The World of Already
(See Cover)
It returns the child's eye to the retinas of men. Emerging from subway, train or even hydrofoil, the visitor to the New York World's Fair feels that he is in a special world, full of runaway pylons, impossible cantilevers, and buildings that look like flowers or accidents of flowing lava.
Is it the future? Not exactly. The 1964 fair both celebrates and illustrates the fact that in the last 25 years science has so far expanded the human imagination that anything seems possible. Crowds at the 1939 New York fair stared with skepticism at exhibits of air conditioning, television and the first nylon stocking. The 1964 fair displays not what might be done in the future, but rather what has already been done. The 1939 fair was a promise. The 1964 fair is a boast.
Much of it, to be sure, has a tacky, plastic, here-today-blown-tomorrow look, as if it were a city made of credit cards. But much of it has grace and substance. From nations to corporations, everybody is there to hawk and hornblow. All the crammed buildings are engaged in a mad struggle for attention. And somehow, in its jostling, heedless, undisciplined energy, it makes a person happy to be alive in the 20th century.
The place has been open for a little more than a month now, and has at last settled down so that it no longer rings with hammers and confusion. More than 6,000,000 people have been there already; and the question in millions of other minds is whether or not to go. The decision should be yes.
Scant Martini. With more than 300 companies, 66 nations, Mormons, Methodists, Catholics and assorted amusement-park types all reaching for him, a fairgoer is lost without a plan, since it is possible to spend a whole day in a series of places that might better be avoided for a whole lifetime. A casual browser is better off in Death Valley than in Flushing Meadow, and the fair's avenues and promenades are already lined with the whitening bones of people who did not read up on the fair and map out their itineraries in advance.
One good way to start is to float over the grounds in a Swiss cable car. At 115 ft., the ride goes high enough to offer a sweep of the jumble below, but still low enough to make the rider feel the clash of the architecture and the overall dynamic of the vast bazaar. If his timing is lucky, he can almost feel the heat as tawny Samoan youths prance beneath on mats of fire, and only moments later he may be staring down into the whites of the eyes of a dozen Zulus. He flies from Denmark to Switzerland via Ko rea, Venezuela, Central America, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Polynesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, Jordan, Lebanon, Greece, Malaysia, and most of Africa, with the rest of the world stretching one way down a series of pools to the Bell System, and another way across the Unisphere to the sovereign republics of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.
The one-way cable ride costs 75-c-,* lasts four minutes, and is thus like a two-ounce martini, slightly intoxicating but only enough to create a need for more. It should be followed by a fast 500 elevator trip to the top of the towers at the New York State pavilion, where one gets a panoptic, 360DEG aerial fix on the fair, standing on a platform more than 200-ft. high. All the insane collages that meet the eye nearer sea level straighten out up there, as one sees from above the order of the fair.
Creative Study. It is laid out along the patterned streets that were designed on the same site for the 1939 fair. Most world fairs have been masterplanned, their buildings a harmonic continuum expressing the genius of a committee. Robert Moses, president of the current fair, had no such architectural ambition. He merely leased lots and let everyone erect what he pleased.
This was probably the only instance in the past 75 years that New York's Robert Moses was permissive. Moses, whose vision has changed the face of New York State, is the sort of man who likes to knock things over rather than walk around them. When he took over as fair president, he forced the resignation of Robert Kopple, a lawyer from Long Island who conceived the idea in the first place and who raised the initial money for the fair because he felt that his children were ignorant of the world. Kopple had once made the mistake of opposing Moses on another city project. At least Kopple now has a free pass to the fair. Few other people do. Free passes are as rare as five-leaf clovers. The fair cost $1 billion. Moses is determined to make it profitable, so that there will be enough money left over to develop a park for the city.
Moses also shrugged off the International Bureau of Expositions, which refused to sanction this one on several grounds of finance and timing. So the fair is unofficial. But it has as great a spread of national exhibits as any previous fair, thanks to trade syndicates who hurried in where governments would not go.
