This silent film shows the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940. The Fair, which covered the 1,216 acres (492 ha) of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (also the location of the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair), was the second most expensive American world’s fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people attended its exhibits in two seasons. It was the first exposition to be based on the future, with an opening slogan of “Dawn of a New Day”, and it allowed all visitors to take a look at “the world of tomorrow”. Within six months of the Fair’s opening, World War II began, a war that lasted six years and resulted in the deaths of 50-85 million people.
Some of the details you will see in the film include the Constitution Mall at 1:30, the Court of Peace at 3:26, the Romania exposition at 4:08, Ford Motor Co. building at 5:00, the Futurama Highways of 1960 at 5:20, the fair at night at 7:10, United States Steel Building at 7:26, Consolidated Edison’s City of Light at 7:55, the Lagoon of Nations display at 9:00, and more.
With its vast area and prominent location just south of the Theme Center, the Transportation Zone pavilions attracted widespread attention. Perhaps the most popular of the Transportation Zone pavilions was the one built for General Motors. There, the 36,000 square feet (3,300 m2) Futurama exhibit, designed by famed industrial designer and theater set designer Norman Bel Geddes, transported fair visitors over a huge diorama of a fictional section of the United States that was designed with a stunning array of miniature highways, towns, 500,000 individually designed homes, 50,000 miniature vehicles, waterways, and a million miniature trees of diverse species.These elements of the diorama gradually became larger as the visitors, seated in chairs overhead, moved through the exhibit, until the cars and other elements of the exhibit became life-size.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
