Trucks, Cranes Herald World's Fair
"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is the valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens . . ."
—"The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925.
BY SHEMED S. SNIDER
(United Press International)
NEW YORK - On a meadow that once was a valley of ashes the sounds of trucks and cranes, of drills and hammers blore out a countdown to the biggest show ever. The 1964-65 New York World's Fair is just around the corner.
By GERALD S SNYDER
On Wednesday, the bands will play, the fountains will burst and the first of 70 million curious people will spin through the turnstiles into Flushing Meadow, at 464-acre fantasyland east of Manhattan. Represented will be 58 countries and 23 states.
Russia won't be there and neither will England, Italy nor Canada. But as the exposition's president, Robert Moses, puts it: "We'll get along without them."
THE FAIR PROBABLY will. Seven weeks before opening day Moses announced the sale of 28,034,987 advance tickets, worth $35,219,602 — equal to the total paid admissions of the 1993-94 New York World's Fair, three times the paid admission of the 1962 Seattle Fair, and more than the box office take of all of last year's major league baseball games.
While keeping construction going on time, tough-minded Moses has tangled with the Paris based Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) over the fair's accreditation, with New York City over the price of children's tickets, with architects over the exposition's building style and with the city's traffic commissioner who adamantly predicts a COLOSSAL JAM on the fair's new highways.
Moses, 75, also has disagreed with his own chief engineer who happened to remark that "eight or 10" pavilions would still be
FAIR FACTS
FAIR FACTS
Dates of Fair:
April 22-Oct. 18, 1964
 April 21-Oct. 17, 1965
Site:
Flushing Meadow, New York
Admission:
Adults $2, children $1
Estimated Attendance:
40 million first year, 30 million second year
Occasion for Fair:
Tercentenary of New York City
Symbol:
Unisphere
Theme:
Peace Through Understanding
unfinished on opening day ("The fair will be ready and ready in its entirety," Moses said in a news release the next day) and he even managed to incur the wrath of the Ambassador of Kuwait.
"WE ARE ASKED," Moses said in a February speech at Palm Beach, Fla., "why we lay claim to being a world's fair when quite a few regions and areas are missing.
Instead of celebrating the presence in the fair of many nations, old and new, who are eagerly participating, the critics shake their gory locks mournfully and ask where are the British Raj, Malagasy, Rudolph the Rainer and his roulette, the Sultan of Kuwait with his bottomless oil, Cadillaas, hares, heat, sand flies and camel dung?"
But no matter what may happen from now on, the fair is sure to shape up as the most elaborate of any ever assembled.
The speech came to the attention of a senator, was printed in the Congressional Record and seen there by Jamil al-Hassani, press officer of the Kuwait Embassy in Washington who wrote Moses a letter in protest.
ON THE SAME land where the trilon and perisphere blossomed during the 1939-40 world's fair, building styles range from small kiosks and authentic American
Indian dwellings to IBM's eggshaped pavilion designed by the late Eero Saarinen, Kodak's "floatini carpet" concrete roof structure and an ornate three-story hair belonging to Hong Kong.
When they were first planning the fair, Moses said he didn't care if the buildings were "avant-garde, fin de siècle, reactionary, electric, rococo, siroco, General Grant, General Mills, Corbu, Corbel, Bauhaus, skull and bones — they are all the same to us."
If visitors are surprised at what they see on the outside they are apt to be awed at what they see inside. The fair promises everything from Michelangelo's marble Pieta to a Walt Disney-created figure of Lincoln that will rise from a sitting position, shake hands with the visitor and answer his questions.
There will also be a "people wall" in one pavilion which will hydraulically lift an entire audience into a theater, a duck farm incubator (with eggs hatching daily); a pizza school, with exhibits of different types of pizzas made around the world; a replica of Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of
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lake amusement area and an 80-foot high replica of an automobile tire will revolve with 24 barrel-shaped gondolas.
