Great Scot!

One of The Fair's most popular attractions was the railroads exhibit, and it's not hard to see why. The Duchess of Hamilton, one of the London Midland and Scottish Railway's luxury trains, was sent across the pond for a 3,000 mile tour of the colonies before being put on display at The Fair. The Duchess was, however, first re-christened The Coronation Scot. The real Coronation Scot was a slightly older train, inaugurated in 1937 for the coronation (hence its name) of George VI. (The real Scot was also blue with silver accents.)

The Duchess had also to be fitted with a headlamp and bell in order to make her legal for American rails. After The Fair, the Duchess became something of a war refugee, not returning home to England until 1942.

"The Coronation Scot" (far left) at The Fair

What a pity we don't
travel like this anymore!

Not long ago, The Duchess of Hamilton's locomotive was given a make-over to restore her to her original streamlined gorgeousness, and was unveiled in 2009 at Britain's National Railway Museum in York, where she can been seen and admired today.

The Eagle Has Landed

High atop two flagpoles flanking what is now Industry Pond (their original location in the park is a bit of a mystery) in Flushing Meadows Corona Park sit two stylized art deco eagles, retained form the 1939 Fair. Though said at various times to have been "gifts" from Nazi Germany, this myth is, thankfully, almost wholly discredited today.

Documentary evidence in the New York Public Library and elsewhere shows the eagles to be the work of sculptor Robert Foster. Indeed, the eagles are perfectly in keeping with Foster's demonstrated style; compare them with his Mercury sculpture, which adorned the Ford Pavilion, for instance.

Assertions of this alleged Nazi connection are rendered even more silly when one remembers that the eagle is the national bird of the United States...its presence in the park would be wholly expected and thoroughly unremarkable.

Elektro in New York Now Through March 31 Only

There’s not a hell of a lot to be seen at the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, which relies heavily on photographs, video and ephemera not always optimally reproduced. In addition, there’s a handful of souvenirs, a few exhibit pieces (like the Sunbeam T-9 toaster), some striking models (including a very impressive Trylon and Perisphere), and artists’ renderings of both realized and un-realized fair buildings, structures, and exhibits. (MCNY’s exhibit covers six fairs, so the amount of material from 1939 is actually quite minimal.)

The real star of the show, though, has got to be the life-size replica of Elektro, the walking, talking, cigarette-smoking robot that wowed audiences at the Westinghouse Pavilion in ‘39. The original Elektro resides in Mansfield, Ohio, in a museum that’s only open a few hours on weekends during the milder months. Presumably the Elektro at MCNY is the replica created and owned by the Mansfield museum, though MCNY provides no detail. And, to tell the truth, I thought that he looks like he’s made out of plastic or fiberglass, not metal...



Elektro was featured in Westinghouse's promotional film The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair, which probably more accurately should have been titled The Middleton Family at the Westinghouse Pavilion. Elektro also appeared in the 1960 comedy Sex Kittens Go to College under the name Thinko. 

Elektro will be at the Museum of the City of New York now through the end of March.

Souvenir lapel pin, featuring Elektro, from 
the Westinghouse Pavilion (Author's Collection)

A View From the Bridge

The Bridge of Flags in 1939;
from the Richard Wurts/Dover paperback

As previously noted, anyone who knows anything about The Fair knows that there are two structures from 1939 still standing in situ in Flushing Meadows: the New York City Building and the Boat House. But it's curious to me how many overlook an important third Fair structure from 1939--the Bridge of Flags. Also referred to as the "Spillway" bridge, it led from the Town of Tomorrow to "Gardens on Parade" and into the foreign zone, which lay to the northeast.












Perhaps its anonymity can be attributed to the fact that the bridge lay on the periphery of the fairgrounds, and does not seem to be indicated by name on any Fair maps. And while one can purchase postcards of the "Bridge of Wings" (one of two bridges that spanned Grand Central Parkway and provided access form the main fairgrounds to the Transportation Zone, the other being the Bridge of Wheels) on eBay, it would seem that the Bridge of Flags was not deemed important enough to be immortalized on a postcard.

December, 2012

To what porpoise?

Today the bridge goes by the name "Porpoise Bridge", which is the name I am assuming was assigned to it for the '64-65 Fair. Why, I cannot imagine...just how many porpoises show up in Flushing Meadows?

Now Playing

The Fair was, of course, intended (originally at least) to be uplifting, educational, and inspirational. According to most authoritative accounts, the Amusement Zone was only admitted to The Fair rather late in the game, when organizers realized that if they wanted to attract the crowds they hoped for, they would have to include something to appeal to the baser instincts. The Amusement Zone (dubbed "The Great White Way") was segregated from the main Fair grounds, and most amusements required additional admission.

