But the 1939 Fair was indeed the future, and it did work. There’s a variety of reasons why this fair stands out in the collective cultural mind more than many others. It was New York, it lasted two seasons, it was 1939 (and Poland and Czechoslovakia did not return in 1940), it just happened to hit the zeitgeist the right way. Whatever. By now Fairs looked not only at the past and present but at the future, and one of the most popular attractions was Futurama. Check it out:
And compare Democracity, the exhibit inside the Perisphere.
Makes you want to live in 1960, doesn’t it? Futurama and Democracity offered a great dream of these wondrous cities with great transportation, all coming real soon now. The narrators of the day were full of confidence; you might even say that their unshakeable belief in what they were promising was their distinguishing characteristic. They didn’t sound like people, they sounded like the voice of God. And the point is, if you think about it, this promised future actually happened! By the 60s almost everybody did have a car. There were interstate highways. Airports were right outside the main cities. There were suburbs.
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Note that these future cities are very much of a piece with Disney’s own future city, EPCOT. You could easily say, in fact, that Walt’s vision in the 60s was nothing more than this vision updated. Add to this the mechanics of Futurama: the ride was a set of continuous seats that moved across the panorama. Is this starting to seem familiar?)In the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, the one that I hung out at, we were treated to the fulfillment of the 1939 Fair. Much of this fair simply proved that the earlier fair had gotten things right. That was '64's glory and its tragedy. While 1939 made all sorts of promises for the future, 1964, while demonstrating how ‘39’s future had arrived, didn’t get much right about our future thenceforth, or for that matter even have all that much to say that was new about out our future thenceforth. Not to detract from it, because it had a lot to offer in terms of entertainment and culture, but what it didn’t have was God promising a future that
actually happened. We are not living on nuclear fusion power. We do not use machines that eat rain forests on one end and spit out six-lane highways on the other. We don’t call each other on videophones; well, all right, we sort of do, but not really, because mostly we text. At the point where 1964 did not predict the personal computer, it absolutely failed to predict our true reality. 1964 was 25 years after 1939, and 1939 got it mostly right. 1989 was 25 years after 1964, and almost everything had been gotten wrong. Futurology ain’t what it used to be. Some other side notes. The site of '39 and '64 was the same; before it was a fair site, it was that valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby. The '39 Trylon and Perisphere symbols were torn down; the '64 Unisphere still stands (and is copied in Columbus Circle). Both parks had separate amusement park areas; I admit to never once visiting the '64 amusement area because it couldn’t hold a candle to fair stuff. Both parks had Robert Moses, whose great final goal was to turn Manhattan into a road and eliminate all that pesky city stuff that was already there, replaced with new modern buildings that separated all the parts of our lives into work areas and play areas and living areas, much as Futurama and EPCOT described. This never happened, which is good, because it’s a terrible idea. And, of course, as we stated earlier, '64 was the launching pad for much of what followed in what we could call phase 2 of the Disney theme park era.
There have been plenty of other fairs. This year there’s one in Shanghai, China’s first. Nowadays fairs tend to be dedicated to a theme, like living with the sea or some other ecological or social goal, and are wonderful showcases for architectural follies. Plus, countries show off, as they have always done. If you want to see Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue this year, for instance, you’ll have to go to Shanghai. At Hannover in 2000 we saw Lucy the hominid (first time out of Tanzania, I think), among other things. Speaking of which, the '64 fair had a moving sidewalk past Michelangelo’s Pieta; they didn’t want you standing there staring at it blocking others, although when I recently saw it in the Vatican, it was just another statue in St. Peter’s and there was no gawking crowd (but I will admit it is worth the gawk). But despite fairs continuing, they don’t carry the weight they used to. We don’t expect them to limn the future, plus the world has shrunk to easy manageability both physically and via communications, and not only can I get to China in less than a day, I can communicate with China in a nanosecond (and vice versa, if they’re not blocking the internet). So the age of the great fairs is over, although they still go on, explaining how problems might be solved and building sewers and subways in outlying suburbs and selling that newly developed area to international corporations in one way or another after the fair closes. It’s not the same, but nothing is.
We have seen the future, but the future isn’t what it used to be. Our expectation now is change at light speed, unpredictable and totally paradigm-shifting. We don’t bother to predict changes, because they happen faster than we can predict them. We just live through them. I’ll still go to fairs when I can (I’ve got my eye on Milan in 2015), but it won’t be the same as a teenager taking the F train out to Flushing in 1964 to confront the future head on. I can do that at home. So can—and does—everyone else in the world.
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