1939 New York World's Fair

Fairgoers walking to the north of the Theme Center on the Avenue of Patriots would encounter the Communications and Business Systems exhibits. The focal point of this area was the Communications Building, a large structure with a pair of 160-foot-high (49 m) pylons flanking it.[18]^:73[19]^:39

At the AT&T Pavilion the Voder, a mechanized, synthetic voice, spoke to attendees, foretelling the widespread use of electronic voices decades later.[18]^:77 The Business Systems and Insurance Building, an L-shaped structure, housed numerous companies such as Aetna, MetLife, and IBM. In particular, the IBM pavilion displayed electric typewriters and an "electric calculator" that used punched cards.[18]^:79

Next door to these business exhibits, on the "Street of Wheels", was the "Masterpieces of Art" building housing 300 priceless works of the Old Masters, from the Middle Ages to 1800. Whalen and his team were able to borrow paintings and sculptures from Europe. Thirty five-galleries featured great works from DaVinci and Michelangelo to Rembrandt, from Hals to Caravaggio and Bellini.[18]^:81–82

The Community Interest Zone was located just east of the Communications & Business Systems Zone.[19]^:79 The region's exhibits showcased several trades or industries that were popular among the public at the time. It included buildings dedicated to home furnishings, plumbing, contemporary art, cosmetics, gardens, the gas industry, fashion, jewelry, and religion. Organizations such as the American Standard Companies, Christian Science, Johns Manville, Works Progress Administration, and YMCA also had buildings in the Community Interest Zone.[18]^:85–101 In addition, there was also the "Electrified Farm", a working farm,[18]^:91 and the Town of Tomorrow, which included 15 "demonstration homes" on a bowling green adjacent to the World's Fair station of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company.[18]^:100

The Government Zone was located at the east end of the fair, on the eastern bank of the Flushing River. It contained 21 pavilions, several smaller buildings, a centrally located Court of Peace, a Lagoon of Nations, and a smaller Court of States. The 60 foreign governments contributed a wide diversity of creatively designed pavilions housing a myriad of cultural offerings to fairgoers.[18]^:116–117[19]^:55

British Pavilion

The Pavilion of Great Britain and the British Colonial Empire consisted of two buildings with a first-floor connection. The copy of Magna Carta belonging to Lincoln Cathedral also left Britain in 1939 for the first time to be in the British Pavilion at the fair.[18]^:129 Within months Britain joined World War II and it was deemed safer for it to remain in America until the end of hostilities. It therefore remained in Fort Knox, next to the original copy of the American constitution, until 1947. The pavilion included a collection of stamps celebrating Rowland Hill, and the 100th anniversary of the postage stamp. One of the stamps was the British Guiana 1c magenta.[20]

The French pavilion, on the Court of Peace that was the grand open space northeast of the Theme Center, was a two-story structure whose facade featured enormous windows with "majestic curves".[18]^:127–128 Its restaurant was so celebrated that after the fair closed and World War II ended, the restaurant remained in New York City as one of the city's finest French dining establishments: Le Pavillon.

The Greek pavilion was in the Hall of Nations, and was a mirror of how the Metaxas quasi-fascist regime wanted to show Greece to the world.[18]^:130 The interior rooms were designed by Nelly, the famous Greek photographer. Nelly's collages expressed four aspects of Greece: the legacy of ancient Greece, the Christian spirituality, picturesque landscapes and the Greek racial continuity. On one of its outside walls there were four big murals featuring four historic episodes of Greek history, authored by Gerasimos Steris. After the Fair concluded, the pavilion was dismantled and parts of it were donated for the construction of the Greek Orthodox cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Tarpon Springs, Florida.[21]

The Italian pavilion attempted to fuse ancient Roman splendor with modern styles, and a 200-foot (61 m) high waterfall dedicated to Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio defined the pavilion's facade. The pavilion occupied 100,000 square feet of space on plot GJ-1 at Presidential Row North and Continental Avenue and cost more than $3 million.[22]^:197 Italy paid for the right to use another ten thousand feet of space in the fair's Hall of Nations.[22] There, the mosaic floor was to be graced by a high pillar upon which rested the ubiquitous She-Wolf, mother of Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome. Above Nino Giordano's Capitoline She-Wolf extended the lines of a Roman triumphal arch. The long side walls, adorned with emblems of ancient and modern Rome and maps of its new colonial 'empire' were divided into three sections by columns with rostra rising on a plinth of black marble and accentuated by Roman stucco of a velvety-white color. These walls sheltered Romano Romanelli's bronze statue of Mussolini which stood tall upon a black marble pedestal in the very center of the room.[22]^:198

