New York World's Fair (1939)

The Event New York City’s public exhibition featuring pavilions from nations around the world and developments in architecture and consumer products

Dates April 30-October 29, 1939; May 11-October 27, 1940

Place New York, New York

The New York World’s Fair attracted visitors from around the United States and the world to experience the “world of tomorrow.” One of the main purposes of the fair was to allow Americans to move past the struggles they had faced during the Great Depression and envision a modern lifestyle of prosperity.

The first world’s fair took place in London in 1851 as an economic development strategy to show off international manufactured goods and to promote tourism. Every few years thereafter, a major global city hosted a world’s fair, which provided many social and economic benefits. For example, fair attendees often provided a boost to the local economy by shopping in stores and eating in restaurants. In 1934, business leaders and government officials began advocating for a world’s fair in New York with the hopes that it would help to lift the spirits of Americans who had been suffering through the Great Depression.

High Hopes for the Fair

In the early stages of the fair’s development, the fair’s planning committee formed the World’s Fair Corporation to oversee the fair and elected former New York City police chief Gerald Whalen as its head. The committee began generating funding for the event through the sales of bonds to millionaires, trade unions, major corporations, and the general public. The committee determined that 40 percent of the proceeds from the fair would be used to repay these original investors. The fair also received funding from the city and state of New York, the U.S. federal government, and each of the countries who had a pavilion at the fair. However, the fair generated less revenue than it took in from these investors and was thereby declared an economic failure. Even local business owners were disappointed that the fair did not generate as many customers as planners had originally estimated.

Opening day was set for April 30, 1939, the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as U.S. president. In part, this day was selected to emphasize the United States’ past accomplishments and to provide hope that the United States would once again become a prosperous nation. Because one of the main priorities for the fair was to lift the country and the world out of depression, the predominant theme of the fair was “Building the World of Tomorrow.” The selection of the fairgrounds site on a former ash dump in Flushing, Queens, contributed to the notion that urban renewal and redevelopment could lead to the future prosperity of the United States. In particular, the fair both celebrated and catered to the emerging middle class, whom politicians and social reformers hoped would form the backbone of American society.

Architecture, Zones, and Pavilions at the Fair

The New York World’s Fair was the first major world exhibition that departed from a focus on trade in favor of imagining a future utopian society in which the material conditions of the average American would dramatically improve. The fair emphasized cultural achievements in architecture and design more than previous exhibitions of its kind had. In particular, the fair served as a showcase for the Art Deco and Bauhaus styles, and many pavilions housed priceless artwork by renowned artists such as Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio. Artists of the 1930’s, such as Alexander Calder and Salvador Dalí, constructed artworks for the fair. Creators of the Westinghouse time capsule also hoped to preserve some of the culture of the 1930’s for future generations. They hoped that people in the future would enjoy artifacts such as a Gillette safety razor, messages to the future from Albert Einstein, a Mickey Mouse cup, a copy of Gone with the Wind, and a picture of Jesse Owens winning a gold medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

As fairs in the past had done, the New York World’s Fair served as a showcase for the latest technologies, but the focus was on the consumption of goods, rather than their production. Various zones on the fairground represented the major industries that were trying to establish themselves as the foundation of the American economy in the era after the Depression. The Transportation Zone, which housed pavilions by General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, promoted the concept of the automobile as the future of transportation for the middle class. The Ford pavilion featured a “road of tomorrow,” where fair visitors could ride in sample cars onto the roof to overlook the fair from several different viewpoints. General Motors’ Futurama ride carried passengers through a diorama of a projected 1960’s roadway, featuring seven-lane highways, model homes, and cities that were free from blight. As passengers progressed through the ride, the dioramas gradually increased in size until they were finally life-sized. Other areas of the fair included the Communications and Business Systems Zone, which highlighted American Telephone and Telegraph’s (AT&T’s) advancements in telephone technology and exposed many members of the general public to television for the first time. The Food Zone demonstrated how advancements in agricultural technology and transportation could deliver mass-produced, low-cost foods to the American public, which was particularly important for morale after a decade in which many Americans went hungry. A “Town of Tomorrow” provided a model community comprising single-family homes, which featured the latest electronic appliances from General Electric.

Entertainment was another luxury that Americans were expected to enjoy after the Depression. Thus, one of the most popular zones at the fair was the Amusement Area. This area of the fair stayed open until 2 a.m. every night, long past the 10 p.m. closing time of the international pavilions. Large fluorescent bulbs illuminated the nightlife activities and exposed Americans to the latest innovation in lighting. The most popular pavilion in the Amusement Area, and in the fair as a whole, was the Aquacade, a water show featuring professional swimmers, divers, dancers, and singers. Another highly successful attraction in the Amusement Area was the parachute drop, which was later moved to Coney Island and continues to serve as the iconic “Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn.”

The Fair and the Pending World War

As in past world exhibitions, a major emphasis of the fair was to allow visitors to experience a simulation of international tourism and thus to promote a sense of unity among the nations of the world. This goal was particularly difficult in 1939, when Americans felt uneasy about the communist and fascist dictatorships emerging in Europe. Many pavilions glossed over the international conflicts that were threatening the stability of the world’s most powerful nations and presented idealized cultural models of the nations they represented. Germany’s absence from the fair was glaring, and in 1940, the Soviet Union and several smaller nations were no longer represented at the fair. The central theme of the fair shifted from the utopian “Building the World of Tomorrow” to the more pertinent “For Peace and Freedom.” Nevertheless, warring nations such as France and Great Britain built weaponry displays into their pavilions for the second year of the fair. The Polish pavilion featured photographs from the war, and the Czech pavilion showed the film The Rape of Czechoslovakia (1939), which showed the hardships of life under German occupation. The shift in focus turned the fair from a lighthearted event into a relatively somber experience.

Impact

The New York World’s Fair had a profound effect on the consumer consciousness of the post-Depression era, especially among the 45 million fair attendees. The fair achieved its primary goal of bringing the consumption of mass-produced, modern goods to the forefront of American society. If anything, critics say that one of the downsides of the fair was that it was overcommercialized, which took away from its artistry and its ability to promote world harmony. Nevertheless, most fair attendees genuinely enjoyed the consumer presentations at the fair, which left them with an optimistic vision of the future. In many cases, this presentation of the future world became reality, particularly in the case of the development of the American suburban landscape to easily accommodate automobile travel. The secondary goal of promoting “peace and freedom” was less successful, as many of the world’s countries became involved in World War II. Nevertheless, the presence of pavilions from war-torn European nations brought the realities of the war to the American people, who later rallied around the Allied cause.

Bibliography

Duranti, Marco. “Utopia, Nostalgia, and World War at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair.” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006): 663-683. Looks at the shift in focus from the first half of the fair to the second, as the emphasis of consumerism changed to the theme of peace and freedom.

Gelenter, David. 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. New York: Free Press, 1995. Examines the unique chronological state of the fair, bookended by the Great Depression and World War II.

Kuznick, Peter J. “Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle over the Presentation of Science at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.” American Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1994): 341-373. Discusses the shift from the emphasis on science and technology in previous fairs to consumerism in the New York fair.

Wurts, Richard. The New York World’s Fair 1939/1940 in 155 Photographs. New York: Dover, 1977. Detailed photographic exploration of the fair.