“To see if all the peoples of the world can live together in a single place”
At the second stop from the end of the 7 train in Queens is what was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a vast dumping ground for ashes and street sweepings. The land was considered to be “all but worthless” when it was acquired for the purpose, and it is difficult to imagine that the value of the place benefited very much from the years in which trains carrying 20,000 cubic yards of ash would arrive every night from Brooklyn. In September of 1911, the local papers began to publish complaints of the horrible stench that “pervaded the territory for miles around and forced residents to close their windows in the hottest weather.”
It was 27 years and eight months later that E. B. White paid a visit to the same site. “The refurbished ash heap,” he wrote in spring of 1939, “rising from its own smolder, is by far the biggest show that has ever been assembled on God’s earth, and it is going to be a great place to go on a fine summer night, a great place to go on a sunny spring morning.” The ash heap was, by that time, the home of the 1939 World’s Fair (tagline: “The World of Tomorrow”), which would be followed by another fair at the same site in 1964 (tagline: “Peace Through Understanding”).
The fairs were wildly popular. Each one attracted tens of millions of visitors from around the world who came to see the marvelous pavilions constructed by dozens of countries and corporations, and to bear witness to such marvelous attractions as the world’s longest escalator or models of NASA rockets. The 1939 French pavilion included a restaurant. The Vatican brought in Michelangelo’s Pietà for the occasion 1964. No expense was spared.
Today, the site of the fairs is Flushing Meadows Park. The fairs are gone, but on warm summer evenings, people from the surrounding neighborhood gather. There are soccer games and an ambient smell of grilled meat. The US Open takes over a part of the park when it comes to town and the Mets play ball nearby, which gives the whole place a sense of athletic festivity.
Bitterly cold February afternoons, unlike fine summer nights, seem to have escaped White’s endorsement (“Nobody can embrace Culture in a topcoat,” he wrote back in 1939), but that has not stopped me on two recent visits with friends to Flushing Meadows. This time of year, there are no soccer games and no grilled meats. Instead, there seems to be just a skeleton of grandeur and a sense in the architecture that something marvelous happened here and that you have missed the boat.
The idea of a World’s Fair — the notion that the nations of the world should descend upon Queens at great expense and come together to show off the latest in science, culture, and consumer wares — seems completely beyond modern comprehension. The boardwalk linking the subway station to the park feels just a bit too wide and windswept. The benches, which were World’s Fair originals, lean slightly forward and up in a vague gesture of optimism. (Their contemporary replacements also feature new anti-homeless armrests.) The “Fountain of the Planets” appears as a neglected concrete pond, its name presented only on the placards next to emergency ice rescue ladders placed by the Parks Department.
The sidewalks orbit around a midway, which does not seem apparent until the empty fountains, a 43-foot-tall statue of a man throwing a rocket into the heavens, and the 140-foot-tall Unisphere line up in a perfect row. Fifty-eight years after the last fair and in the middle of winter, it is still an impressive sight to behold.
The Unisphere, an enormous globe made of stainless steel sitting in a fountain, was installed for the 1964 fair. (The fountain was shut off several years ago after it sparked a small disease outbreak among the playful children of Queens.) The original plaque explains that the Unisphere (so generously donated by United States Steel) is dedicated to “Man’s aspirations toward Peace through mutual understanding and symbolizing his achievements on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe,” which certainly gets a person thinking about entropy if they weren’t already. Man’s achievements in an expanding universe lately seem to be limited to things like new wars in Europe, performative cuts to municipal budgets, and a Californian delusion called “Metaverse” or something.
At the foot of the Unisphere is what served during both fairs as the New York City Building, which was devoted to showing off the many marvels of New York’s municipal government. In 1964, this included a magnificent scale model of the city called the “Panorama,” which remains in the building as part of the Queens Museum, which occupies the space.
That the model of New York City should exist in the New York City building in the middle of Queens all feels rather insular, as New York sometimes does. The truth, however, is saved for the observant reader of plaques. At the Queens Museum, any plaque reader emerging from the men’s restroom near the reception desk and happening to look at just the right spot on the wall will discover the previous life of the New York City Building which, following a brief stint as a roller rink, housed for four years after WWII the General Assembly of the United Nations.