The pavilion's popular restaurant was designed in the shape of the nation's luxury cruise line ships.[18]^{:133, 135}

The Japanese pavilion was designed by the Japanese-American architect Yasuo Matsui to resemble a traditional Shinto shrine, set within a Japanese garden. It offered tea ceremony and Japanese flower arrangement exhibits.[18]^:135–136 The interior had a "Diplomat room", which featured a reproduction of the Liberty Bell made out of Japanese pearls and diamonds, worth $1 million. This room also featured a photomontage mural across which was written the motto "Dedicated to Eternal Peace and Friendship between America and Japan".[23]

The interior of the pavilion was designed by the Japanese architect and photographer Iwao Yamawaki, who studied at the Bauhaus school in Germany in the early 1930s.[24]

Jewish Palestine Pavilion

The Jewish Palestine Pavilion introduced the world to the concept of a modern Jewish state, which a decade later became Israel. The pavilion featured a monumental hammered copper relief sculpture on its facade titled The Scholar, The Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil by the noted Art Deco sculptor Maurice Ascalon.[18]^:136

The Netherlands Garden, located in the Netherlands Pavilion exhibit.

This exhibit presented a comprehensive survey of the cultural importance of the three parts of the empire: the Kingdom of Europe, the Dutch East Indies and the territories of Suriname and Curacao in South America.[25]

The 21 countries of the Pan-American Union, as well as several communications companies, were represented in the Pan American Union Pavilion. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua were among the cooperating countries.[18]^:141

The Good Neighbor policy at the 1939 World's Fair was an extension of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, which sought to redefine negative Latin American stereotypes.[26] Each country seized the opportunity to showcase their country and to make it more appealing to those around the world, especially in the United States. In their bid to increase cultural awareness at the World's Fair, the countries promoted tourism and strove to compare itself to the United States in an effort to appeal to Americans.[27]

Polish Pavilion

USSR Pavilion at night

The Polish Pavilion was composed of a boxy tower. The Second Polish Republic prepared some 200 tons of artifacts, including a royal carpet of King Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, seven paintings presenting important events of Polish history, 150 contemporary Polish paintings, a gunmetal monument of Józef Piłsudski, armor of a Polish hussar from Kórnik Castle, ancient Polish weaponry (14th–18th centuries), a bell manufactured for the purpose of the Fair, folk costumes, house furniture from different regions of Poland, and over 200 examples of Polish inventions.[18]^:143

The USSR (Soviet) Pavilion was a semicircular structure with two wings partially enclosing a courtyard.[18]^:148 Exhibitions included the life-size copy of the interior of the showcase Mayakovskaya station of the Moscow Metro, whose designer Alexey Dushkin was awarded Grand Prize of the 1939 World's Fair.[28] The USSR Pavilion's courtyard contained a statue on a pylon, which was 260 feet (79 m) tall.[29][30] The pavilion was only open for 1939 and was razed at the end of that year.[31]

The United States Federal Building's main building was set between two 150-foot (46 m) pylons. The Federal Building and several surrounding structures contained a combined 23 exhibits, dedicated to 22 states and Puerto Rico.[18]^:151

Southwest of the Government Zone was the Food Zone, composed of 13 buildings in total (excluding the Turkey and Sweden exhibits, which were physically located within the Food Zone but considered part of the Government Zone). Its Focal Exhibit was Food No. 3, a rhomboidal structure with four shafts representing wheat stalks.[18]^:102–103[19]^:45

Among the many unique exhibits was the Borden's exhibit, that featured 150 pedigreed cows (including the original Elsie) on a Rotolactor that allowed bathing them, drying them, and milking them in a highly mechanized way. While no such complete system ever became common in milk production, many of its features came into everyday use in today's rotary milking parlors.[18]^{:105, 107} Next door was the Continental Baking building, presenting a vast, continuous process of baking breads and other products, and was fashioned in the shape of a huge packaged bread loaf.[18]^:109

The Production and Distribution Zone was dedicated to showcasing industries that specialized in manufacturing and distribution.[18]^:175[19]^:87 The focal exhibit was the Consumers Building, a L-shaped structure occupying a triangular plot on the Avenue of Pioneers.[18]^:175–178 Numerous individual companies hosted exhibitions in this region. There were also pavilions dedicated to a generic industry, such as electrical products, industrial science, pharmaceuticals, metals, and men's apparel.[18]^:176–195

The PRR S1 on display at the fair. This engine ran continuously at 60 mph (97 km/h) on a dynamometer while the fair was open.

