Tent of Tomorrow and Meadow Lake
1964 World's Fair Site, Flushing Meadow/Corona Park, Queens, NY

The 1964 World’s Fair was held in Flushing Meadow/Corona Park in Queens, New York City. The site is dominated by three connected concrete towers that support three 64-foot-diameter platforms at different heights, with the highest one at 216 feet. These towers were part of the New York State pavilion at the fair, and housed observation decks serviced by high-speed elevators. The towers have been unused since the fair, and decades of rain and wind have taken their toll; almost all of the metal elements (including the inside stairs) are rusted to the point of uselessness, and only the strength of the massive concrete columns keeps them standing at all.

At the foot of the towers is another magnificent relic of the fair-- the giant “Tent of Tomorrow,” an open structure of tensioned steel supported on 16 concrete columns, each 98 feet high. The Tent of Tomorrow was also part of the New York State pavilion at the fair. It was designed by modernist architect Philip Johnson, and the floor of the structure has a huge terrazzo map of New York State, now cracked and nearly invisible beneath weeds.

The most famous remnant of the fair is the Unisphere, a 120-foot diameter steel globe (the largest globe in the world) which is still a polished and pristine Queens landmark. But although a number of other structures from the ’64 World’s Fair have found new lives—such as the Queens Museum of Art and the Queens Theatre in the Park—the structures from the New York State Pavilion, though magnificent, have essentially been left to rot.

Most of the country knows this part of New York City only from television broadcasts of the US Open, which is held in the USTA National Tennis Center at the northern end of Flushing Meadows/Corona Park. Shea Stadium is just to the north of the Tennis Center, and most of the park is just wide open spaces and large lakes, a landscape shaped by the city-beautiful aesthetic of Robert Moses when he was the administrator of the 1964 World’s Fair.

But the threads of this region can be traced much further back. Before Robert Moses came along, the park had already been home to the 1939 World’s Fair, a stupendous and dazzling event with hundreds of pavilions which introduced the American public to technologies we now take for granted: television from the Radio Corporation of America, air-conditioning from the Carrier Corporation, diesel engines, even nylon stockings.

The 1964 World’s Fair was not so significant in terms of the technologies introduced, but it was nonetheless a massive project that stood out even in an era of New York’s history that was characterized by huge projects. It was also not actually a “real” world’s fair as previous ones had been-- it was never sanctioned by the Bureau of International Exhibitions-- and instead it was the product of an unprecedented level of cooperation between corporations and municipal authorities. Over its two- year run, the fair lost a huge amount of money, in part because people complained about the overly “commercial” atmosphere, and defaulted on a $24 million loan from the city. This debt, combined with the depression of New York in the 70s, is a large part of the reason that the structures from the fair were not better maintained.

But to me, the faults of the fair are almost inconsequential; what I love about the idea of the fair, and its towering monuments, is that they are the symbols and relics of the tremendous ability that New York has had to utterly change and reconstruct the environment. Prior to the ’39 World’s Fair, the entire site—now a green and landscaped expanse—was a giant ash dump, run by Brooklyn Ash Removal. In the novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald describes how the area looked in the 1920s: “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."

And in this desolate landscape, someone had the vision to build not just one, but two massive expositions that attracted millions of visitors from around the world.

After years of seeing the remnants of the World’s Fair in Queens, I finally climbed the towers with the help of a homemade grappling hook. I took this picture from the top of the tallest tower, looking south over the Tent of Tomorrow and Meadow Lake. Meadow Lake is outlined with lights at the top of the picture, and the Tent of Tomorrow is the structure that looks like a spoked wheel-- actually a very large building, and made small only by the height of the tower from which I took the photo.