Fins & Pylons. Moses once had a committee of architects somewhere underfoot, but they quit when they realized that no one was going to mastermind more than grass seed. Left on their own, many exhibitors predictably put up the sort of eyecatchers that suggest refreshment stands on U.S. 1. In the main, even the fair's most arresting and successful structures are not really buildings. They are events. They were built, after all, to last but two years and then be demolished. They were built as elements of a fair, not as gatehouses to stately cities. Described in words, they sound spectacularly vulgar, but they are really just spectacular.
For General Electric, for example, architects turned a huge dome inside out, revealing its supporting lining of intersticed steel so that its overall look suggests tripes `a la mode de G.E. IBM, in a glorious defiance of sanity, has set what appears to be a 50-ton egg on a nest of plastic in the tops of metal trees. Johnson's Wax has suspended a huge gold clam over a blue pool inside six slender white pylons that rise high and flare into unearthly petals. Eastman Kodak has built a plaza under an undulating roof of thin-shell concrete that plays hide-and-seek with geometry, now duncing up into conical pinnacles, now forming a hole so that real and artificial rains can pour through onto Sculptor Harry Bertoia's metal flowers below. People can walk up and down dale on the roof. Young boys go there and control the rains by pinching their fingers over dozens of brass nozzles, spraying all the girls below.
The eye stops appreciatively on the massive, floating box-and-cloister of Charles Luckman's United States pavilion, and disapprovingly on Bell Telephone's flying wing, which looks more like a big hunk of sedimentary rock than an airfoil. The three-acre building that houses General Motors' Futurama ends in one gigantic tail fin, which may be good as advertising but is ridiculous as architecture. The boldest structure at the fair is Architect Philip Johnson's New York State pavilion: 16 tremendous columns support an elliptical roof of colored plastics that is larger than a football field.
Beware Behemoths. Beyond architecture, one other characteristic of the fair stands out from above, and before descending to join the masses the fairgoer might do well to contemplate it. There are sometimes more than 200,000 people down there and half of them seem to be standing in lines. People have waited more than 2 1/2 hours to get into Ford, two for General Motors, one for General Electric. There is obviously a number of minutes beyond which a show is not worth waiting for. The fair is full of fine things that demand no queuing at all.
Ford's Magic Skyway is worth a wait of perhaps 30 minutes, on a cool day. But lines mass there as if the company were giving away Fords. The superb showmanship of putting people in new automobiles and driving them past an assemblage of plastic reptiles and plastic cavemen by Walt Disney is more than the contemporary world is able to resist. The prehistoric pageant lasts only twelve minutes. The car radio announces: "This is the world that was," and the rider swerves past little dinosaur eggs hatching before his very eyes, while off to the left a two-story Tyrannosaurus rex is busily killing a tough stegosaurus. A caveman with Cro-Magnon bravado appears, confronting an 800-lb. bear. A pert little cavewoman turns meat on a spit, while her cave-baby warms his bottom beside her. Cavedaddy turns out to be the first tycoon. He invents the wheel.
General Motors, star of the '39 fair with its revelations of the future, has again attempted to be visionary. Its Futurama is built around the idea that the human population has ample room to explode, and proves the thesis with wonderful models of future machines and future cities in contemporary wastelands. Man will subdue the primordial jungle, for example, with a G.M. machine a couple of hundred yards long. Out in front of it, smaller machines fell the great trees with laser beams. Blink, blink. The red beams slice the trees and they topple. The great mother machine now takes over, moving forward to eat the trees and all the undergrowth, meanwhile extruding four-lane highways from its distant rear. Dazzling cities spring up out of the bush to either side.
But for the rest, the present is abreast of the presumed future. There is an undersea hotel (Jacques Cousteau has already developed a five-man sea house),an aquacopter (just a baby submarine) and a space dormitory for moon travelers (it closely resembles the Indonesian pavilion half a mile away).
