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Saving (a little piece of) the World's Fair
But artists' "failed utopias" project annoys New York City parks officials
ryann.liebenthal@gmail.com
The Unisphere, a 140-foot high steel frame replica of the earth, hovers beneath the clouds. The white concrete towers of the New York State Pavilion stick out eerily above the trees.
These are relics of the World’s Fair, in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, rust marking their distance from a bygone era.
As the adjacent Queens Museum of Art prepares to expand, and obliterate more of the abandoned fair infrastructure, a group of artists recently tried to salvage a few pieces of what’s left. Flushtopia, they called their project, after the Flushing neighborhood where it’s located.
Preservationists have fought unsuccessfully for years to save parts of the fairgrounds. But New York City officials rebuffed them, according John Jay College urban historian Jeffrey Kroessler, even as developers proposed new plans for the park, including an unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics.
“It would be nice if the historic landscape got the respect it deserved,” Kroessler lamented.
Museum expansion is to swallow up an ice skating rink built for the first World’s Fair in 1939.
The Flushtopia artists’ idea was to create “islands” with fair installation detrius, in the middle of a man-made lake.
Island-Building
Douglas Paulson stapled synthetic petals on to a mountain of bent metal: Volcano Island. Christopher Robbins piled up inflatable plastic loveseats: Couch Mountain. In front of the boathouse, Gisela Insuaste sat at the center of a small metal-wood hybrid capsule: The Rocket Ship.
Their project was to be included in a museum exhibition, with visitors encouraged to visit the “islands” by pedal boat.
“They’re about to destroy all that stuff there, and this is one way to at least get some people to see it before it becomes what happened to Shea Stadium, a big pile of wasted rubble,” said Robbins, referring to the demolition of the Queens stadium where the New York Mets played, and its replacement with Citi Field.
Flushing Meadows Park was once just a heap of ash. Then former New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses convinced the New York World’s Fair committee to locate the 1939 fair in Queens. The fair, which promoted “The World of Tomorrow,” was one of the largest ever, drawing more than 44 million visitors. But it was a financial flop, failing to make money for the city, and was closed after two seasons.
Moses tried to revive the Fair in 1964, but it flopped again. Eventually much of the park, and much of the fair architecture, fell into disrepair.
Paulson has also worked on art installations in Denmark, where he met many of the other artists now working on Flushtopia. They brought their friends, and the crew swelled with eager island developers.
One day they gathered around the picnic table and discussed the Flushtopia philosophy.
Paulson had once described the project as a commentary on failed utopias—with each island meant be a different interpretation of utopia. But other artists now questioned that idea.
“I was thinking about this yesterday,” Robbins said, “about how all of this is supposedly failed utopia, like how the World’s Fair was this vision for the future that obviously didn’t work out. But then I realized, there aren’t ugly apartment blocks covering this entire area. And so it’s totally a success, because look at this!” he finished. His colleagues laughed in agreement.
New York City Parks officials, citing resident complaints, have unhelpfully ordered the museum to remove the artistic islands from the lake.
Paulson was disappointed, but undeterred.
The group plans to recreate the exhibit in other parts of the world, he said.
The Unisphere, left over from World's Fair exhibitions in 1939 and 1964.
Photo courtesy of the Queens Tourism Council
Artists build islands in a lake with leftover items from the long-defunct World's Fair. Photo by Ryann Liebenthal