If New York is, as a PBS documentary in the 1990s put it, “the crucial, sometimes harrowing experiment, to see if all the peoples of the world can live together in a single place,” the refurbished ash heap in Queens was, at times during the twentieth century, the core of that experiment. The effect of spending an afternoon there even now is that a person leaves with a vague sense of having seen something international — the diet version of looking at an international airport departure board and feeling a sense of indefinable possibility.
That same feeling — perhaps a darkened and rather superficial version of it — has been on subtle display around town for the last few days. Buildings were lit up in blue and gold and many of the coat-wearing dogs of Manhattan suddenly found themselves wearing the same colors.
Carnegie Hall welcomed the Vienna Philharmonic for three performances and this weekend put its money where everyone’s mouth is when it brought in a new conductor to replace the previously scheduled Put*n loyalist. The change was all over the news, but the only indication of it when I arrived at Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoon was an insert in the Playbill: “Please note that Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in place of Valery Gergiev.”
“Everyone likes to think that this kind of thing isn’t political,” said the woman sitting next to me, who moved to New York as a child from postwar Albania, “but that is impossible.”
At the beginning of the second half of the concert — after the Prokofiev but before the Tchaikovsky — a violinist announced that a moment of silence for the people of Ukraine would follow the last piece and that the musicians (whose home of Vienna is less than 300 miles from the western border of Ukraine) have no tolerance for acts of war. The crowd applauded wildly.
I biked home after the concert (people will tell you that the best way to get to Carnegie Hall is practice, but often fail to consider that a train or bicycle is very much easier and faster). On the way, I stopped by where East 91st Street meets Central Park. I pass by at least once a week but had never realized that it is the location of the Russian Consulate. The street is blocked off by police barricades, seemingly less to protect the Russians and more to protect the protesters who have come to wave flags, lead chants in Ukrainian, and place signs and sunflowers in the barricade.
The Russians, most people in the crowd theorized, must not be home. The doors were locked, the curtains were drawn, and steel shutters were closed on many of the windows. A single Russian flag still hung over 91st Street. If they did happen to be out on Saturday evening and cared to look west toward the reservoir in Central Park, it would have been difficult for them to escape the fact of the sunset’s blue and gold color scheme to match the jackets of the dogs and the flags of the protesters which, to a person looking for that sort of thing, felt like an endorsement by the very atmosphere.
The glorious fairs also had their tensions. There is no avoiding that Germany was conspicuously absent from the 1939 fair owing to what they called “budget concerns,” or that there was a still-unsolved bombing at the British pavilion on the Fourth of July in 1940 that killed two police officers. At the end of the fair, many of the staff of European exhibits found themselves to be refugees and settle in New York. The 1964 fair — held against a grim nuclear backdrop — included a “Science for Survival” exhibit put on by the Office of Civil Defense, perhaps as a backup in case “Peace Through Understanding” happened to fall through.
Even so, the bold hope of the World’s Fairs in Queens and of the people out this weekend in Manhattan are not far off: that man’s achievements on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe might be more ambitious than a smoldering heap of ashes.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“A Visit to Chernobyl: Travel in the Postapocalypse” by Cameron Hewitt from Rick Steves’ Europe and reprinted in The Best American Travel Writing 2019.
For some years between its infamous nuclear disaster and the latest events of… well, everything, the Ukrainian government permitted trips to the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone for tourists traveling with guides. The exclusion zone — its own sort of ash heap — tells its own story of Ukrainian history and the radiation, it turns out, is not such a concern if you know the right people.
I first read Hewitt’s account of his visit in December of 2019 and had started to talk with friends about penciling in such a trip for the not-so-distant future. It appears that it may still be quite some time.
“The World of Tomorrow” by E. B. White in Essays of E. B. White.
Readers who regularly make it to this part of the Newsletter will already be familiar with E. B. White (yes, the Charlotte’s Web guy) and would do well to just buy the book. Ten years before he wrote “Here is New York” (which has made multiple appearances in this section and will make still more), White visited the 1939 World’s Fair to see the World of Tomorrow for himself while fighting a cold. The review? “When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.”