Fairs: The World of Already

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The one-way cable ride costs 75¢,* lasts four minutes, and is thus like a two-ounce martini, slightly intoxicating but only enough to create a need for more. It should be followed by a fast 500 elevator trip to the top of the towers at the New York State pavilion, where one gets a panoptic, 360° aerial fix on the fair, standing on a platform more than 200-ft. high. All the insane collages that meet the eye nearer sea level straighten out up there, as one sees from above the order of the fair.

Creative Study. It is laid out along the patterned streets that were designed on the same site for the 1939 fair. Most world fairs have been masterplanned, their buildings a harmonic continuum expressing the genius of a committee. Robert Moses, president of the current fair, had no such architectural ambition. He merely leased lots and let everyone erect what he pleased.

This was probably the only instance in the past 75 years that New York's Robert Moses was permissive. Moses, whose vision has changed the face of New York State, is the sort of man who likes to knock things over rather than walk around them. When he took over as fair president, he forced the resignation of Robert Kopple, a lawyer from Long Island who conceived the idea in the first place and who raised the initial money for the fair because he felt that his children were ignorant of the world. Kopple had once made the mistake of opposing Moses on another city project. At least Kopple now has a free pass to the fair. Few other people do. Free passes are as rare as five-leaf clovers. The fair cost $1 billion. Moses is determined to make it profitable, so that there will be enough money left over to develop a park for the city.

Moses also shrugged off the International Bureau of Expositions, which refused to sanction this one on several grounds of finance and timing. So the fair is unofficial. But it has as great a spread of national exhibits as any previous fair, thanks to trade syndicates who hurried in where governments would not go.

Fins & Pylons. Moses once had a committee of architects somewhere underfoot, but they quit when they realized that no one was going to mastermind more than grass seed. Left on their own, many exhibitors predictably put up the sort of eyecatchers that suggest refreshment stands on U.S. 1. In the main, even the fair's most arresting and successful structures are not really buildings. They are events. They were built, after all, to last but two years and then be demolished. They were built as elements of a fair, not as gatehouses to stately cities. Described in words, they sound spectacularly vulgar, but they are really just spectacular.

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