General Motors Futurama building at the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair.
Read all the press releases coming out of Ford lately, and it’d be easy to get the idea that New York City threw a giant party called the World’s Fair just for FoMoCo to introduce the Mustang. While Ford did indeed buy all sorts of hype for the introduction of its pony car at the fair, it’s worth recounting that it was one of a handful of auto-related companies at the two-year fair, and that their presence at the fair wasn’t really all that welcome.
Conceived as an economic stimulus for the city and as a way of reprising the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair for that fair’s 25th anniversary, planning for the 1964 fair fell to Robert Moses, the parks commissioner perhaps most responsible for shaping modern New York City and the man who transformed a former ash dump and tidal marsh into Flushing Meadows Park for the earlier world’s fair. The fact that the Bureau of International Expositions – the Paris-based organization that schedules, oversees, and regulates world’s fairs – denounced Moses’s plans didn’t matter one bit to him. So what if the United States had already held a world’s fair in Seattle just a couple years prior, and so what if Montreal was scheduled to host another one in 1967, and so what if BIE rules only allowed for fairs to last for one year, Moses argued; this is New York City, the biggest city in the world, and who needs approval from some overseas outfit to hold a world’s fair here?
Of course, Moses’s stance invited retribution from the BIE, which asked its member nations – that is, just about any country that hoped to hold a world’s fair in the future – to boycott the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair. While plenty of smaller countries ignored the BIE’s pleas, most larger countries abided by it, which meant that the fair wouldn’t have as much of an international flavor as official world’s fairs. To compensate, Moses and the fair’s directors re-envisioned the fair to accommodate American industry. Sure, Switzerland, India, and the Philippines got pavilions at the fair, but so did Coca-Cola, DuPont, IBM, Johnson’s Wax, General Electric, Parker PenEastman Kodak, American Express, Eastern Airlines, National Cash Register, Travelers Insurance, General Cigar, and plenty of other corporations, inviting backlash and disdain for the commercialism that the fair seemed to embody. And like Ford, Chrysler and General Motors had elaborate displays at the fair – some of the largest of the fair’s displays, in fact – located in the Transportation section along with Avis and Hertz, Greyhound, Socony Mobil, and even a Hell Drivers auto thrill show.
1964 GM-X dream car. Photo by Don O’Brien.
GM’s 110-foot-tall exhibit hall included an updated Futurama exhibit with predictions of living on the moon and underwater “all solidly based on fact,” according to the official guide to the fair, as well as its Avenue of Progress and a Chevrolet New Orleans exhibit. General Motors might not have debuted any hot youth-oriented cars at the fair, but it did display a trio of concept cars: the three-wheeled Runabout, fitted with a built-in shopping cart; the Firebird IV, ostensibly a gas-turbine car like its three predecessors, but non-operational; and the GM-X, the company’s (again non-operational) rocket-shaped vision of a state-of-the-art high-performance car of the future that ended up influencing the 1967 Cadillac Eldorado more than anything else.
Ford’s pavilion, which it called the Rotunda after the somewhat similarly styled Rotunda of the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair, reportedly used enough steel to construct a 22-story-tall skyscraper. Along with its International Gardens and Fields of Science (every little thing at the world’s fair apparently warranted proper noun-ification), the pavilion also featured the Disney-designed Magic Skyway, which used Ford convertibles on a track to off the grounds of the fair and then some animatronic dinosaurs before passing over a futuristic city of tomorrow.
Along with the Mustang, which Ford actually introduced about a week before the official April 22 opening of the fair, and the subsequent Shelby G.T. 350, Ford also had a copy of Henry Ford’s Quadricycle on display and a number of its own concept cars, including the Aurora, the Allegro, and the Cougar II.
Chrysler’s 1964 World’s Fair pavilion. Photo courtesy Fifties50s.
Taking a different approach, Chrysler didn’t constrain itself to one pavilion for its Autofare exhibit. Rather, designer Irving Harper went with a few smaller pavilions on their own islands in a sort of artificial lake, including one shaped like a giant finned coupe and one like a V-8 engine. Production Chrysler products seemed to float among the islands on their own small platforms. Though not revealed at the fair, Chrysler still made sure to display a couple of its fleet of 50 Turbine cars there.
U.S. Rubber ferris wheel. Photo courtesy Fifties50s.
The other auto-related companies at the fair were no slouches in over-the-top marketing either. Greyhound, celebrating its 50th anniversary at the fair, ran an in-fair taxi service using dedicated Escorter carts that cost a minimum of $3 for 20 minutes ($9 per hour for two passengers, $11 per hour for four), while U.S Rubber, promoting its U.S. Royal Tires, ran an 80-foot-tall ferris wheel along the rim of the tire, with rides costing 25 cents. The Escorter carts later went to Atlantic City to ply its boardwalk, while the giant tire later rolled on out to Allen Park, Michigan, and got rebranded as a Uniroyal.
Nowadays, not much remains of the fair, aside from the Unisphere and a few crumbling buildings. All of the automakers’ pavilions appear to have been torn down shortly after the fair ended, with only a handful of displays – mostly the Disney-designed displays at the Ford pavilion – moved out to other locations.
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