Flushing project shines light on World's Fair rehab effort

It’s almost 1964 again at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Pavilion in Queens.

To celebrate completion of the first phase of rehabilitation work on the Pavilion’s Tent of Tomorrow and Towers — which date to the 1964 World’s Fair — those structures are being illuminated in “parks green” from now on, the New York City Parks Department announced Tuesday.

New architectural lights, first lit Saturday, will shine every night, with additional plans for certain holidays and special events.

The project costs $24 million. In a second phase of the project currently in the planning stages, the structures will be stabilized, allowing for limited guided tours of the towers.

It's the first major effort to preserve the structures since the World’s Fair of 1964.

The Tent of Tomorrow and Towers were part of the New York State Pavilion constructed to host the fair.

The Tent of Tomorrow, 350 feet by 250 feet, has 16 100-foot columns suspending a 50,000 square-foot roof of multicolored panels.

At the fair, the exhibition had three towers of 60, 150 and 226 feet.

“The two shorter towers held cafeterias for the fair, and the tallest tower, as the highest point of the fair, held an observation deck,” a parks department news release said.

Although it ultimately would welcome 51 million visitors, the fair itself was a financial failure, run by the region’s master planner Robert Moses, and it helped herald his downfall.

The fair was also unsanctioned by the Bureau of International Exhibitions, because the organization's rules allowed only one such exposition every 10 years, and Seattle had just hosted one in 1962, and rent couldn't be charged to exhibitioners; the organizers wanted to charge rent to turn a profit. Canada, much of Europe and the Soviet Union declined to participate.

“Criticized by the sophisticated for its kitsch, the 1964-65 World’s Fair nonetheless stands as an optimistic take on the promise of the Space Age, an early taste of the digital world, a culminating celebration of plastics and synthetics, and the beginnings of modern theme-park entertainment,” according to a history of the fair by the New-York Historical Society.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.