Egg & Carousel. IBM makes a show of its own mechanics. The audience of 500 sits on steeply tiered seats at ground level; and when the program is about to begin, this entire "people wall" is lifted 53 ft. into the air by two hydraulic rams. They end up inside the lofty IBM egg, watching nine movie screens at once, in a demonstration meant to explain how the human brain is just another computer.
Of all the big shows, G.E.'s Carousel of Progress is one of the most frankly commercial, but it is so studded with million-dollar gimcracks that it is worth seeing. Six audiences watch it at once, revolving in their seats to stop in front of segment after segment of a central stage. The star is a man who looks like Lowell Thomas full of formaldehyde. He sits in his kitchen, taps his foot nervously, blinks, and brags about his household appliances. He is made of plastic--Walt Disney again--and so is his dog, which grrrs and twitches on the floor. Caroline Kennedy saw the dog and wanted to take him home.
First the man crows about the faith ful pump in his sink, the new icebox and his coal-burning stove. The year is about 1898. All these relics are choreo graphed to gush rusty water, pop open, or glow genially while he talks. The revolving audience sees him in three additional incarnations--in the '20s, the '40s, and today in his ultimate, modern G.E. home, with indirect colored lighting and clear-plastic, form-fitting kitchen chairs. The older appliances are wonders to behold. But the plastic man's life gets duller as it progresses.
Walt's Wonders. Disney's realistic robots, in fact, stalk the fair. Pepsi-Cola has about 350 of them, doll-size, flanking a boat ride that children seem to like more than anything else. Scottish dolls climb steep plaid mountains, Iranian dolls fly on Persian carpets, and French dolls cancan. The dolls sing an original tune about the cohesion of the peoples of the world that might have been composed by Wendell Willkie.
Disney's final contribution to the fair is a modest attempt to revive Abraham Lincoln by rebuilding him out of steel, aluminum, gold, brass, soft epidermal plastic, air tubes, fluid tubes, pneumatic and hydraulic valves. Abe works a twelve-hour day at the Illinois pavilion. He does a show every twelve minutes, speaking without notes and repeating bits of six of his earlier speeches, reminding his countrymen that "right makes might."
With a Nudge. The World's Fair is so resplendently miscellaneous that it defies a blue ribbon for any one pavilion, exhibit or show. Nonetheless, there is nothing better on the grounds than a movie called To Be Alive!, presented by Johnson's Wax. It lasts 17 1/2 minutes, has nothing to do with wax and does not even mention the company.
Its technique alone is of great interest. It uses three projectors, like Cinerama, but it resolves the problem of Cinerama with a simple touch of invention: the screens are set a foot apart. The mind fills the gaps without noticing them. Moreover, the separate screens enable the film makers--Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid --to use them in multiple combinations, now showing three aspects of one scene, now three separate scenes, now a three-dimensional, three-screen headlong ride down a plunging highway that kneads the stomach far more than the rollercoaster ride in the first Cinerama.
Beyond technique, however, Thompson and Hammid have made a film of surpassing excellence about the universalities of human experience. When it begins, it is speeded up like an old Charlie Chaplin picture, showing New York masses rushing to work. On the corner of 42nd and Fifth Avenue, buses and cars go by like military projectiles, and hundreds of people zip across the screen like clouds of buckshot. Then-ping--the whole wide scene suddenly contains nothing but a drop of water in a pool. The movie starts life over again. A little Chinese boy studies a land turtle he has found in a field. A little boy in New York stares through a prism with which he can change the very face of the city. A little boy in the jungle learns the rhythm of a drum. A narrator speaks in the first person, describing his life from childhood to manhood, while the images on the screen shift constantly from the familiar to the distant, from face to face, from suburb to desert, from young Africans flirting in canoes to young Italians at a wedding feast in the hills of Assisi. The film is funny, informative, poetic, moving, ingenious, instructive, entertaining and beautifully photographed.
