World: Tomorrow and 1940

Fortnight ago San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition suddenly announced that it would close on October 29—thirty-four days ahead of schedule. This decision was the more remarkable since the Exposition’s attendance was just reaching new highs for the year. But Exposition officials, foreseeing November rains, feared a late-fall attendance drop, decided there would be more profit in packing two months’ business into one. Last week they were getting ready to raze the topless towers of Treasure Island, to liquidate the Exposition that does not have to run a second year to save its face or its bondholders (of whom it has none).

Different was the predicament of New York’s $157,000,000 World of Tomorrow. Three weeks from closing time, $436,670 of its current liabilities was owed to banks, $500,000 to contractors, another $500,000 immediately due to bondholders, and bills payable topped receivables by $500,000. To meet these quick obligations it had $1,000,000 cash. In New York, as in San Francisco, October’s attendance is proving the best of the year (2,492,096 paid admissions for the first two weeks). It looked as if the Fair, by closing day, might just about pay off all but about $500,000 of its current debts. But the bald-faced fact was that no Fair official expected there would be a penny left to pay the outstanding $23,982,808 of the Fair’s original $27,000,000 bond issue. The World of Tomorrow had to last over till 1940.

For that reason the impeccable Grover Aloysius Whalen last week tiptoed around the edges of the battlegrounds of Europe, drumming up trade for the 1940 edition of his World of Tomorrow. From Rome this sentimental journeyman reported: “Government officials are favorably inclined.” Elsewhere, he intimated, nations had received him most cordially. But so far he had no signatures on his pocketful of dotted lines. That was serious. For if a majority of this year’s 58 foreign exhibitors fail to renew their leases, the 1940 Fair will have to cope with a lot of blank spots where the handsome foreign pavilions now stand.

On the home front in Flushing, L. I, heavy-handed Harvey Dow Gibson (Fair board chairman & potent Manufacturers Trust Co. president) wooed U. S. exhibitors. To entice them in again next year he:

1) slashed rentals almost 50% ($14 to $7.50 a sq. ft.) in Fair-owned buildings; 2) cut ground rentals 10% for those who had built their own buildings; 3) offered a 50% rent cut to all States exhibiting; 4) advertised sites in the Fair’s Town of Tomorrow at a 30% markdown; 5) abolished all charges for removing garbage.

First to snap up the bargain rates for Fair-owned buildings was big Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. General Electric, Ford, General Motors, Firestone, Carrier Corp. also signed up. By week’s end Florida was the only State to renew her contract; Ohio the only one (of 33) to say she wouldn’t.

To Banker Gibson this was such good news that he loosed the floodgates. He ruled that for the remainder of the 1939 Fair (except weekends & holidays) babies in arms or in carriages would be admitted without paying 25¢ admission. (“Of course,” one of Banker Gibson’s assistants hastily added, “if the child has a beard, I think we can ask payment.”)

Reason for the exuberance of the Fair’s fiscal watchdog was that he saw a way of getting round his toughest financial hurdle: $3,300,000 will be needed to put his World of Tomorrow into winter quarters and slick it up for a 1940 debut. Mr. Gibson thought he saw the prospect of enough 1940 renewals paid in advance to tide him over until spring brought green grass and cash customers.

But as the 22,939,831st paying customer clicked through the turnstiles last week, it appeared that New York might not have the sole U. S. exposition next year. For up popped an outfit named 1940 Exposition, Inc., headed by San Francisco Hotelman Dan London, proposed to raise $1,650,000 in order to winter over the Golden Gate Exposition and reopen it in 1940. By week’s end the San Francisco promoters had half the sum promised, but very little cash. Without help from Fair officials, 1940 Exposition, Inc. did not look as if it could raise the money by the dollar deadline this week.

Meantime, Doubting Thomases who think that the U. S. public will cold-shoulder a World’s Fair next spring, amid World War II, found precedent against them. In the spring of World War I (1915) San Francisco opened its famed Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which drew 13,127,103 customers (about 3,000,000 more than the Golden Gate Exposition will have drawn). In that year, too, 2,000,000 visitors jammed San Diego’s Panama-California International Exposition.