The Transportation Zone was located west of the Theme Center, across the Grand Central Parkway.[19]^:25 Perhaps the most popular of the Transportation Zone pavilions was the one built for General Motors (GM), which contained the 36,000-square-foot (3,300 m²) Futurama exhibit, designed by famed industrial designer and theater set designer Norman Bel Geddes, which transported fair visitors over a huge diorama of a fictional section of the United States with miniature figures. Along the way, visitors would encounter increasingly larger figures until they exited into a representation of a life-size city intersection.[32] Stores in the GM Pavilion included an auto dealership and an appliance store where visitors could see the latest GM and Frigidaire products.[18]^:207–209

Adjacent to the GM Pavilion was the Ford Pavilion, where race car drivers drove on a figure eight track on the building's roof endlessly, day in and day out.[18]^{:205, 207} Not far from GM and Ford was the focal exhibit of the Transportation Zone, a Chrysler exhibit group. In the focal exhibit, an audience could watch a Plymouth being assembled in an early 3D film in a theater with air conditioning, then a new technology.[18]^:199–201 Other structures included an aviation and marine transport building, as well as exhibits for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company and Goodrich Corporation.[18]^{:202, 204–205, 208–209}

Another large building was the Eastern Railroads Presidents' Conference, dedicated to rail transport.[18]^:202–204 The centerpiece of the Railroad Conference exhibits (on seventeen acres) was "Railroads on Parade", a spectacular live drama re-enacting the birth and growth of railroads. It had music by Kurt Weil and choreography by Bill Matons.[33] In addition to the show, there were important historical objects on display by the various railroads and manufacturing companies, such as the Tom Thumb engine. The Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) had its S1 engine on display, mounted on rollers under the driver wheels and running continuously at 60 mph (97 km/h) all day long. The British London Midland & Scottish Railway sent their Coronation Scot express train with a locomotive LMS Princess Coronation Class 6229 Duchess of Hamilton, (disguised as sister locomotive 6220 Coronation), to the fair.[34][35] GM's Electro-Motive Division had a display of their then new streamlined diesel-electric passenger locomotives. The Italian state railways displayed one of their record-setting ETR 200 electric multiple unit cars.

Life Savers Parachute Jump

Beyond the corporate and government zones, the wildly popular but less uplifting Amusements Area was not integrated into the thematic matrix, and was classified as an Area rather than a Zone. It was located south of the World's Fair Boulevard, along 230 acres (93 ha) on the east shore of Fountain Lake.[18]^:49 Despite the high-minded educational tone that Grover Whalen attempted to set, the Amusements Area was the most popular part of the Fair. The attractions included a roller coaster,[18]^:57 a Flying Turns-style bobsled,[18]^:53 a Life Savers-branded parachute tower called the Parachute Jump[18]^:57[36] (later moved to Coney Island, where it is standing but not operating[37]), the 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge Gimbels Flyer train ride,[18]^:55 (later purchased by Kennywood, where it still runs today),[38] and carnival acts such as a "Little Miracle Town" with dwarves.[18]^:60 Other attractions included a "winter wonderland" called Sun Valley, a Theatre of Time and Space,[18]^:66 and a replica of Victoria Falls.[18]^:69–70

Frank Buck exhibited his "Frank Buck's Jungleland", which displayed rare birds, reptiles and wild animals along with Jiggs, a five-year-old trained orangutan.[18]^:57 In addition, Buck provided a trio of performing elephants, an 80-foot (24 m) "monkey mountain" with 600 monkeys, and an attraction that had been popular at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair: camel rides.[39] A number of the shows provided spectators with the opportunity of viewing women in very revealing costumes or topless, such as the "Frozen Alive Girl", the Living Pictures, and the Dream of Venus building. This last attraction was a pavilion designed by the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and statues as well as live nearly-nude performers posing as statues.[40][41] While there were a number of protests by prominent politicians over the course of the fair about the "low minded entertainment", and the New York Vice Squad raided shows in the area on several occasions, the public generally accepted this form of entertainment.

The Bendix Lama Temple[42] was a 28,000-piece full-sized replica of the 1767 Potala temple in Jehol, Manchuria, commissioned and brought back by the industrialist and explorer Vincent Bendix.[43][44][45] The Temple had previously been exhibited at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, called "Century of Progress".[46] In New York, the Temple contained a girlie show.