Film Fair. After that one, the most discussed picture is Parable, presented at the Protestant and Orthodox Center. Its central figure is a whitefaced clown. The circus is operated by Magnus the Great--a kind of Barnum and Belial character who sits in his tent and manipulates human marionettes strung on ropes high in the air. The whitefaced clown releases the ropes that hold the marionettes and frees them from bond age, replacing them himself. Stabbed by the agents of the malevolent Magnus, he is lofted on high, bleeding and suffering. He lets out a cry of agony and dies.
Throughout the fair, films are a basic denominator. In the United States pavilion, audiences are ridden past dozens of screens that light up consecutively with moments from American history. The narration is straight from This Is Your Life, styled in the second person singular, telling each and every American that you tamed the wilderness, then you invented the electric light, and you are now assaulting the universe.
Both New York State and the Port of New York Authority show movies that are the ultimate in wide screens, being 360DEG around. Audiences stand in the center. The device works well, and the state's show is a bit better than the Authority's. Riding in a car up a highway, you can look out the back window and see the road receding, or look forward and feel its onrush, while fields and trees stream by on either side.
Plunging Roots. Socony Mobil uses films in a fine game for teenagers. Thirty-six kids at once sit in drivers' seats, hold steering wheels, adjust themselves to brakes and accelerators, and stare at a road ahead of them which is shown on small, individual screens. With a whoosh and voom, they're off, all 36 zinging up the same road in a contest to see who is the most economical and safest driver. They are graded electronically as they meet situations--a school bus discharging its tender cargo, an idiot driver warping and woofing all over the right of way.
A pavilion called Sermons from Science, one of the minor discoveries of the fair, presents the Word only as a kind of commercial at the ends of its excellent and varied movies on scientific subjects, which contain, among other things, fascinating studies in time-lapse photography: cumulus clouds boil upward, taproots plunge down through the soil like fast-moving snakes.
View It Yourself. Not all the fair's good shows, however, are on film or indoors. Several times a day, five Mexican Indians climb a giddy, 114-ft. pole outside the Mexican pavilion. One begins to dance on top of the pole; his four companions lean over backward and fall toward the ground. They are tied to long ropes which are wrapped tightly around the summit of the pole. Hanging upside down, all four men begin to spin in accelerating, expanding, awesomely descending circles as the ropes unwind, righting themselves just in time to drop lightly to the pavement.
At the State of Oregon's timber carnival, a talented sculptor named Ken Kaiser casually shapes human faces from massive logs, using a roaring, 30-in. gasoline-powered chain saw. Logrollers stand on thick timbers in the Flushing River, trying to jar each other into the scented currents. Hulking lumberjacks heave double-bit axes at targets, handbuckers go through 2-ft. logs in about 40 sec., and competing axmen hack chips the size of dinner plates out of the remnants of trees.
At the Coca-Cola pavilion, the visitor takes an amusing, self-propelled international walk, first through Hong Kong, where there are fish stalls in teem ing markets, with the smell of incense heavy in the air. For one startled moment, sniff again. Damned if the incense doesn't smell like Coca-Cola. Move on, turn a corner, and there is Garmisch-Partenkirchen, high in the Bavarian Alps, where the towering balsams have the unmistakable scent of pillows stuffed with Coca-Cola. A few more giant strides and there is a Cambodian jungle, where monkeys inhabit the high vegetation and Coke bottles dangle in cool rushing streams, secured by their necks to trailing, primeval vines.
Million-Dollar Touches. Two of the fair's most attractive edifices stand out for their sense of permanence in a garden of transience. Spain's incredibly beautiful pavilion could probably ride the meadow for a thousand years if it were permitted to, and it should at least be moved somewhere in 1965. It was designed by Architect Javier Carvajal, and somehow suggests the courtyards of Castile and the filigreed palaces of Andalusia in its unending surprises of space and light. Spain, bidding for new status in the conversation of international trade, has spared no expense to shine at its national best. Flamenco dancers of what Spaniards would describe as great purity perform in the pavilion's theater. From the Prado come Goya's great majas, clothed and nude. One could do worse than spend a day in the Spanish pavilion.
