The New York Fair: Sep. 25, 1964

With 200,000 people a day still pushing through the turnstiles at Flushing Meadow, the smart fairgoer will want to plan his time to avoid the crush. Since most of the crowd seems perfectly content to spend long hours waiting to get into G.M., G.E. and other popular industrial exhibits, it’s best to leave these until after dinner when the lines are usually shorter. Meanwhile there are 646 acres to investigate, crammed with endless variety. Start with an itinerary in mind, take it slow and easy, cover the grounds section by section, and a day at the fair will be a pleasant memory instead of a whirling nightmare.

SPAIN has the most satisfying pavilion of all: a well-wrought building where cool, shadowy interiors lead to bright, fountained courtyards, an art gallery where Goya and Velásquez hang cheek by jowl with Miró and Picasso. With a stageful of vibrant flamenco gypsies and a choice of fine restaurants touting “eels from the River Tagus” and “mushrooms from the caves of Segovia,” Spain outclasses most other foreign and state pavilions, many of which offer nothing more remarkable than displays of consumer goods and models of jute mills.

VATICAN. The centerpiece is Michelangelo’s Pieta, which draws reverent gasps in spite of its hoked-up blue stage setting. Modern religious arts and crafts are used to advantage throughout the pavilion, the best being a forest of vivid liturgical banners hanging like medieval flags in the main hall.

JOHNSON’S WAX is polishing its image with a 20-minute, exquisitely filmed paean to awareness called To Be Alive! that miraculously never once mentions the sponsor or his product.

DU PONT, on the other hand, presents a 45-minute commercial that succeeds be cause of its fast pace and good timing. Live actors are synchronized with film excerpts, song-and-dance routines with cartoon characters. The cast performs as though it were not all for a synthetic cause.

GENERAL ELECTRIC sends the audience around the show in a revolving auditorium. Disney-made dummies extol progress (appliances division) in vignettes showing American home life in 20-year intervals from the turn of the century. Somehow the coziness of icebox and coalstove days seems more appealing than the cool splendors of the modern home filled with the latest conveniences.

COCA-COLA lets the fairgoer wander at will, sampling the sights and smells of a Hong Kong street, the Taj Mahal, an Alpine resort, a Cambodian rain forest, and a cruise ship off Rio.

PEPSI-COLA’S UNICEF exhibition warms the heart of every little girl at the fair with a boat ride through a fantasy of Disney dolls. Hundreds and hundreds of them, dressed in saris and kilts, Lederhosen and grass skirts, they wink and blink, nod and grimace, dance and sing to a joyful hymn in praise of world understanding called It’s a Small World.

PROTESTANT AND ORTHODOX CENTER shows the controversial short, Parable, a heavily symbolic film that casts a clown as a latter-day Christ who is crucified under the Big Top. The controversy seems to be between those who think it is art and those who believe it is sacrilege. Most people probably know which side they are likely to be on. If not, there’s one way to find out.

GENERAL MOTORS presents a retread of its successful Futurama from the 1939 New York Fair. Viewers get a trip to the moon without gossamer wings, a glimpse of vacation lands under the ocean and cities under the Antarctic snows. Best concept is the jungle-road-building behemoth that cuts trees with a flash of its laser beam, chews up the undergrowth and, quick as a wink, turns out a four-lane highway.

FORD lavishes its affections on a series of prehistoric vignettes. Immense monsters (bodies by Disney) clash in battle and sound like dueling trailer trucks. Presumably, Ford mechanics sneak out at night to hammer out the dents on the dinosaurs. Disney also created a family of cave people so upright and lovable that it is a foregone conclusion they will discover fire and invent the wheel.

PARKER PEN has mechanized the pen-pal business. An IBM machine, stuffed with 65,000 names gathered the world over, matches ages and hobbies in minutes. Those interested can correspond with French spelunkers, Australian fur farmers or Arabian schoolboys.

ILLINOIS has as its star boarder a life-size mechanical facsimile of Abe Lincoln. This steel-boned, electronic-nerved creature stands up, adjusts its coattails, clears its throat, and delivers six excerpts from Lincoln speeches on liberty in a voice that sounds like the Midwestern twang of Doc in Gunsmoke.

IBM has laid an egg—a 50-ton concrete one—and perched it high above ground in a nest of steel trees. Inside, where the yolk should be, is a nine-screen presentation on computers. Best action comes in front of the People Wall, where passers-by can watch 500 mildly apprehensive fairgoers as they leave the ground and slowly disappear into the underbelly of the egg.

