Moses’s great boondoggle: The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair [Part II].

Part I of my article on the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair ran yesterday; the link is here.

Just like the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, the sequel in 1964 had to have a grand monumental structure that would be an instantly recognizable icon of the fair, like the Eiffel Tower (1889 Paris World’s Fair) or the Space Needle (1962, Seattle). In 1939 it was the Trylon and Perisphere, two monuments that were so iconic they appeared on almost every promotional poster and in every book and article memorializing the event. Ironically neither building survived the fair. The monument design that won for the 1964-65 reboot was the Unisphere, a 120-foot diameter globe made of 900,000 pounds of stainless steel, sprouting out of a giant reflecting pool. The Unisphere won out—it was Robert Moses who chose the design, of course—over other ambitious projects, such as one called the “Galaxon,” which would have been a 300-foot-wide concrete candy dish set on a crooked angle, or a 170-foot tower that would have been called “Journey to the Stars.” We’re probably lucky Moses liked the Unisphere, at least a somewhat more down to earth design. The Unisphere survived the fair and is still there in Flushing Meadows Park.

The other iconic architecture of the fair was the New York State Pavilion, whose most recognizable feature was a set of two uneven towers, concrete stalks with disc-shaped buildings on top of them that contained restaurants and observation decks. Moses and the bigwigs of the fair decided to get noted artist Andy Warhol to contribute a large piece of art for the exterior of one of these buildings. They were less than thrilled when Warhol unveiled his choice: a huge grid composed of numerous mug shots of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted. Originally fair officials were concerned that the artwork would invite lawsuits, but somebody evidently pointed out to them that somebody being chased by the FBI was not likely to reveal his location by filing a lawsuit against Andy Warhol for putting his mug shot on a building. The exhibit ultimately stayed.