Audience members viewing The Billy Rose Aquacade at the 1939–40 Worlds Fair.

Billy Rose's Aquacade was a spectacular musical and water extravaganza foreshadowing the form of many popular Hollywood musicals in the ensuing years. The show was presented in a special amphitheater seating 10,000 people and included an orchestra to accompany the spectacular synchronised swimming performance. It featured Johnny Weissmuller and Eleanor Holm, two of the most celebrated swimmers of the era, and dazzled fairgoers with its lighting and cascades and curtains of water, pumped in waterfalls at 8,000 gallons a minute. The cost of admission was 80 cents.[18]^:52

The Aquacade facility itself served as an entertainment venue in the park for many years afterward, including the 1964–65 World's Fair, but fell into disrepair in the 1980s and was finally demolished in 1996.

There were two focal exhibits that were not located within any of the 1939 Fair's "zones". The first was Medical and Public Health Building, which was located on Constitution Mall and the Avenue of Patriots (immediately northeast of the Theme Center). This structure contained a massive "Hall of Man" dedicated to the human body, and a "Hall of Medical Science" dedicated to medical professions and devices.[18]^:168–173

The other was the Science and Education Building, located on a curved portion of Hamilton Place between the Avenue of Patriots and Washington Square, just north of the Medical and Public Health Building. The building was not used to teach science, but it contained an auditorium and several exhibits on science and education.[18]^:196–197

Although the United States did not enter World War II until the end of 1941, the fairgrounds served as a window into the troubles overseas. The pavilions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example, did not reopen for the 1940 season. Also on July 4 that same year, two New York City Police Department officers were killed by a blast while investigating a time bomb left at the British Pavilion.[51] The bombing has never been solved, but there is evidence that bombing was an inside job by William Stephenson, a British agent based in New York.[52]

Countries under the thumb of the Axis powers in Europe in 1940 like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France ran their pavilions with a special nationalistic pride. The only major world power that did not participate for the 1939 season was Germany, citing budget pressures. The USSR Pavilion was dismantled after the first season, leaving an empty lot called "The American Commons". When the fair closed, many among the European staff were unable to return to their home countries, so they remained in the US and in some cases exercised a tremendous influence on American culture. For example, Henri Soulé moved from the French Pavilion at the fair to open Le Pavillon restaurant, retaining Pierre Franey as head chef.[53][54]

World War II presented additional problems with what to do with the exhibits on display in the pavilions of countries under Axis occupation. In the case of the Polish Pavilion, most of the items were sold by the Polish Government in exile in London to the Polish Museum of America and shipped to Chicago. A notable exception was made for a monument of the Polish–Lithuanian King Jagiełło to which Mayor Fiorello La Guardia took such a liking that he helped spearhead a campaign to have it installed in Central Park, where it still stands today.[55]

Belgium Pavilion

Another building saved from 1940 was the Belgian Building designed by Henry Van de Velde. It was awarded to Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, and shipped to Richmond in 1941. The school still uses the building for its home basketball games.[56]

After the Fair, the Temple was again disassembled, and placed in storage for many years. There were proposals to erect it at Oberlin College, Harvard University, Indiana University, and elsewhere, but they all failed for lack of funding. In 1984, the approximately 28,000 pieces were shipped to the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, with plans to rebuild it in a nearby park, but objections from the neighboring Chinese Embassy have stalled the project indefinitely.[44][45][57]

Some of the buildings from the 1939 fair were used for the first temporary headquarters of the United Nations from 1946 until it moved in 1951 to its permanent headquarters in Manhattan. The former New York City Building was used for the UN General Assembly during that time.[58] This building was later refurbished for the 1964 fair as the New York City Pavilion, featuring the Panorama of the City of New York, an enormous scale model of the entire city.[59] It became the home of the Queens Center for Art and Culture (later renamed the Queens Museum of Art, and now called the Queens Museum), which still houses and occasionally updates the Panorama.

One other structure from the 1939-40 Fair remains in original location: the New York City Subway's Mets–Willets Point station, rebuilt for the Fair. It also served the 1964-65 events and continues to serve New York Mets games and US Open Tennis.

