NEW YORK AND THE FAIR
By ALISTAIR COOKE
TO the accompaniment of waving flags and bowing diplomats, speeches, salutes and the dancing of forty national troupes ; to the sound of the noble trombones of Sousa, to the patter of feet from every corner of the globe, the smooth shuffle of Cuban dancing girls, the hobnailed marching of the marines ; to the clarion call of the Roose- velt voice and a swing trumpeter hitting high C ; it has happened. The Fair is opened. For more than a year now we have been watching a little geometric pattern creeping on to everything that carried a sign. On shop- windows and motor-cars, on theatre programmes and ash trays, on the wrapper round a loaf of bread, on children's toys, and traced in white smoke against the blue sky, New Yorkers have learned to recognise " a trylon and a peri- sphere " better than they know their wives or the Empire State Building. Everywhere you turned you saw a drawing, or a model, of a white column with three sides, like a tapering cenotaph, and by its side a white sphere. The World's Fair Committee was good enough to explain some time in 1937 that nobody should lose any sleep trying to figure out what this symbol meant. " Why trylon and perisphere? " somebody asked Mr. Grover Whalen, the suave President of the Fair, when they were in the early stages of planning. " Why not? " said Mr. Whalen. And since nobody else would think of using them, they stand for the Fair.
Seen from the top of a midtown skyscraper, the World's Fair lies due north-east of Manhattan Island. It looks like an outlying haze, with nothing much visible but the sword and ball—sorry, I mean the trylon and perisphere. But when you drive out to Flushing Meadows, and stand in the middle of the exhibition, New York's grey towers look like a little backdrop to a brave new world of white stone and glass and trees.
The World's Fair ambitiously calls itself " The World of Tomorrow," and certainly the only human sight it resembles is the shining city that H. G. Wells dreamed after the pestilence of " Things to Come." It covers an enormous area, and it may be mentioned as a standard of reference, rather than pride, that the entire Paris Exposition could be dropped neatly into the mere Amusement Zone of the New York Exhibition. There are only seven zones, but they cover the development and plot the future of human skill in almost every interest that men and women have ever had.
Walt Whitman once had a vision of a city within whose walls " shall all that forwards perfect human life be started, tried, taught, advanced, visibly exhibited." Here, in 1939, he would find it. In the Communications Zone, for example, he could see the stages by which men learned to ride, sail, fly, telephone, flash news and pictures across oceans. You can watch a typewriter being tapped and hear an automaton talk what the keys have pressed. You can see a liner sink, watch its wireless sputtering, and see the recep- tion, the answering flashes and the approach of the rescue ships. For a nickel you can throw a lever and watch a machine work out for you, by the swift inter-meshing of a thousand parts, the insurance benefits of 29,000,000 policy holders throughout the United States. On a beautiful farm, under a huge glass screen, the cows of tomorrow amiably line up on a " rotoIactor," take a shower, are mechanically dried and milked by the loving hands of vacuum tubes three times a day. This is no joke or pointless use of the machine. It is the humdrum daily practice of a famous farm outside New York, which gives this city the best milk I have ever tasted.
To see even this little of one zone would take you about two days. It has been calculated that you could cover the whole Fair, at a brisk trot, in six weeks. If you felt you needed a regular break for sleep, it would take nearer three months. It is much too tremendous to be sketched in anything but a complete issue of this newspaper. By way of consola- tion, and to cheer you with the prospect, need I add that any month you have to spare you can see the most complete collection of the history of all schools of European painting that has ever been assembled in one place, or town, or country? If it means anything to you, you can lose your- self for a day in a replica of Sun Valley, Idaho, where you can ski and toboggan and sled over snowy hills and down ravines stiff with pine.
You can eat all the known foods of every living country. You can, if you will, line up with a hundred schoolchildren and watch a model womb repeat in ten minutes the whole process of human labour and birth, a marvellous working- model designed by no less than the 78-year-old Robert Latou Dickinson, the world's leading gynaecologist. You can move day by day from the sedulously planted landscape of Poland into Ireland. Or lie on the coast of Maine, or stand in Arizona or Sweden. You can get to know the foliage and the soil, the animals and the people of the countries of what we call, in our tolerant moments, the civilised world.
I shall go back again and again to the World's Fair. But I hope that visitors from Great Britain will take a day off and look at that grey backdrop which is Manhattan, at the skyline which is being dwarfed by a bigger show, for the first time since the Dutchmen sailed up the Hudson, and marvelled at the scarlet and gold of the autumn trees that cover the banks of the Hudson like the quills on a porcupine. In wondering at the World of Tomorrow, it will not be hard to forget about poor old-fashioned New York. Poor crazy New York, the modern metropolis that so few visitors will take time to know. That hard, brittle city, which yet, if you care to roam around it, has more trees than buildings —Chinese trees, of all things. Hurrying, sophisticated New York, which is yet tender enough to reserve a strip of underbush for quails and pheasants. Expensive New York, with its high rents, which still leases fifteen thousand acres for pelicans and herons, for trees where chipmunks and grey squirrels may juggle nuts unharmed.
I would like a stranger here to ramble some sunny day up and down the twenty odd miles of trails in Central Park, and wonder why he never saw a crosstown 'bus, or why he never had to walk where the motor-cars whisk by. He might be curious enough to enquire and hear of an older miracle of New York. He would hear about a Mr. Olmsted, who designed Central Park, so that a carriage way, a pedestrian system, and a crosstown traffic system should never meet. He planned it that way as long ago as 1856. This year I like to raise my hat to Frederick Law Olmsted, an ingenious Yankee, in the days when New York housed just a million people, whose vision makes the park seem always half-empty in a town of eight millions. If the great scientists and designers who have created the Fair will take a thoughtful walk through Central Park, they will know why as Americans they had the wit and skill to envisage the World of Tomorrow on Flushing Meadows in 1939.
Previous page
