The fair, like the Carlsbad Caverns, the Little Bighorn battle site and the Newfane (Vt.) Inn, is worth a visit if you happen to be in the neighborhood. The locals who live within easy distance of Flushing Meadow by subway, train or highway keep going back there and to date have actually outnumbered tourists at the turnstiles. In any case, it takes at least several trips to sample the top attractions. Some of them are even worth the long wait in line.
PAVILIONS
SPAIN has gone to immense trouble and expense to impress, delight and profit. With great paintings, hot-eyed flamenco dancers, two exceptional restaurants (see below) and a cunning convolution of courtyards and corridors, Spain's entry is Número Uno.
JAPAN displays ancient arts and modern crafts, consumer products ranging from TV sets and cameras to microscopes and automobiles. All this is assembled in a complex of buildings circling a many-leveled courtyard, featuring samurai duelers, Kabuki (and other) dancers, judo wrestlers.
VATICAN. The Pieta, bathed in blue light, is a major attraction, though somewhat diminished by the cold setting and a crowd-hustling moving sidewalk. Cognoscenti who have already seen Michelangelo's masterpiece glowing like old ivory in the natural light of St. Peter's might be wise to remember it that way.
BELGIAN VILLAGE advertised itself for months as being "worth waiting for." Open at last, it has proved something of a disappointment, since its charming, smaller-than-life evocation of an ancient Flemish town is still not complete. It may be worth waiting for a while longer.
JOHNSON'S WAX is cleaning up with a highly polished, noncommercial film, To Be Alive!, which has drawn extravagant praise from cinema buffs and deserves every bit of it.
GENERAL ELECTRIC has built itself an enormous drum. The outer rim houses six theaters that revolve around a series of stages showing American home life (appliance division) at 20-year intervals from the turn of the century to the present. Moving, talking, life-size dummies inhabit the sets, which unintentionally plug nonprogress by going from a scene that recalls the cozy charms of the icebox, wood stove, gaslight era to one that all too plainly spells out the sterile joys and chilly conveniences of a modern electric home that has little taste and no charm at all.
IBM, on the other hand, makes you glad that you live in 1964. Its wondrously way-out building is nothing more than a monstrous egg perched atop a modern steel structure. The ingenious People Wall lifts you hydraulically to the egg's underbelly, where huge bomb-bay doors open and let you in.
COCA-COLA has a walk-through exhibition that lets you wander down a street in Hong Kong, past the Taj Mahal, up into the Alps, through a Cambodian rain forest and onto the deck of a cruise ship off Rio. On the way out is a delightful display of antique Coke bottles and advertisements.
PEPSI-COLA'S UNICEF exhibit features an indoor boat ride through a wonderland of Disney dolls, representing children of every country and culture, all wildly singing and dancing to a mad little tune called It's a Small World. This particular ride is a must for all children, also charms many adults.