• Finale of the 1939 film Eternally Yours takes place in the fair
• In Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940), the pool hall on Pleasure Island is shaped as an eight ball, with a cue next to it, a parody of the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 World's Fair.
• In the film Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), a comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Carole Lombard and Gene Raymond visit the fair after a dinner date and find themselves stuck high in the air on the Parachute Jump when it malfunctions.
• The Pinky and the Brain episode "Mice Don't Dance" (3-11a) takes place in the 1939 World's Fair.
• The Twilight Zone Season 2 episode "The Odyssey of Flight 33" follows Flight 33 lost in time and briefly in 1939, with a sky view of the World's Fair. However, the pilot incorrectly identifies the location as Lake Success, which actually is in Nassau County, not Queens County.
• In The Simpsons 2003 episode "Brake My Wife, Please", Mr. Burns gives Homer a ticket to the fair as a reward for being the first employee to arrive at work that day. The ticket shown features the Trylon and Perisphere, as well as the opening and closing dates of the fair.
• In the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger, a very similar "World Exposition of Tomorrow" is featured at the same Flushing Meadows location, albeit in 1943, a year when no World Fair was held anywhere due to World War II.
• TV show Futurama's namesake comes from the Futurama pavilion[60]
• In the 1992 film Forever Young, Nat (Elijah Wood) explains to Daniel (Mel Gibson) that what he is watching is called "television". Daniel replies to a disbelieving Nat, "I know, I saw it at the World's Fair in 1939."
• The X-files references the 1939 World Fair in season 2 episode 12

• E.B. White recounts a visit to the fair in his 1939 essay "The World of Tomorrow".[61]
• The still under-construction fair was the focus of the entire book The World's Fair Goblin (1939), which was written in the fall of 1938 after the editors and authors were given a private fact-finding/research tour of the fair. The original draft of The World's Fair Goblin was called The Man of Tomorrow, but it was considered better advertising to include the World's Fair name in the title.
• DC Comics published a 1939 New York World's Fair Comics comic book, followed by a 1940 edition in the next year. It became the precursor of the long-running Superman/Batman team-up book World's Finest Comics. The 1939 and 1940 comics were sometimes referenced in All-Star Squadron. Early Superman was described as a result of natural evolution from the inhabitants of his native world, leading to his alias "Man of Tomorrow", which reminds one of the "World of Tomorrow" theme of the Fair.
• Doc Savage, a popular fictional character of the Pulp Era who used scientific detection in his adventures, was seen as a perfect match for the fair's "world of the future" concept. President Grover Whalen to do a Grand Opening cross promotion with the publisher, Street & Smith. The still under-construction fair appeared in the finale of The Giggling Ghosts (1938).
• In the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon, one of the main characters breaks into the abandoned fairgrounds and the Perisphere.
• The fair is featured prominently in the graphic novel Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies. In it, a father takes his young son to the fair which inspires him to a lifelong fascination with the promise of a hopeful, wonder-filled future.
• Australian novelist and scriptwriter Frank Moorhouse places several chapters of his award-winning novel Dark Palace at the World's Fair. The novel's protagonist, Edith Campbell Berry, works for the League of Nations and in one episode she is presented as the driving force behind the flying of the League's flag alongside those of the United States and the State of New York.
• E.L. Doctorow's semi-autobiographic novel The World's Fair (1985) culminates with a lengthy description of a young boy's visit to the Fair.
• DC Comics' All-Star Squadron (1981-1987) started using the Perisphere and Trylon as the Squadron's base of operations starting in All-Star Squadron #21.
• Susie Orman Schnall's novel We Came Here to Shine (St. Martin's Press Griffin 2020) is historical fiction set at the 1939 World's Fair. The novel features two main characters: Vivi works as Aquabelle Number One in Billy Rose's Aquacade. Max is a journalist for the fair's daily paper, Today at the Fair. The uplifting novel gives a behind-the-scenes look at the fair. The author's previous novel The Subway Girls is about the Miss Subways program that ran in the New York City subway system from 1941 to 1976.

• "Fifty Years After the Fair", a song written and recorded by Aimee Mann, describes the Fair from the current vantage point of "tomorrow", with a mixture of nostalgia and remorse.
• Three well-respected French restaurants—La Caravelle, Le Pavillon, and La Côte Basque—were offshoots "of the seminal restaurant in the French pavilion of the 1939 New York World's Fair, where Charles Masson père began as a waiter under the eye of the legendary Henri Soulé".[62]

• James Mauro (2010). Twilight At The World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War. Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0-345-51214-7.
• World's Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942 by Robert H. Kargon and others, 2015, University of Pittsburgh Press
• Wright, Christopher C. (1986). "The U.S. Fleet at the New York World's Fair, 1939: Some Photographs from the Collection of the Late William H. Davis". Warship International. XXIII (3): 273–285. ISSN 0043-0374.