Revisiting the 1964 World’s Fair

The World's Fair was on to something with video chats, but we're still waiting on those jet packs.

Fifty years ago today, the 1964 World's Fair opened its doors at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in New York, ultimately giving more than 51 million visitors a glimpse into what Walt Disney, Ford Motor Company, IBM, and more believed the future would hold.

The hopes of a new civilization were born on the ash heap of an old one; the fair was the former site of the Corona Ash Dumps, or as F. Scott Fitzgerald called it in The Great Gatsby, the Valley of the Ashes. And in a way, the site has returned to that state. After the 140 pavilions were dismantled, the grounds of the fair largely fell into disrepair. Remnants are scattered across the park grounds: the Unisphere, the Observation Towers, and the scale-model panorama of New York City all still exist, though now they’re used for the most ordinary of outdoor enjoyments.

But for two six-month periods in 1964 and 1965, brand-new Fords brought visitors on a skyway ride through a history of time way above the fair and General Motors shuttled them to a future filled with undersea living and lunar colonies. “At a World’s Fair, man’s dreams of today are given substance, foretelling the realities of tomorrow,” aFord Motor Company film said.

The future, when we imagine it, often still looks like the mid-century modern creations of Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, who designed the zeppelin-like IBM Pavilion. But while a few of the things from the World’s Fair exist now in the form of Skype and Google, many of the fair's futuristic predictions (where are my jet packs?) have not yet come to pass.