But there were other entertainments to be enjoyed that were perfectly in keeping with the vision of The Fair's creators. For a number of years I had heard (read, really) that the documentary films "The City", "The Plow That Broke The Plains", and "The River" were shown at The Fair, but I could never confirm this detail. Well, after a little bit of research at The New York Times, I was able recently to determine that these films, along with a few others, were, in fact, screened as part of The Little Theatre Film Program in the Science and Education Building, located right next to the statue of George Washington at the very center of The Fair.

See Today, 1pm for Showtimes

And guess what? These three films are available on DVD. A fourth, Let My People Live, can be seen and downloaded here. So you can program your own Fair Film Festival! 

The City is available here...

And Plow and River here...

I have to confess, though. As interesting and as important as these films might be as historic documents, as examples of documentary filmmaking, they're pretty dry, pretty tough to sit through. No wonder Fair-goers needed to take a parachute jump, or enjoy some "Living Magazine Covers"!

A still from The Plow that Broke the Plains

Set a Spell

Naturally an area as large as Flushing Meadows-Corona Park would require enough public outdoor seating to accommodate Fair-goers with weary, aching, feet. Two new park bench designs were created for The Fair. Of the 6700 benches that covered the Fair’s 1200+ acres, 1500 were backless, designed so as to not interefere with the view of certain landscaped sections of The Fair.

The benches were manufactured by Kenneth Lynch & Sons in Oxford, CT. Lynch is still in business and still producing the benches today. You can even buy one for your own garden! The 6-foot bench will run you about $700.00.

Benches in storage between seasons;
black-andwhite photos from the New York Public Library

Gloria, cold and camera-shy, on
on of the "Jetson" benches, 2005

A new bench with a much more futuristic look (David Dunlap in The New York Times described it as having “boomerang-shaped, Jetsons-style legs”) was designed for the 1964-65 Fair. You can still see these sleek aluminum beauties at Flushing Meadows. (Also originally manufactured by Lynch, a cast-iron version of this design is available from them as well.)

So what became of all those benches from the first Fair? You can still see the '39 design, including the backless version, all over town. My first thought was that those original 6700 benches were relocated throughout the City sometime between 1940 and 1964. That may well have been the case, but according to Timothy Lynch (Kenneth Lynch's son), none of the benches seen in various City parks today are from The Fair. This only makes sense: a cast iron and wood bench exposed to the elements is simply not going to survive for 70+ years.

BUT...also according to Mr. Lynch, an original '39 bench does, in fact, survive, and is housed in the Olmsted Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Originally constructed as the administration offices of the '64 Fair, the Olmsted Center is today headquarters to the Queens Parks Department.

So today I used a PTO day and rode out to The Fairgrounds. To find The Bench. I was simultaneously delighted and dismayed. The bench is there, sure enough, but it suffers the indignity of being relegated to a thoroughly dreary, drab, and depressing hallway; the pictures speak for themselves. Everyone was really nice, and I even got a lady to agree to take my picture on The Bench. But really, this noble Fair survivor deserves better, is worthy of a setting befitting its heritage, one that will enable it to be seen and appreciated by more people. The Queens Museum across the park would be a much more ideal location, I should think.

I noticed a few things about the bench, however: the right arm (right as you're facing the bench, not as you're sitting on it) is of a heavier casting than the center and right arms; the foot of the left arm end does not have the bolt hole seen on the other two arms and on more recently produced benches; and the decorative detailing on the left arm is also slightly, though obviously, different. I suspect that the left arm is original, and the center and right arms are replacements. From when, I couldn't say. The wood slats are considerably worn, and full of worm holes; these could certainly be original. And of course they wouldn't have been painted bright orange in '39! Still, this is the closest to an original Fair park bench that we have. 

Next time you're in the vicinity of the Olmsted Center, stop in and have a look; the gals at the the front desk will direct you down the correct corridor.

More on that plate glass chair...

A little more research on the plate glass chairs from the Glass Center revealed that another one was sold at auction in 2010 for a little over 9 thousand dollars, nearly twice the going rate in 2003. The auction site cites Arts & Architecture magazine, mentioning that the chair had been sold by J. W. Robinson Co., a high-end Los Angeles home furnishings retailer.

A quick trip to the New York Public Library confirmed this: there was the chair, unmistakably on page 15 of the October, 1947 issue of Arts & Architecture in a Robinson ad. But it's not quite the same chair: the manufacturer is given as Turchin; the glass does not appear to be clear; the cushion appears thicker; and the Robinson chair clearly has additional padding along the inside top back.



I find very little information regarding Turchin on the 'net: they seem to have started out as a much smaller operation, producing, among other things, decorative glass blocks, bookends and aquaria. No mention is made in the Robinson ad of the original chair design, designer, or any Fair connection. Did Turchin simply copy the design? Who knows?

But it would seem that there could certainly be a few chairs out there that date from after The Fair. Assuming, though, that the Brooklyn and Carnegie Museums have done their homework, I am fairly confident that their chairs are Fair originals.