City of New York

Most everyone who knows anything at all about the 1939-40 New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows knows that only two buildings from The Fair remain in situ.

The first and most important of these is the New York City Building, the only building from The Fair intended to be permanent. Designed by Aymar Embury II, it served as home to the UN from 1946-50 and more recently housed an ice skating rink, now departed, in order to allow expansion by the building's other tenant, The Queens Museum of Art.

This 1939 View of the New York City Building Remains Largely Unchanged Today

This expansion will be completed by the end of next year. In the meantime visitors can view a model of the renovations. The building's future once looked rather precarious, but the current project seems to be a reasonable compromise between the Museum's present needs and a healthy respect for the past. 

We shall see. At least the Museum had the good sense to scrap the bizarrely Solomonic proposal of splitting the building in two down the center!

The New York City Building's Cornerstone