Overview

As the world moved toward war, international exhibitions increasingly turned their gaze to the future. Rather than surveying past achievements, late interwar Expos sought to reassure mass audiences by projecting visions of technological order, prosperity and social stability.

New York assumed this role in 1939. Officially named “New York World’s Fair 1939-1940,” Expo 1939 New York was held at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York City, within the United States. The exposition opened on April 30, 1939, closed its first season on October 31, 1939, and reopened for a second season from May 11 to October 27, 1940. It remains one of the largest and most influential Expos in United States history.

Origins and the bid

The idea for the Expo emerged during the Great Depression as a civic and economic stimulus tied to the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration. Planning formally began in 1935 under the leadership of Grover Whalen, with support from New York City officials, business leaders and major corporations. The chosen site, a former ash dump immortalized in “The Great Gatsby,” was radically transformed into a landscaped park intended to serve as a permanent civic asset after the Expo.

Theme and subthemes

The exposition’s unifying theme, “Building the World of Tomorrow,” shaped every aspect of its design and content. Organizers emphasized science, technology, and planning as solutions to economic hardship and social uncertainty, framing the future as manageable through rational design and industrial innovation.

The site

The Expo grounds covered more than 1,200 acres and were organized into themed zones connected by broad avenues and waterways. At the symbolic center stood the Trylon and Perisphere, two striking modernist forms that housed Democracity, a scale model of an idealized future city. This exhibit presented a vision of coordinated urban planning, zoning and transportation, offering visitors a tangible image of life in the decades ahead.

Architectural historian Adnan Morshed argues that flight was a unifying motif of the exposition. Joseph Binder’s winning poster showed airplanes climbing past the Trylon, and in July 1938 aviator Howard Hughes flew around the world in a plane named for the event, a publicity coup for Grover Whalen. The Theme Center, designed by Wallace K. Harrison and J. André Fouilhoux, joined the 213-meter (700-foot) Trylon to the Perisphere, 61 meters (200 feet) in diameter, and the Helicline, a spiral ramp 290 meters (950 feet) long. Visitors rode escalators into the globe and stood on revolving balconies above Henry Dreyfuss’s Democracity, a planned region of 2039 seen as if from an aircraft, with a score by William Grant Still and narration by newscaster H. V. Kaltenborn.

Morshed describes Democracity as a piece of theater in which the visitors on the balconies became part of the show. The two balconies turned in opposite directions and took six minutes to complete a circuit. According to the official guidebook, the model showed a city of 1 million people whose 250,000 workers lived in five satellite towns linked by broad highways through green countryside. As dusk fell over the model, figures of farmers, mechanics and other groups marched across the dome while a chorus sang the theme song, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, about a “brave new world.” Morshed reads the plan as a compilation of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City.

Wings appeared everywhere, Morshed shows. A caped stainless steel figure by Robert Foster crowned the Ford pavilion, wing-like pylons flanked the entrance of the Chrysler Motors Building, a sculpture called “Speed” showed a woman on a winged horse in the Court of Communications, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s “To the Morrow,” popularly called “Wings,” spanned 7.3 meters (24 feet). On the central axis, James Earle Fraser’s statue of George Washington faced the Perisphere along Constitution Mall, as if the first president were looking toward the future. In the Chrysler Building, Donald Deskey’s exhibit ended with a rocket fired from a giant gun on a simulated trip to London. Morshed links this ascending imagery to eugenic fantasies of an improved human type.

Pavilions and international participation

Architecture across the Expo embraced streamlined modernism rather than historical revival. Corporate pavilions played an unusually prominent role, reflecting the Expo’s close alignment with industrial research and consumer technology. The most influential of these was General Motors’ Futurama, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, which depicted an automated highway system and suburbanized America of the future. The exhibit profoundly shaped postwar thinking about transportation and urban development.

According to architectural historian Lisa D. Schrenk, General Motors first intended to restage an assembly line, as at Expo 1933 Chicago, until Bel Geddes persuaded its executives to fund his vision of 1960. Seated in moving chairs, visitors glided over a vast model based on aerial photographs, then emerged at a full-size street intersection lined with new GM cars and received a pin reading “I have seen the future.” A Gallup survey in May 1939 ranked Futurama first in popularity. Ford answered with a building by Albert Kahn and Walter Dorwin Teague, featuring an elevated roadway called the “Roads of Tomorrow” and a rotating Cyclorama of Production, in which 87 groups of animated figures showed how 27 raw materials became automobiles. Schrenk notes Teague’s taste for spectacle over technical explanation.

Film scholar J. P. Telotte observes that the most important designs of the exposition came from the new field of industrial design, from Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague, and that Bel Geddes and Dreyfuss had started out in theatrical design. Teague, a member of the official Design Board, called his method “visual dramatization” and promised productions that would “make the best of Hollywood respectful.” In the lobby of the Ford Building, Henry Billings’s kinetic mural of flashing lights and whirling gears was meant, in the muralist’s words, “not to instruct but to impress.” Among those working on Futurama was Victor Gruen, recently arrived from Austria, who later applied its lessons on handling visitor flow to his own planning.