The Belgian Village looks as if it had been standing right where it is for at least 500 years--or will when it is finished. The biggest international exhibit at the fair, it is a giant section of a Flemish town consisting of 134 buildings. The roofs are being made of real slate and real tiles. The windows are leaded. The streets are all paved with cobblestones.
Three-year-olds and upwards are entranced by nearly everything at the fair, but there are certain stops, like the Pepsi-Cola ride, that are particularly smashing from their point of view. U.S. Rubber's Ferris wheel (50-c-) is the largest replica of a tire ever made, and no child wants to miss it. The flume ride (95-c-) is a bumping, bouncing, water-sprayed trip in a hollow plastic log through a reasonable simulacrum of rapids, ending with a plunge into still waters. General Cigar presents a brief but first-rate magic show. Sinclair's Dinoland is dinolated by nine prehistoric monsters made of fiberglass, scattered through a grove of pines. At the end, there are machines that make plastic dinosaurs. Put 500 in, wait a while, and out pops a little dinosaur like a hot dinner roll.
Cash Flow. One of the most common sights at the fair is of grown men wandering dazedly, holding their trouser pockets inside out in the timeless gesture of bankruptcy. People who have just rounded their first million sometimes go there to celebrate and are paupers by nightfall. No complaint is more frequently heard at the fair than the cries of the nouveau broke.
With a little foreknowledge, this need not be. Nearly all the better things at the fair are free, and those that are not cost little. Actually, the biggest money drain is the high cost of drinks. In Switzerland the gutters are full of kirsch, but at the Swiss chalet a petit shot costs $1.25. Cocktails and highballs are rare at $1, more common at $1.50.
Food is expensive too, and sometimes it is very good. Entrees at the major restaurants average $6. The most elegant room is the Toledo, downstairs in the Spanish pavilion, where the chef of Madrid's Jockey Club somewhat incongruously serves French cuisine.
In Denmark's beautiful small building of latticed woods and spacious glass, a superb Danish smorgasbord is served for $6 a person. Sweden presents its own excellent smorgasbord for the same price. At the Indonesia pavilion, the Kambing Masak Bugis and Ajam Pang-gang cost $6.50. From Mexico (Came Asada Tampiquena, $7) to India (Chicken Masala Jaipure, $5.75), the fair abounds in places where one can eat well and pay well.
But nothing much is missed if all of this is skipped. There is no lasting culinary memory to be taken from the fair, as there was in 1939 when the Pavilion's Henri Soule made his U.S. debut at the French pavilion. Moreover, great Curnonskian meals absorb too much time. The smartest way to eat is to bring your own sandwiches or buy a quick one in a place like Liebmann Breweries' oldtime tavern, where a fast beer and a ham on rye cost $1.10.
There are many other places to eat rapidly without surrendering to the hamburger and hot-dog stands, most notably in the International Plaza, a busy jumble of closely packed shops and food counters. The corner-lot boomtime atmosphere is a pleasant change from the more ordered pace of the rest of the fair. Ecuadorian banana dogs cost 50-c-, Norwegian loganberry punch 25-c-, and a 99-c- Belgian waffle covered with fresh whipped cream and fresh strawberries can be a meal in itself. Peptic athletes can eat Egg Foo Yumburgers, Fishwiches, and frankfurters packed in cornmeal, and wet it all down with Philippine beer. The Luxembourg, a restaurant the size of a closet, serves all the sausage-loaded country onion soup you can eat for $2.
Traps & Troubles. There are a few flypaper palaces that have the bads and should be noted for it. The Hall of Education is full of plastic flower exhibits and other flotsam that has nought to do with education. The Better Living and Transportation & Travel pavilions are both traps. Their Kafkan walls are lined with booths from which predator salesmen claw for the jugular. The pavilion of American Interiors is only a big furniture showroom that charges 50-c- admission. The Underground House ($1) is the pavilion of American Interiors six feet under. Hollywood ($1.25) is a stockade full of tacky TV and movie sets, plus a museum that misspells the names of stars (Tallulla Bankhead).
