Big Apple History . Arts and Entertainment . New York World's Fair of 1939


	The Perisphere and Trylon.

When Rockefeller Center was built it served to invigorate the city that hustled and bustled around it. In contrast, the 1939 New York World's Fair was constructed on the outskirts of the city, bordered by two of Moses' new parkways and surrounded by suburban-style one-family homes. Robert Moses was in charge of building the fairgrounds. The land that became the site for the New York World's Fair was transformed, after two years of work by an army of men, from a 1,200-acre ash heap called Corona Dump into an arena of shining models of the city of tomorrow.

The Trylon, a huge white spike, and the Perisphere, the huge white dome next to it, as well the fair's sleek gates, were built in Art Deco style, a style associated with the celebration of city life. But, Democracity, the model of the futuristic city contained inside the Perisphere, like most of the exhibits at the fair, emphasized the triumph of commerce over art, highway over city. Major corporations, AT&T, GE, and General Motors, among others, gave the American public their visions of America's future. Consumer products and modern devices -- machines that would deliver ordinary people from the drudgery of daily work -- were marketed to consumers as if, through the purchase of a vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher, they could find salvation.


The World's Fair, 1939

General Motor's Futurama had the longest lines of any pavilion at the fair. Visitors sat in moving chairs, which circled like traffic around a 360,000-square-foot model of the United States in 1960. The moving seats, and the fair itself, inspired Walt Disney to create Disney Land. In the world according to General Motors, New York City would become a collection of skyscrapers spaced out from one another by fourteen-lane highways. New Yorkers would live in one-family homes outside the city that would be accessible only by car. Subways, streetcars, and railroads were conspicuously missing from the model. General Motors presented a vision of a future city in which no people actually lived!

General Motors, however, had no plans to spend company money to build the highways or the pre-fabricated homes in the suburbs that were both so integral to their plan. The goal of the Futurama display was to sell Americans on the idea that public money should be spent on highways and new housing so that demand would increase for the privately built car. Contemporary critic Walter Lippman observed, "General Motors has spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and its highways by public enterprise." In GM's World's Fair exhibit the company presented a blueprint for New York City's destruction.