Business: Cloven Hoofs

With a show of fun and frankness unusual in his stereotyped profession, a San Francisco pressagent lately wrote: “When you come right down to it, a great World’s Fair is the architect’s form of that good old American custom, the Binge. . . . He can work in the realm of pure fantasy without worrying much about his client’s idea of how a building ought to look, because he is using (perhaps happily) impermanent materials and because his real client is the general public, and what the general public wants is not utility, but romance and beauty and drama. For a World’s Fair is. no matter what the brochures and prospecti say about it, a big show; it creates an illusion, and it has to be emotional, dramatic, and possibly dyed with the deep but uncertain dyes of mysticism. The walls of most World’s Fairs bear the imprint of the cloven hoof.”

The San Francisco pressagent might well have added that when a fair is over there is frequently the devil to pay. For as often as not World’s Fairs result in thumping deficits.* Last week, World Fair planners the world around had reason to ponder this fact, for one World’s Fair (Paris) closed for the winter thumpingly in the red, and two others (New York and San Francisco) passed milestones in careers which they expect to turn out in equally thumping profits.

Paris-France’s Colonial Exposition of 1931 broke even budgetwise only when the Senate Finance Commission wrote in a theoretical profit of 50 millions of francs as an “increase in values which cannot be accounted for by the statistics of the Finance Ministry”—i. e., national prestige and local business promotion. This year’s Paris International Exposition, which closed last week for the winter, will presumably also be subject to such budgetary juggling. For it cost $64,600,000, of which an estimated $49,000,000 came as a direct Government subsidy. By last week 33,724,295 patrons had paid some $4,746,000 to see the Fair’s gaudy structures clustered along the Seine. To reopen them next year is expected to cost another $16,950,000. In the Chamber of Deputies this week there was strong opposition to the idea from outlying provinces which dislike the thought of their trade suffering while Paris gains.

New York, As Grover Whalen, its president, is quick to point out, the 1939 New York World’s Fair is a bird of a very different color from the Paris Exposition. Instead of a government-conceived, directed and subsidized essay in national propaganda, it is a privately-conceived and financed attempt by New York businessmen to drum up new trade. Inspired by the success in this respect of the Chicago A Century of Progress in 1933-34, 118 leading New Yorkers in 1935 formed New York World’s Fair 1939 Inc., a nonprofit, nonstock corporation whose officers get no remuneration. New York City is crashing through with about $25,000,000, New York State with $10,000,000, but this is not a subsidy, for a large part of the money is being spent in basic improvements and reclamation of the Fair site which will be a park when the Fair is ended. The U. S. Government has authorized expenditure c. $3,000,000 and the Fair Corporation itself plans to spend about $47,000,000, part financed by Fair revenues, the rest by a $27,800,000 issue of 4% debentures which has been completely taken by the public. Domestic and foreign participants will ante enough more money to make the Fair fund total $125,000,000, twice the Paris Exposition’s cost and by all odds the biggest sum ever spent on a Fair in history.

Theme of the New York Fair is “Building the World of Tomorrow.” This it is now busily doing in Flushing Meadows, a filled-in swamp nine miles from Manhattan, once beloved by rats but now graced by two artificial lakes, handsome landscaping. Only building finished is the Administration Building where most of the Fair Corporation’s 900-odd employes work and where dressy President Whalen holds forth in a copper-lined board room. Like the Chicago A Century of Progress, the Administration Building is showily modern, as apparently will be most of some 350 other projected buildings which eventually will jam the site’s 1,200 acres. Most of the New York Fair’s space has already been let and last week Japan contracted to rent 10,000 sq. ft., Russia 110,000 and Hungary 36,000. Virtually all nations are expected. Attendance is estimated at 40,000,000 first year, 24,000,000 the second. When it is all over and the debentures have been paid off, President Whalen and associates expect to have a surplus of about $8,000,000 which will go to the Comptroller of the City of New York for charities and improving Flushing Meadows Park. New York businessmen will already have received their share of the booty from the $50,000,000 a year Fair patrons are expected to spend at the Fair, the $1,000,000,000 they will spend in the City itself.

San Francisco. Since the International Convention of Expositions awarded to New York the honor of holding the World’s Fair of 1939, San Francisco’s rival notions have been somewhat adrift. San Franciscans point out that Congress designated their Fair, which will begin in February 1939, two months before New York’s, as “America’s official World’s Fair of the West in 1939.” Its actual title, however, is “Golden Gate International Exposition” with the major subtitle “Pageant of the Pacific.”

Like the New York Fair, an attempt to stimulate local business, San Francisco’s Fair originally sprang from a local movement to get a better airport. To provide it and also what is certainly the most spectacular possible site for a Fair. San Francisco has created the “world’s largest man-made island” on Yerba Buena Shoals in San Francisco Bay near the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. With a WPA appropriation of $3,800,000 this mile-long rectangle has been pumped up from the Bay floor to 13 ft. above high tide and last week it was turned over with appropriate ceremonies to the city.

Running San Francisco’s Fair is a private corporation, Bay Exposition Inc.. whose President Leland Cutler, onetime president of San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce, is now in the Orient wangling for participation. A more important wangling job is that of dynamic Ray Warner Smith, who is raising $7,500,000 from California firms by the good old “pledge & put up” sort of drive. So far he has extracted $5,600,000. California is putting up $5,000,000, the U. S. Government $6,200,000 and the remaining $33,-200,000 the Fair will cost is coming from exhibitors and participants. These so far include 15 nations, many a colony and twelve States. Attendance is supposed to reach 20,000,000 before the Exposition closes in December 1939, and revenues, if any, will be prorated among the subscribers. With subscribers, Promoter Smith’s method is very simple: “Be nice to the nice ones, and when the nice ones are all in we will be tough with the tough ones.”

* The Philadelphia Sesquicentennial lost $14,000,000. Chicago’s A Century of Progress made about $200,000.