Technological demonstrations were central to the exposition’s appeal. RCA introduced many visitors to television through the first large-scale public broadcasts. Westinghouse Electric presented the Westinghouse Time Capsule, designed to be opened in the year 6939, embedding the Expo’s future-oriented ethos into material form. Innovations such as nylon, fluorescent lighting, and new household appliances reinforced the message that scientific progress would improve everyday life.

Film was everywhere. Telotte counts more than 500 films made for and shown at the exposition over its two seasons. Among the documentaries that premiered there was “The City” (1939), made for the American Institute of Planners, scripted by Lewis Mumford, directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke and scored by Aaron Copland; Morshed notes that its case for garden cities relied on aerial views from an airliner. General Motors and Westinghouse showed their own documentaries, “New Horizons” and “The Middleton Family at the Fair.” Walt Disney took part only on a small scale, with a four-minute Mickey Mouse cartoon for the Nabisco pavilion, an early step toward his studio’s larger role at later Expos.

Brands pervaded the grounds. Scholar Scott A. Lukas notes that by 1939 companies had taken over many spaces, so that in the Food Zone names such as Wonder Bread, Lucky Strike and Borden were themselves the message. Westinghouse showed Elektro, a robot whose slow, halting voice came from two turntables of prerecorded discs, while Bell Labs’ Voder synthesized speech elsewhere on the grounds. Bobby Schweizer finds the same mood in “All’s Fair at the Fair” (1938), a Fleischer Studios color cartoon in which Elmer and Miranda, country folk who served as the exposition’s promotional characters, are turned by its machines from rustics into modern consumers and drive off in a new roadster. The exposition also had a whole section devoted to fashion, the World of Fashion.

International participation remained substantial, with pavilions from more than 60 foreign nations and 33 U.S. states. However, the global context increasingly intruded upon the exposition. The Expo opened only months before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and geopolitical events soon reshaped its international character. Pavilions representing Poland and Czechoslovakia were affected by occupation, while the Soviet Union withdrew from participation before the second season. As a result, the Expo’s optimistic narrative coexisted uneasily with unfolding global conflict.

National pavilions also turned to film and design. For the British Pavilion, the General Post Office Film Unit made two shorts for the British Council, promoted together as “British Workers”: George Pearson’s “British Made” and Humphrey Jennings’s “Spare Time,” a portrait of leisure among steelworkers, cotton workers and coal miners. Film scholar Kevin M. Flanagan argues that Jennings pitched Britain to Americans by mixing local pageantry with familiar touches such as basketball and pulp Westerns, part of a wider effort to steer U.S. opinion away from isolationism that also brought King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the exposition in June 1939. Some interiors of the Czechoslovak pavilion were the work of František Cubr and Zdeněk Pokorný, later codesigners of their country’s prizewinning pavilion at Expo 1958 Brussels.

Visitors and services

Public engagement was extraordinary. Across its two seasons, the exposition attracted approximately 44 million visits, confirming its success as both entertainment and public education. The Expo demonstrated that large-scale exhibitions could mobilize corporate sponsorship, popular science, and futurist imagery to sustain mass appeal during periods of uncertainty.

Behind the crowds lay financial disappointment. Historian Katie Uva notes that the first season drew about 26 million admissions, well short of the 45 million to 60 million organizers had projected. An adult ticket cost 75 cents when the average family earned about $1,524 a year, and a celebration of automation rang hollow in a country where one in six workers was unemployed. For 1940 the organizers replaced Whalen with Harvey Dow Gibson, lowered admission and recast the theme as “For Peace and Freedom,” while the empty Soviet site became the “American Common.” Gibson also put Elmer, a chubby, folksy everyman, on the grounds to greet visitors, although the actors playing him were dismissed in June 1940. Uva reads the shift as a retreat from the future into nostalgia.

Legacy

Expo 1939 New York left a lasting legacy. It popularized the idea of the future as a designed environment shaped by technology, planning and consumption, influencing postwar architecture, suburban development and industrial design. The site remains today as Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

The exposition also served urban policy. Scholar Magdalena Sabat shows how New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses used it to promote the city to investors and to advance his vision of a metropolis bound to its suburbs by parkways and highways. Planning themes ran through the exhibits: a demographic display used floor maps and mechanical models to chart census data, and Moses commissioned a large relief model of the city’s water supply system. The New York City Building, erected for the exposition, survives in the park and now houses the Queens Museum, which also keeps that Watershed model. Sabat argues that such projects expose both the ambition and the blind spots of modernist planning, which favored fast, orderly networks over the intricacy of city life.

Within the Expo tradition, Expo 1939 New York represents a decisive turn. It shifted the Expo from retrospective display toward speculative futurism, offering audiences not a mirror of the present but a promise of what might come next, even as the world stood on the edge of profound transformation.