The 1964 World’s Fair: what you saw then and what still stands

For two summers in the middle of the 1960s, a former garbage dump in Queens was the most optimistic place on earth. The 1964 World’s Fair promised jet packs, picture telephones and a cleaner, shinier tomorrow, all for two dollars at the gate. Some of it came true, some of it went to Disneyland, and a surprising amount of it is still standing in Flushing Meadows, waiting for you to take the 7 train out and say hello.

When and where was the 1964 World’s Fair?

The fair ran for two seasons: April 22 to October 18, 1964, and April 21 to October 17, 1965. It filled 646 acres of Flushing Meadows, the same ground that had hosted the 1939 fair.

Before either fair, the site was the Corona Ash Dumps, mountains of coal ash that F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized as the “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby. Few pieces of real estate have come up further in the world.

The man in charge was Robert Moses, the city’s master builder, who became president of the World’s Fair Corporation in 1960. Moses had long wanted Flushing Meadows to become a true Central Park for Queens, and he hoped fair profits would pay for it. He also picked a fight with the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions, the body that officially sanctions world’s fairs. The bureau declined to recognize New York, so many European governments stayed home. Technically, the most famous world’s fair of the century was not an official one.

Seasons

April to October, 1964 and 1965

Visitors

About 51.6 million (70 million projected)

Adult ticket

$2 in 1964, $2.50 in 1965

Moses had forecast 70 million visitors. The final count was 51,607,448, which is still a lot of sore feet. Opening day drew about 90,000 people, less than half the prediction, and the fair ended deep in the red. Children got in for a dollar both years.

The Unisphere: the fair’s steel signature

The fair’s theme was “Peace Through Understanding,” and its symbol was the Unisphere, a stainless-steel globe 140 feet high and 120 feet across. Landscape architect Gilmore Clarke first sketched it on an airplane in 1960. U.S. Steel built it for free, in exchange for having its name on the fair’s marketing, which tells you most of what you need to know about 1960s corporate America in one sentence.

The globe alone weighs about 700,000 pounds. It was dedicated in March 1964, became a New York City landmark in 1995, and got its fountains back in 2010 after a $2 million restoration. On a hot day, the spray still makes kids run through it, exactly as their grandparents did.

Technically, the most famous world’s fair of the century was not an official one.

The Pietà and the Mustang: two very different crowds

Michelangelo comes to Queens

The single most astonishing loan was Michelangelo’s Pietà, sent from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Vatican Pavilion. Cardinal Francis Spellman lobbied Pope John XXIII for it, and the sculpture crossed the Atlantic aboard the Italian Line’s Cristoforo Colombo, arriving April 13, 1964.

Its steel shipping container weighed 11,500 pounds and was packed so it would float if the ship went down, complete with a buoy to signal its location. Broadway designer Jo Mielziner staged it against dark blue velvet behind a bulletproof Plexiglas shield, and a moving walkway kept the line flowing. By one count, more than 27 million people filed past. Before the fair closed, the Vatican announced it would no longer lend out works from its collection.

The car that started the pony craze

Across the fairgrounds, in a very different kind of temple, Henry Ford II unveiled the Ford Mustang at Ford’s Wonder Rotunda pavilion on April 17, 1964, five days before the fair officially opened. The press had seen it earlier that week. The base price was $2,368, and The Henry Ford museum says some 22,000 were sold before the first weekend was out. If you wanted one that spring, you had a great deal of company.

Walt Disney’s four shows, and where they live now

Walt Disney used the fair as a giant, corporate-funded test lab. His studio built four attractions for four sponsors, and every one of them outlived the fair in some form.

The Small World song by Robert and Richard Sherman has been stuck in heads since 1964. The Carousel of Progress, with its own Sherman Brothers tune, “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,” is billed as the longest-running stage show in American theater history. On the Magic Skyway, guests rode in new Fords past animatronic dinosaurs while Walt narrated through the car radio. The rollers that moved those cars became the ancestor of Disney’s Omnimover ride system.

The future, as seen from 1964

The Bell System let visitors try the Picturephone in booths at its pavilion, and some calls connected to a matching booth at Disneyland. That June, AT&T opened public Picturephone rooms in New York, Chicago and Washington at $16 to $27 for the first three minutes. Only 71 calls were placed in the first six months. The idea was right; the price and the timing were a few decades early.

IBM’s pavilion, designed by Eero Saarinen with exhibits by Charles and Ray Eames, centered on a giant egg-shaped theater. About 500 visitors at a time sat on the “People Wall,” a tiered grandstand hoisted hydraulically up into the egg for a 12-minute show on 22 screens. Elsewhere in the pavilion, you could write any date from the past century on a card and a computer would print that day’s big headline. IBM says only General Motors’ Futurama drew bigger crowds.

Did Belgian waffles really debut at the fair?

This is where the story usually gets told a little loosely. Belgian waffles did not make their American debut in Queens. They had been showcased at Expo 58 in Brussels and sold at Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition in 1962. (Accounts differ on exactly who ran the Seattle stand.)

What the 1964 fair did was make them famous. Maurice and Rose Vermersch of Brussels, helped by their daughter, sold thick waffles piled with whipped cream and sliced strawberries (Rose’s idea) for about a dollar. They meant to call them Brussels waffles, but found that many Americans did not know where Brussels was, so they renamed them Bel-Gem waffles. According to the family, they averaged around 2,500 a day. Powdered sugar on a great many sport coats did the rest.

The New York State Pavilion and its towers

If you have seen Men in Black, you have seen the New York State Pavilion. Philip Johnson designed it with Richard Foster: an open-air “Tent of Tomorrow” with what was called the world’s largest cable suspension roof, a drum-shaped Theaterama, and three concrete observation towers. The tallest, at 226 feet, was the highest point at the fair. The tent’s floor was a giant terrazzo road map of New York State, 567 panels sponsored by Texaco.

After the fair, the pavilion decayed for decades. The Theaterama became today’s Queens Theatre, but the towers’ elevators were removed in 2008, and the observation decks never reopened after the 1960s.

The good news is real, if slow. NYC Parks began stabilization work in 2019, finished a first phase in 2023 and has lit the tent and towers at night since then. A second phase focused on the towers brought the total to more than $50 million, with completion scheduled for October 2026 and limited tours planned afterward. A full public reopening will need a great deal more money.

What you can still see at Flushing Meadows Corona Park

Take the 7 train to Mets-Willets Point and follow the boardwalk into the park. Here is what survives from the fair:

• The Unisphere. Free, open to all, and the best photo in Queens.
• The Queens Museum. Housed in the New York City Building, which also hosted the United Nations General Assembly after World War II. Its star is the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335-square-foot model with 895,000 buildings at a scale of one inch to 100 feet. Moses commissioned it for the fair, where a nine-minute ride over it cost a dime. Its last big update was in the early 1990s, so it is a time capsule of its own.
• Rocket Park. Outside the New York Hall of Science, founded during the fair, stand a Titan II and an Atlas rocket from the fair’s Space Park. They were restored in Ohio and reinstalled in 2003, with Walter Cronkite at the ceremony.
• The State Pavilion and Queens Theatre. Viewable from outside; the theater still puts on shows.
• Terrace on the Park. The odd tabletop-shaped building on stilts was the fair’s heliport. It is now a catering hall, so you may need a wedding invitation.

Plan on a half day and wear real walking shoes. The fairgrounds are still enormous, and the benches are still farther apart than you remember.

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