Greatness in Flushing Meadows
JEFFREY HART
1939: The Lost World of the Fair, by David Gelernter (Free Press, 418 pp., $23)
Mr. Hart is a senior editor at NR. IF YOU frequent large and miscellaneous antique shows, you learn all sorts of things from old memorabilia. Some are surprising, such as that Bill McKinley was the most beloved of all American Presidents. Other things are not so surprising, such as that the New York World's Fair of 1939 - 40, at Flushing Meadows, was probably the most brilliant fair of all time, including the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. I went to it almost every day, and I don't need the memorabilia to tell me how important it was.
Which brings me to David Gelernter's book, whose subtitle should be noted: The Lost World of the Fair. His subject is the lost world of the later 1930s as much as it is the Fair itself.
I cannot do more than begin to suggest here the richness of his treatment. In the New York City of 1939 that he paints here the subways and streets were not only safe but clean. In that city there were only forty murders per year; just think of that. Executions were very prompt. Manners at all levels were more formal than ours. In the middle and upper classes, men wore suits and ties. Women never wore shorts. There were rituals about when to touch your hat and when to take it off, correct modes of introduction, established rules governing interaction between the sexes. Men always remained standing until the last woman was seated. Gelernter calls this an ``ought'' culture to contrast it with our ``want'' culture -- not an altogether satisfactory choice of terms, but pretty good.
He notices that art, technology, and their cousin, design, were allied, and shrewdly sees that this was because people wanted to get things done and expected to do so. Engineers were heroes. Among his greatest doers were Robert Moses, the master builder; Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor; and Franklin Roosevelt, the President -- all men of authority, a key word here.
Mr. Gelernter believes that, since the time of the Fair, authority has evaporated. He is certainly correct in this, but he offers no theory to explain it. Perhaps it has something to do with the circumstances we live in. Could LaGuardia himself have kicked off West 96th Street that ``homeless'' maniac who terrorized the neighborhood for months? Could LaGuardia have cut through the years of fuss and actually put pissoirs on New York's streets? Could Robert Moses, of Jones Beach, the Triborough Bridge, countless playgrounds, and magnificent public swimming pools, have rescued Times Square or even built a new highway on the West Side?
Mr. Gelernter is good, but also not entirely satisfactory, on the Fair itself. His device for taking us there is a fictitious diary by a bright young woman who went to the Fair. This does not quite rise to the subject, nor does Mr. Gelernter's own excellent research. He should have looked at the Fair more closely, more continuously and intensely. Yet meaning after meaning emerges.
The hero of the Fair was George Washington, whose large though banal statue graced the place: the Father of His Country, the very image of authority. Then you had the Trylon and Perisphere, by the great firm of Harrison and Fouilhoux. Let us explicate.
The Trylon was, by Fair regulations, the tallest structure there. No other was allowed to be as tall. Of course you can guess what the second tallest structure was: the Soviet pavilion with the Worker atop. He held aloft a huge red star that gazed angrily at night toward the Trylon and Perisphere, which were gleaming white but sometimes bathed in pastel colors.
The Soviet pavilion was a depressing and heavy hulk of Stalinist imperial architecture. All that I can remember from inside were some folk dancers and a replica station from the Moscow Metro, chandeliers and all. You can probably imagine my reaction, even at age 9, to the aesthetics here. Good old Ivan -- the Worker -- was a stitch. He had a thick neck and thick wrists, infallible signs of proletarian virtue. He seemed disconcertingly stupid. Ah, this was what Stalin was putting up against the Trylon and Perisphere? At 9, I became an anti-Communist at a glance.
An adult, meanwhile, would have seen that the Trylon and Perisphere were not casually conceived some lazy afternoon down at Harrison and Fouilhoux. He would have seen that they were a climax of High Modernism, perhaps its greatest architectural achievement. In their geometric character, they represented pure Mind. Henri Matisse had held that all spatial forms could be resolved into triangles, spheres, and cubes: the beginning of Cubism. The Eiffel Tower had famously insulted the low mansard roofs of Paris. Architects connected with European formalism had experimented with huge spires as images of aspiration, and one had even been submitted in a design for Coney Island. Wallace Harrison and Andre Fouilhoux (Wally and Andy to their architect friends) knew all this and figured out how to bring it to a brilliant result.
What did the two gigantic monuments mean? George Washington, the Father of His Country, had his Egyptian obelisk, a symbol of maleness, in Washington, D.C. This had to be retained, but also transformed. The four-sided obelisk became the three- sided Trylon. (Ezra Pound: ``Make it new.'') Meanwhile, just as the Trylon was a representation of masculinity, the globular Perisphere was pregnant with The World of Tomorrow, a giant model inside named ``Democracity.'' Between the Soviet pavilion on the one hand, and the Trylon and Perisphere on the other, the Fair symbolized the greatest conflict of our age, and suggested its resolution.
Much of what this model, and the rest of the Fair, foresaw came to pass. That poor Soviet Worker, with his thick wrists and thick skull, did not stand a chance against the energy and creativity of the West, represented by Harrison and Fouilhoux. Neither, ultimately, did the regime that shipped him here in crates. If the poor clod could have escaped from his Stalinist perch, I like to think he would have headed for the Parachute Jump, the Aquacade, and the Voyage to Mars, picking up a Zombie (a drink that was ``one to a customer'') on the way.
The Fair was consciously designed to represent optimism and brains at home to the cruel new utopias so menacing abroad. Maybe that is why we cared about it so much. The good news is that the Fair -- brilliance, energy, speed, electronics, intelligence -- won.