To the Bitter End

The beginning, it has often been said, augurs the end. Certainly the axiom proved true of the New York World's Fair. It opened to disappointing crowds on a cold, rainy day in April 1964, with militant CORE picket lines all but blocking major avenues and hecklers disrupting President Johnson's send-off speech. Last week it closed with a frightening scene straight out of a Federico Fellini film fantasy.

While thousands of revelers swayed to the strains of Auld Lang Syne and The Star-Spangled Banner, prim ladies in tweed suits feverishly uprooted all the chrysanthemums recently planted for a permanent park, stuffed them into their pocketbooks or pinned them onto their hats. Tipsy men wantonly ripped signs from buildings, kicked over trash baskets, waded in the Unisphere fountain, and shinned up the 20-ft. poles near the United Nations Plaza to capture the flags. One man completely gutted a statue of King Tut near the Egyptian Pavilion, another attacked a copy of an ancient vase outside the Greek Pavilion with a hammer, while hundreds of people watched in silence. Everything from saltcellars to cameras was stolen as souvenirs.

Deflated Balloons. Lamentable as the vandalism was, it made little difference. The following day, demolition crews moved into the evacuated fairgrounds to pick up where the tourists had left off. The balloons above the ten Brass Rail Restaurants were deflated, and the food stands themselves were prepared for the bulldozer. The motorless Fords and Mercurys at the Ford Pavilion were packed away on car trailers and shipped off to Detroit, where the company will add the motors, sell them to employees at cut rates. The talking Lincoln statue from the Illinois Pavilion was carefully crated, sent by moving van to Disneyland.

Missed Guess. While fair participants were salvaging what they could, fair investors were licking their wounds. The day before closing, Robert Moses issued a grim report to stockholders. In spite of 51 million visitors, 6,000,000 more than any other world's fair, the fair had been a fiscal flop: Moses' calculations had been based on 70 million.

As a consequence, the Fair Corp. could not pay back its $24 million loan from the city. Instead, New York will have to console itself with the sales taxes on the $750 million worth of business the fair brought to metropolitan restaurants, hotels and shops. Moses further announced that he could pay only 500 on the dollar on $29 million in promissory notes, and that the huge network of playgrounds he had hoped to build in Queens with his surplus profits would have to wait--perhaps forever. The Fair Corp. still had enough left in its coffers to follow through on one big promise--to turn the fairgrounds into a city park. The city is now negotiating to keep the handsome Federal Building as a training center for high school dropouts and the New York State Pavilion as an all-purpose theater. Other permanent fixtures are the Hall of Science and the heliport, which will become the focal point for an eleven-acre zoo.

The most lasting memento at Flushing Meadow is not to be seen. At the Westinghouse Pavilion, buried in a 50-ft. steel shaft and sealed so as to last 5,000 years, is a Time Capsule crammed full of documents and artifacts. Among them: a tranquilizer, a birth-control pill, a pack of filter cigarettes, a blue and white bikini, and photographs of Joe DiMaggio, Errol Flynn and Adolf Hitler--but not one of Robert Moses.

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