60 years ago, the World's Fair showcased dazzling inventions and international cultures

It took place at a crossroads in U.S. and world history, amid a changing of the guard, between old and new.

It opened six months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who’d presided over the groundbreaking in February 1962, and just weeks after The Beatles first arrived in America to appear on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

The U.S. Surgeon General had just declared cigarette smoking caused lung cancer. The war in Vietnam had yet to see its first U.S. combat troops. Spacewalks, Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the Moon, the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Immigration Act and even the Cultural Revolution in China — think Chairman Mao Zedong and the Little Red Book — were all still somewhere in the not-so-distant future.

As was future South African President Nelson Mandela being sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island and Nikita Khrushchev being deposed as premiere of the Soviet Union.

Yet, for a generation of Americans, for a generation of baby boomers and their parents, the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens was a seminal moment in their lives, a glimpse of what that future might hold, of what the world might be; a celebration of color, culture, food and technological advances.

“Absolutely, the most fantastic place in the world,” Bobbi Weller, 91, a resident at the Bristal assisted living facility in Jericho, who attended the fair with her husband and three children, recalled this week.

As fellow resident Florence Friedman, 97, who went with her husband and daughters Elizabeth and Margaret, said: “When you saw these things about the future, all those countries, I don’t think I ever thought I was going to go to those places. It was really before it was common to travel on airplanes. You’d take a ship and it would be a week going — and, who had that amount of time?”

The fair theme was a simple one: “Peace Through Understanding.” It all still seems somewhat ironic, considering the change to come in the ’60s.

The women’s liberation movement, bra-burning, the Stonewall uprising, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Race riots that set U.S. cities ablaze; the Summer of Love, hippies — the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic drug scene, all of this followed the fair.

Inventions that glimpsed the future

Sixty years after the April 22, 1964 grand opening of the New York World’s Fair, the world has inherited some of the most dazzling inventions showcased there: Bell Telephone introduced fairgoers to the Picturephone, phone calls accompanied by video transmissions of the participants. There were also “high-speed computers” and the “wonderful world” of chemistry, how the benefits of nuclear fission might enhance lives. There was a demonstration of timesaving kitchen appliances like microwave ovens.

And, in one exhibit, the benefits of credit cards.

The fair also brings to mind that among the 140 pavilions and 110 restaurants representing the interests of 24 states, 80 nations and about four dozen corporations, fairgoers got a glimpse of the “metropolis of tomorrow” with its “free-flowing” roadways, and were told how mankind might soon colonize ocean floors. 

Joseph Tirella, a Bayside native and author of the 2014 bestselling book “Tomorrow-Land, The 1964-65 World’s Fair and the Transformation of America,” said of his research into the fair’s legacy, “What it made me realize is while we went from black-and-white television and Camelot to psychedelic technicolor, it was all to the backdrop of the Cold War. That there was no peace and there was no understanding.”

And like the 1939 World’s Fair, which opened just ahead of World War II and also was hosted on the same site, Tirella said: “It really couldn’t have been at a worse time.”

Maybe one of the least-known facts about the 1964 World’s Fair is that it wasn’t a World’s Fair at all. At least, not technically.

That’s because World’s Fairs are sanctioned by the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions — the Bureau of International Expositions or BIE — and there’s a rule no nation can host more than one World’s Fair in any given decade. Seattle had hosted the 1962 World’s Fair. That meant New York had no chance.

Except, fair architect Robert Moses had other ideas. And, another agenda.

Moses, whose building of Long Island parkways, public pools, and construction of the Triborough (now Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge, led to his controversial standing as a “master builder,” was tasked with acquiring the Flushing Meadows wasteland from the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company and its Tammany Hall crony boss, John A. "Fishhooks" McCarthy, ahead of the 1939 World’s Fair, according to Queens Historical Society Executive Director Jason Antos.

Moses had designs on turning the post-fair site into an outer-borough version of Central Park, Antos said. But the ’39 fair, which introduced the world to television, didn’t attract the attendance — or, produce the revenue — Moses hoped for.

Then World War II happened.

By the early 1960s, Antos and Tirella said, Moses was still looking for one last way to cement his legacy — and came up with the idea for the ’64 fair.

When the BIE refused official sanction, Moses stormed ahead anyway, convinced newly independent former colonies in Africa and Asia to join in, persuaded Latin American nations to host pavilions, and got tourism boards to circumvent the BIE rules and send representatives. He also convinced industries to display their newest works there.

The Ford Motor Co. introduced its new “Pony car,” the Mustang, at the fair, its pavilion featuring the “Magic Skyway” ride, where fairgoers could ride in a new car around a track. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his family even went for a ride. The U.S. Rubber Co. had a Ferris wheel shaped like a giant tire.

Pavilions hosted by corporations included General Motors, General Electric, Westinghouse, IBM, Coca-Cola and Sinclair Oil, which sponsored “Dinoland,” featuring life-size replicas of nine dinosaurs ages before "Jurassic Park." You could even mold a plastic dinosaur in a push-button operated machine. 

The Illinois pavilion featured “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,” where a lifelike President Abraham Lincoln recited some of his famous speeches.

The Hall of Science featured a nearby park filled with rockets that remain to this day. The Port Authority building remains as the current Terrace on the Park. And anyone who’s seen the 1978 Michael Jackson-Diana Ross-Richard Pryor film, "The Wiz," has seen the New York State Pavilion. Same if you’ve seen 1997’s "Men in Black," where the pavilion towers, now undergoing a complete restoration, were disguised as flying saucers.

