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xiii Introduction next time you’re in the city so nice they named it twice, take a walk in the park. Not Central Park, but one that’s half again as big and is even more of a central park, located in the geographic and population bull’s-eye of New York City. It’s Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens where, before the soccer players, picnickers, and best tennis players on the planet took it over, the last great world’s fair took place. Between April and October 1964 and again in 1965, some fifty-two million people from the four corners of the earth gathered there to be part of what Fair officials predicted would be the greatest single event in history. The park is an enduring legacy of the Fair, transformed from the dismal “valley of ashes” that F. Scott Fitzgerald described in The Great Gatsby into a big, beautiful thing that is the pride of the borough. Few people today, of course, would say that the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair achieved, or even came close to achieving, this more than lofty, perhaps ridiculous claim of becoming the greatest event in history. Besides the sheer attendance , however, which made it not just one of the most popular world’s fairs but perhaps one of the most popular events of any kind ever to be held, consider what a typical fairgoer could experience in a single day in Flushing Meadows. In between seeing color television for the first time at the RCA Pavilion and taking a ride in a brand-new car from Ford called the Mustang, one might have stopped by Bell Telephone’s pavilion to try something named the Picturephone that let you see (and, a little concerning, be seen by) the person you were speaking to. One’s next stop might be the IBM Pavilion to see what the huge fuss was over this new business machine, the computer, followed by a visit to GE’s pavilion to watch a real demonstration of thermonuclear fusion in which a million amperes of “free energy” were released. Then, after strolling through the Space Park to check out a few rocket ships that had actually been in orbit—quite a thrill in these heady days of the race to the moon—one might go back in time to see a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls followed by Michelangelo’s Pietà, especially since this event was the first time that masterpiece had left the Vatican since it was sculpted 465 years earlier. Then just for fun, one might swing over to Pepsi’s pavilion to take in a new ride xiv Introduction built by Walt Disney called “It’s a Small World” and then over to the Illinois Pavilion to see another Disney creation, an eerily lifelike (or just plain eerie) robotic Abraham Lincoln that reportedly looked, spoke, gestured, and even smiled like the dead president. Finally, for sustenance, you might head over to the Chun King Inn for its seven-course dinner (for just ninety-nine cents, thankfully, now that one was nearly flat broke) and, on the way out, one of those Bel-Gem waffles that everybody said was the best damn thing at the Fair.1 Some, perhaps many of you, had such a day or something like it in your own visit to Flushing Meadows in 1964 or 1965. I was lucky enough to, giving me firsthand knowledge of the amazing experience that was the Fair, especially for an eight year old. “Anyone who has attended [a world’s fair] has a story to relate about the[ir] experience,” says Ilene Sheppard in her essay in Remembering the Future: The New York World’s Fair from 1939 to 1964, and this Fair was no exception. Sheppard rightly believes that world’s fairs are “cultural common denominators that cut across social and class distinctions” and “shared experiences among diverse groups of people,” powerful ideas that certainly describe the biggest one of all held in the most polyglot of cities. Still, despite the incredible array of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that more than fifty million people took in some forty years ago, the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair has been either discounted or simply ignored by both scholars and general writers alike. Not as beautiful as the Columbia Exposition ’s White City in Chicago in 1893, not as progressive as the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, and not...

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