Seventy-five years ago this past Wednesday, the 1939 New York World's Fair opened, and over the next year-and-a-half, 45 million visitors flocked to "a place of bright lights, colors, and streamlined buildings that promised a marvelous future just within reach."
Sixteen years ago, in the spring of 1998, I wrote those very words about the fair. My master's thesis focused on the impact of World War II on the 1939 New York World's Fair (the "world of today" invading the "world of tomorrow," if you will) and how, for some, the fair marked a unique moment in American history.
At the time, eBay was just making itself known to me, and as a result I acquired all kinds of wonderful World's Fair paraphernalia: spoons, milk bottles, salt shakers, photographs, a hardcover guidebook. All these objects still delight me.
If you know anything about the fair, you can't help but love it. Its famous symbols — the Art Deco-styled Trylon and Perisphere (sometimes simply known as the ball and spike) — suggested the future in a way that seems so innocent now. The fair's most popular exhibit, General Motors' Futurama, dazzled visitors with what the world of tomorrow might look like. And yet the future, as presented by General Motors, was 1960, near enough for everything predicted at the fair to come to pass within the fairgoers' lifetimes. This was important.
Probably the most notable technology introduced at the fair was television. But in order to convince the public that what they were seeing was real, a transparent television set was displayed so that viewers could look inside.
Millions of visitors happily roamed the fair, visiting the marvels of the future. But just a few months after it opened, events in Europe decidedly took a turn for the worse. These events were mirrored most starkly at the foreign pavilions: a Czechoslovakian pavilion stood when there was no longer a Czechoslovakia, a mysterious bomb exploded inside the British pavilion not long after a Nazi flag was discovered there, and dozens of foreign fair employees had no idea when or how they would ever return home.
Yet if the fair is thought about at all today, it is remembered simply for the future it promised, and, of course, for all the great stuff that came out of it. As memories took hold, people also saw the fair as marking a time in history right at the end of the Great Depression (which was, after all, when the fair was first envisioned) and just before World War II became an American reality, even though this time never really existed. It existed at the fair, however, and it prompted people to hold a fair 25 years later on the very same spot in Flushing Meadows.
And now, 75 years on, there is still something to be thrilled about. The future that 1939 predicted seems so charming to us now, so hopeful. Upon leaving General Motors' Futurama, each person was handed a button that said, "I Have Seen the Future." In 1939, this was plenty.
Reyna Eisenstark is a freelance writer, essayist and educational book writer based in Chatham. http://blog.timesunion.com/eisenstark