Erected on the site of the Trylon and Perisphere, the centerpiece of the 1939 World’s Fair, whose theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” the Unisphere globe remains to this day the symbol of the 1964 World’s Fair.

And anyone who attended the 1964 World’s Fair remembers the UNICEF Pavilion, sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and featuring Walt Disney’s “It’s a Small World.”

The ulterior motive of Moses was to lure Disney to the fair and as part of his post-fair vision to have Walt Disney use the location for an East Coast Disneyland, historians said. But after the fair Disney did what many New York retirees do: he went south, to Florida.

An international mix of cultures

Among nations hosting pavilions were: China, Korea, Sierra Leone, Polynesia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Morocco, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Japan, Sudan, Mexico, Venezuela, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and the Philippines.

It was at the fair that many visitors were introduced to international foods for the first time: kimchi, bulgogi, sushi, sake, sukiyaki, shawarma, tandoori chicken, naan, the fragrant nasi kuning — yellow rice or turmeric rice. And, a fair favorite: Belgian waffles.

The 646-acre site also offered another future perk: development of the World’s Fair property coincided with the construction of Shea Stadium, a multiuse venue planned as the new home for the 1962 expansion New York Metropolitans baseball team and the 1960 expansion American Football League team, which just a year before had gone from being the Titans of New York to the New York Jets.

“The No. 1 take-away,” Antos said, “is people experienced different cultures. You ended up with a melting pot you didn’t have at prior World’s Fairs … And, it marked the transition between the old Queens and the new Queens.”

Sixty years later, the grounds have Citi Field, the National Tennis Center and a new soccer stadium on the way. And Queens is the most diverse county in the country.

When it comes to World’s Fairs, the 1964 World’s Fair is not regarded among the great ones. In fact, most fair historians say those include the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower, then the tallest building in the world, was the centerpiece, and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where electricity was first displayed. Some even rank the 1939 World’s Fair ahead of it.

Mobile phone technology was unveiled at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan.

But, for those who attended the 1964 World’s Fair — and during its two-year run, more than 51 million visitors did, from what historians believe was every state in the union and from a majority of countries around the world — it remains a highlight.

Co-founder of the New York State Pavilion Paint Project, whose volunteers repainted the pavilion a decade ago, before New York City began the current restoration, Mitch Silverstein recalled first going to the fair with his family as a 6-year-old from North Massapequa. In the two years the fair was open, he went countless times.

“All good memories that have lived with me since,” he recalled this week. “I remember sitting in the driver’s seat of a Ford Galaxie  at the Ford Pavilion. We didn’t wait for the Mustang like many people did. Of course, It’s a Small World was amazing. Not only did you travel in a boat, but hundreds and hundreds of the little figures sang to you!”

And, Silverstein recalled: “The [Eastman] Kodak moonroof, the Unisphere and its fountains, the grandness of the New York State Pavilion, countries from all over the world, a Ferris wheel shaped like a tire, dinosaurs and space rockets, a futuristic monorail, Travelers Insurance [pavilion] with a roof shaped like an umbrella and the technology of the future are among the many memories.”  

Judi Siegel, 90, a resident at the Bristal in Lake Grove, especially loved seeing the GE exhibit “Progressland” and its Disney-influenced Better Living Pavilion.

“Of course, when you’re young and you see all these nice things — a new refrigerator and a stove — these are things you wanted.”

Rudy Parisi, 90, a resident at the Bristal in East Northport, went to the fair with his wife, Angela, and three of their six children — Angela was pregnant with the fourth — and still have a photo of their son Joey, then 4, with the famous clown Emmett Kelly.

Another East Northport resident, Richard Luning, 77, was a 17-year-old from Fresh Meadows, Queens, when he went the first of a handful of times.

“My favorite part was the GE Hall of Progress,” he said. “At the time it was cutting edge in terms of home cooking, electronics … I thought it was quite amazing that they could microwave food — and, have it prepared within two minutes.”

To coincide with the 60th anniversary celebrations, the Queens Theatre, which began life as the Theaterama, one the structures designed by renowned modern architect Philip Johnson as part of the New York State Pavilion, will feature fair-related monthly events April 28 through October — the series dubbed Theaterama!

For more info, and to make reservations, visit queenstheatre.org.

While many fair visitors recalled seeing the Vatican exhibit featuring Michaelangelo’s marble statue La Pieta, former Hofstra Vice President for University Relations Mike DeLuise, now retired, had a revelation at the fair.

He was a 15-year-old junior at Cathedral College Prep Seminary in Brooklyn studying to be a Catholic priest when he and his fellow students saw Pope Paul VI on his visit to the fair on Oct. 4, 1965. DeLuise got to stand just feet from the pope at the Vatican pavilion. DeLuise then joined an audience of 90,000 for Mass at Yankee Stadium that night, where he got to stand on second base.

Like many New Yorkers, DeLuise attended the fair numerous times, wandering the grounds with friends, visiting many of the religious pavilions, which included not only the Vatican, but those of the Mormons.

DeLuise fondly remembered a blond-haired woman handing out free copies of the Book of Mormon.

“I didn’t become a priest,” DeLuise said. “And, I didn’t become a Mormon. But I had a great time meeting girls at the World’s Fair. It changed my life.”

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”