By Katie Uva Since their inception in the mid-19th century, world’s fairs have been major cultural touchstones. While fairs have typically had malleable themes and many different types of activities and displays on offer, one of the signature features of world’s fairs has been their role as industrial showcases. Fairs present new technology and inventions and promote the goals of their funders. In the mid-20th century, many of those goals centered on reshaping America’s cities. At the 1939 World’s Fair, several exhibits sought to awe visitors with a picture of prosperous regions anchored by cities, sculpted by highways, and based in suburban family living. By 1964, these ideas and the public-private cooperation they demanded had remade American life. The 1964 World’s Fair aimed to celebrate and perpetuate an already powerful mode of thinking about America’s cities, but in doing so also became a major target for criticism. Read this in its original format here.

Visitors to the General Motors Highways and Horizons exhibit at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair proudly wore this “I have seen the future” pin after stepping out of the “Futurama,” a ride-like feature of the exhibit that traversed several levels of the pavilion, and extended for a third of a mile. The Futurama covered 35,000 square feet and was made up of 408 separate sections created by hundreds of skilled artists and craftspeople.

"The 1964 World’s Fair occurred at a moment of significant upheaval in New York. The Fair was a powerful symbol of the establishment, a showpiece for corporate giants and urban leaders alike to bolster their claim to be bringing Americans a better future. Consequently, it held enormous appeal to visitors but was also a focal point for protest. The pictures of mid-century urbanism promoted at the Fair were undeniably popular; out of 51 million total visitors to the Fair in its two seasons, 29 million went to the General Motors Pavilion, 2 million more than went to Michelangelo’s Pieta at the Vatican Pavilion… Futurama II, sponsored by General Motors, echoed the arguments made by its predecessor; its display allowed visitors to see 'a gigantic machine build a superhighway in the jungle, see barren desert become farmland, and hover above a futuristic metropolis of automated highways and moving sidewalks.'" To learn more about the 1964 World's Fair, check out Katie Uva's article in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.