Perisphere, the Unisphere, the Atomian, the Space Needle—they are all symbols that (mostly) still stand long after their fairs have gone, symbols that have taken on new meanings; signifiers with new significations, if you will. Talk about grist for the Caveman mind! The original reason for the Spain trip in 2008 was the possibility of going to the fair in Zaragoza, but that just didn’t work out. However, there was a fair in Barcelona in 1929, and the grounds are still there, looking very world’s fairish. The picture above, from the period, could almost have been taken yesterday. Additionally, there was the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, much of it taking place in the same area, and Olympics infrastructure is a close aspirational cousin to fair infrastructure.

So you get to walk down the boulevard of a real World’s Fair from eighty years ago, which is, for me, an absolute thrill. It still feels like a World’s Fair. The big castle on the hill housing the Catalan art museum is from that fair! Mies’s pavilion has been recreated, one of the very first Modernist buildings! On weekend nights, the fountains play water games for hours (take that, EPCOT). Plus there’s a Calatrava sculpture from the Olympics towering over the mountain, plus an entire Triumph of the Will looking stadium to go with it! There’s even a simulacrum sort of SpainWorld where all of Spain is shrunk into one little walking park!

In other words, reason number 132 why Barcelona, for me, was hog heaven.