St. Louis;" the ancient temple of Anghor Wat and hundreds of other displays ranging from the works of Velazquez, Goya, El Greco and Zurburian to the Holy Ikon of the Virgin of Kagan and a six-stage carousel auditorium "where audiences will move from stage to stage without leaving their seats."
Admission to the fair will be $2 for adults and $1 for children under 12 with youngsters under two admitted free. Fair officials claim that 75 percent of all exhibits will not charge admission and of the 134 full-sized pavilions 119 will have no entrance fee.
A "Jaycopter" will simulate the action, controls and flight pattern of a conventional helicopter; a monorail will whirl around the
One estimate (there are many) has the average adult spending $7.50 during the course of a day.
This does not include meals. In 174 restaurants and 24 snack bars visitors will buy everything from Argentine empanadas (meat patties), Belgian gaufres (waffles), Korean "Kimsee" and Maryland sea food to a complete seven-course Chinese dinner (for 99c) and popular priced hot dogs (30c) and hamburgers (40c).
For the foot-sore there'll be 10,000 benches and in the Simmons Beautyrest "Land of Enchantment" a chance to lie down in the quiet and comfort of one of 44 rest alcoves complete with contour beds and disposable sheets and pillowcases. Admission to the building is free. Rest alcoves $1 per half hour. It's estimated it will take 12 days to see the entire fair.
THE FAIR WILL have its own hospital, doctors, nurses and attendants and six first aid stations on the grounds.
During the 1939 fair at Flushing Meadow television was just an embryo and RCA amazed visitors then with a remarkable invention.
This year RCA will operate the world's largest closed-circuit color television network, consisting of about 300 color receivers in pavil
ions, waiting rooms, restaurants and private VIP lounges.
The network also will help alleviate one of mankind's oldest problems — the lost child. The faces of the little lost ones will be flashed on the screen in living color — tears and all.
DESTINED TO attract the largest crowds are the two largest pavilions — General Motors and Ford. They're neighbors in the sprawling transportation section and each is trying to outdo the other.
GM will have an elaborate version of the "Futurama" it introduced in 1939-40. About 70,000 visitors a day will lean back in contour chairs and move at four miles per hour through jungles, deserts and cities of the future.
The Ford feature attraction will be a Disney-created "Magic Skyway" with a ride in a variety of the company's 1964 convertibles through primeval swamps, caves and worlds of tomorrow.
THERE'LL BE NO girl shows at the 1964 fair. Bob Moses laid down the law: "We shall have no cheap midway with mechanical gadgets, freaks, shills and dubious sideshows."
But there will be entertainment—from steel drum bands, calypso singers and limbo dancers to ice reviews, boat rides, live snake dances and Elsie the Cow. There will be hula girls in the "Alohatheatre" of the Hawaiian exhibit.
Admission to a "color carousel" of one building will be restricted to women where the ladies will be treated to a personal hair-coloring analysis via electronic computer. The analysis will be made, the fair has announced, "during a delightful six-minute
ride in a beautiful, glass-enclosed circular building."
Connecticut-born Moses, who has been a park builder, highway constructor and operator, slum clearer and builder of great buildings, got into his first tiff when the BIE refused to approve the New York World's Fair as a fair. The BIE said it had approved the Seattle World's Fair in 1962 and that its rules held two fairs could not be held in the same country in any 10 year period.
THE SOVIET UNION withdrew its plans for a pavilion when the U.S. State Department asked for an equal two-season session for a U.S. pavilion in Russia. The Russians were ready to admit the United States for one season only and the plans fell through.
Britain and Canada, looking toward a BIE-approved exposition in Canada in 1967, also have stayed out. Among those who are in: Austria, Belgium, the Republic of China, Japan, Morocco, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel (backed by a group of American businessmen), Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sweden, the Vatican and the United States with its $17 million block-square "Challenge to Greatness" pavilion.
The states represented: Hawaii,
Alaska, Florida, Illinois, Loui-
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SECTION C
UNIVERSITY
Daily Hansan
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