NEW YORK CITY can be seen from a simulated helicopter trip around a complete scale model of the five boroughs (the Empire State Building is 15 in. tall). The model will be used by city planners after the fair; meanwhile the modelmakers frantically try to keep up with the real-life builders, tearing out tiny rows of brownstones to slap in new office blocks.

THE BELGIAN VILLAGE gets an A for architecture—a delightful replica of a Flemish town—but bad marks for allowing pizza parlors and egg-roll stands to compete with colorful shops selling crepes suzette, Belgian cookies, lace and crystal.

JAPAN displays its ancient arts and modern crafts, consumer products and heavy industrial machines in an intricate maze of buildings. Its best attraction is an outdoor demonstration of samurai dueling, Kabuki players and judo experts, as well as the tea-ceremony performance, where the ancient disciplines are enacted by pretty Japanese hostesses in gorgeous, drip-dry kimonos.

West Virginia puts on a demonstration of glass blowing; Montana has a trainload of Western collector’s items, including an invitation to a hanging, Calamity Jane’s thundermug, and Buffalo Bill’s silver-handled toothbrush. Alaska has brought in Chilkat Indians to custom-carve totem poles (at $100 a running foot). General Cigar offers a magic show. Indonesia demonstrates shadow puppets, Oregon runs a lumberjack carnival, Polynesia sells chunks of fresh sugar cane. Socony Mobil tests your reflexes in a simulated driving-hazard test. Sinclair Oil has a forest of dinosaurs, and the Scott pavilion boasts the best rest rooms of all, with a diaper-changing room for harried mothers.

VIEWS

THE SWISS SKY RIDE charges a big 75$ for a four-minute cable-car trip but sends the traveler soaring 115 ft. above Samoan fire dancers, Burundi drummers, Guatemalan marimba bands and Swiss yodelers.

NEW YORK STATE. For 500 the fairgoer is whisked 226 ft. up into the pavilion tower for a panoramic view of Mosesland surrounded by acres and acres of cars.

PORT AUTHORITY HELIPORT offers a $6.50, four-minute whirlybird’s-eye squint. The flight is best taken at night when the fair becomes a fairyland of colored lights and fireworks.

THE MONORAIL ride around the comparatively uncrowded Lake Amusement Area offers a suspended seven-minute fair survey for 80¢.

RESTAURANTS

The fair does handsomely by those with fat pocketbooks and fickle palates. Herring lovers will drool at the wide selection offered on Denmark’s $6.50 cold board. The Spanish pavilion’s Toledo and Granada restaurants dish up a numbing array of French and regional dishes. Africans (or at least Americans of African ancestry) in native robes serve groundnut soup and couscous ($4.50) in Africa’s tree house, while the diner lucky enough to have a table on the balcony finds himself eyeball-to-eyeball with an inquisitive giraffe. Indonesia’s seven-course, $7.75 dinner is spiced by whirling Balinese dancers. There are also many good, inexpensive restaurants. Cafe Hilton atop the Better Living Center offers cafeteria-style choices of regional dishes from five gaily decorated international kitchens with entrees priced from $1.25 to $3.25. The Maryland pavilion brings the tang of salt water with its Chesapeake Bay crab and oyster recipes ($3.50). Greece’s taverna has stuffed vine leaves and mousaka starting at $2.50.

For those on a hamburger budget, most foreign pavilions have food stands selling specialties of their country at hamburger prices. The United Arab Republic serves falafel (50¢), a bean feast that tastes like a spicy meat sandwich. Morocco serves mint tea and pastry ($1) in carpeted tents. Try the Belgian Village’s crepes-suzette shop, where a Grand Marniered pancake costs 75¢, or India’s chicken pakora with clay oven-baked bread (45¢) served on the lawn by a turbaned chef. International Plaza, a noisy cluster of small shops and food stands, offers a culinary Cook’s Tour that takes only a few steps. Colombian tacos (75¢) can be washed down with Philippine beer (70¢), Ecuadorian banana dogs (50¢) with Brazilian coffee (15¢), Tunisian nougatine (45¢ )with Indian tea (free), North African bricka (65¢) with Norwegian loganberry punch (40¢). And the American-Israel pavilion caters to Jewish dietary laws with kosher frankfurters and Kosher Kola (55¢).