Pick up your left foot, pick up your right, Walk away from every care.
This is your fun time, you are entitled to it, Fair is Fair.
And Moses is Moses. This week, in the world's most glamorous ex-dump, feet were being picked up in double time to the tune of Richard Rodgers' official Fair Is Fair march to prove that when Robert Moses says there is going to be a world's fair in Flushing Meadow in 1964, there damn well will be a fair.
In the flat-roofed headquarters building, the electronic countdown clock (Fair staffers call it "the Ulcer Machine") was ticking off the seconds, minutes, hours and days before the long-promised morning of Wednesday, April 22. With 14 weeks to go, it had finally become apparent to everyone that the deadline would be met. Finally, that is, to everyone but Fair President Moses: he never had any doubts. "All that remains," says he, "is to pitch in, let nothing slow our pace, and throw open the doors to those who said at the beginning that we couldn't make it."
There had been good reason for skepticism. The 1959 announcement of the world's biggest world's fair was greeted with a who-needs-it attitude by many of the nation's best-heeled potential exhibitors. The Paris-based International Bureau of Expositions huffily refused to recognize Moses' $500 million gambol in the meadow as a proper world's fair on the grounds (among other reasons) that there can be only one world's fair per country per decade, and Seattle was it. But the big corporations came round, and some nations skirted the bureau code by allowing private trade associations to take over the financing of exhibits; one member nation, Lebanon, defied it by going ahead with an official pavilion. More than 50 nations are represented, and of the major powers, only Great Britain, Italy and Russia abstain.
Belly Dancers, Dragons. Ever since Prince Albert masterminded the first one at London's Crystal Palace in 1851, world's fairs have been almost as frequent as revolutions. Many have influenced the architecture, the entertainment tastes and the commerce of their day. In the U.S., the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, with its acres of white plaster palaces, has been accused of setting the cause of modern architecture back by generations; it also established the belly dance as a U.S.
art form. Forty years later, Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress Exposition helped spread the gospel of contemporary architecture with its buildings in the "modernistic" style — forests of blue mirrors, thickets of chromium stair rails, and jungles of neon tubing; it also gave America the fan dance. New York's 1939 fair brought a sense of monumentality combined with reason to architecture, with its carefully planned plazas of glass brick and fluted stucco. It also floated the Aquabelle.