The so-called Lake Amusement sec tor is merely a disaster area. Its trouble is simple: the amusements the area offers are almost all less amusing than the free shows of the industries. In 1939 this amusement area was four times as large, and there were nudes there. This time there are a few trained porpoises and the flume ride.
But these things are not enough to draw crowds, especially when the main entrance to the fair is so far away. The major shows of the area would have to do that, and they are not succeeding. Texas' huge production, To Broadway with Love, costs from $2 to $4.80 and is an oversized, undertalented anthology of Broadway show tunes--done by performers who seem to have been drawn from the senior class at high school. A circus playing to 35 people is one of the rainiest sights in the world, and one can see it in the Ringling tent. The circus is a good one too. Finally, the entire amusement area is ringed by American Machine & Foundry's monorail, which is a good ride but commands a view of the dreariest part of the fair.
Pike & Watusi. The ultimate amusement really comes with the fair's endless cosmopolitan touches, both great and trivial.
You can see how they dance in Guinea, buy a fez from Morocco, eat a soft-shell Maryland crab. While the Malaysians aren't looking, you can run Malaysian tin ore through your fingers. You can eat walleyed pike from Minnesota and see a chef from India baking bread in mud pots. In the calm oasis of the Irish pavilion, you can drink coffee primed with Irish whisky and listen on earphones to actors like Micheal MacLiammoir and Siobhan McKenna reading Yeats, Swift or Synge. In the Indonesian pavilion, you can look over the Indonesian girls that were personally selected by President Sukarno. There is even a portrait of a beautiful woman painted six years ago by Sukarno himself. Upstairs more girls dance to the gamelan music of Bali.
Fresh Sudanese dates cost 25-c-, and 50-c- buys a look at the recently discovered 1,000-year-old Sudanese Madonna. You can watch a New York harnessmaker make a saddle and West Virginians blow glass. At the Singer exhibit, you can see jeweled woolen fabrics that cost $1,200 a yard. You can walk through the African pavilion, see Watusi dancers and royal Burundi drummers and have your eyes opened to a dozen nations you never knew existed, and a year or so ago you were right.
You can eat pastry flown from Tunis, drink Israeli orange soda, savor an Egyptian beancake sandwich, try a taco from Colombia, drink Greek wine, and sober up at an Indian tea bar. You can inspect benni seeds from Sierra Leone, pitchforks from Taiwan, and yourself on RCA color TV. You can see the Piet`a of Michelangelo in the Vatican pavilion.
Totems & Pen Pals. You can see wonderful relics of the early West in a train that has come from Montana--an invitation to a hanging, a machine with which a bartender could mix drinks with his foot, Calamity Jane's thundermug, and Custer's watch. In Parker Pen's handsome pavilion, a computer can seine the world to find you a pen pal who matches your interests and talents. In the New York City building, there is a fabulous 100-ft. by 160-ft. model of the city, including every structure in all five boroughs, built at a scale of 1 in. to 100 ft. for $600,000.
You can watch Japanese warriors play vigorous sword games on a stage surrounded on two sides by water and backed by a thunderous Nagare wall. They smash one another over the head with wooden poles, shouting noises of guttural rage, bobbing, feinting, taking clever steps backward and occasionally falling by accident into the water. You can try on a Panamanian straw hat, test a Nicaraguan wooden spear, and talk to a stranger in California while you stare into his eyes on television-telephone. Alaskan Chilkat Indians will tell you how to make totem poles: start by floating the log in a lake until it steadies, then split off the upper third, since that is where the most knots are.
The great fair succeeds, in the end, because it so abundantly contains the variety of the world. You have only to walk through it to discover continents in the corners of your eyes.
*This price and those that follow are at the adult rate. Children's rates are lower.
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