Diorama

Please excuse my recent absence from your blogs. Unfortunately, Verizon has recently cut off my internet connection, so I can only access the web from the local library! Hopefully, the problem will be dealt with soon. In the meantime, here's a final Flushing Meadow post.

Near the Unisphere, there's a huge marble neoclassical building that is the only surviving remnant of the 1939 World's Fair. Named the New York building, it originally housed the New York exhibit in the first fair. Afterwards, it became a recreation center and ice rink. Later, from 1946 to 1950, it became home to the United Nations General Assembly. This, in fact, is the building in which the partition of Palestine and creation of Israel occurred.

It was subsequently renovated for the second World's Fair and, in 1972, became home to the Queens Museum of Art. Half of it houses the museum, and the other half still has an ice rink.

Most of the art in the Queens Museum of Art is fairly interesting, but isn't particularly worthy of a visit. However, the museum has an amazing collection of World's Fair paraphernalia. Of particular interest is the New York Panorama.

The Panorama is somewhat misnamed. Actually a diorama, it was built for the 1964 World's Fair. It is a gargantuan model of New York City, featuring every building, park, field, and waterway. Every so often, it is updated to reflect the changing face of the city.

The Panorama is showing its age somewhat. It has visible creases showing where the individual sections are connected, and the city could do with a bit of dusting, but it is still pretty amazing. Best of all, a glass pathway goes most of the way around the room, making it possible to view almost the entire city from a fairly close range.

All in all, visiting the Panorama made me feel a lot like Godzilla.

Here's a picture of Manhattan looking South from the Bronx:


And here's a somewhat blurry picture of George, my wife, and our friend Katie laying on the glass for a birds-eye view:


Here's Prospect Park, near my sister Jen's apartment:


This is Northern Queens, looking South from the Bronx. LaGuardia airport is on the right:


Here's Flushing Meadow:


Here's the Fordham area of the Bronx, where I live:


And here's a close-up of my neighborhood. Poe Park is on the right:


This is Coney Island. The parachute jump is toward the left:


Here's my wife, looking out over the whole thing:


And here's my foot, hovering over a small part of the city as the denizens lie below, unaware of the threat that sits but a few feet above their sleeping heads:


It's hard to avoid feeling godlike at the Panorama.

Down and Up

Walking through Flushing Meadow, it's easy to forget to look down and up, but some of the most beautiful remnants of the World's Fair are on the ground, in the sky, in places just out of the range of easy sight.

When you enter the park from the Shea Stadium subway stop, there is a plaza with several mosaics. One of them, by Andy Warhol, shows Robert Moses:


Up close, he looks a little psychotic, and appears to have a major cavity:


Another one, a few steps away, is an abstract piece by Salvador Dali:


As far as I can tell, it is a mermaid, bent double, over the black outline of a heart. That Dali--such a kidder!

I don't know who did the one of the "Fountain of the Planets," bit it's beautiful:


Unfortunately, the real fountain is empty and gated. It looks like an industrial waste dump:




Over near the Unisphere, there is a small plaza with sandblasted murals commemorating both World Fairs. They are almost impossible to see, and are usually covered with skaters, but are really beautiful:


A few hundred feet away, the remainders of the New York State pavilion are still standing. The towers were designed as platforms for viewing the Fair and the city, and the oval space beside them had a fiberglas "tent" over it, covering a gargantuan map of New York state.


After the fair, the New York Pavilion was made into a roller skating rink. However, it had a few major design flaws. A few years later, the fiberglas covering started to fall apart, so it was removed, and the floor was patched with concrete. Finally, though, the whole space was fenced off and left to rust.


In the meantime, the towers were also shut down. One of the glass elevators was stored in the sub-basement, while the other was left halfway up the tower, where it has spent the last thirty years falling apart.


Having seen Men in Black, I expected the towers to be slick, exciting, ultra-modern structures. In person, though, they look incredibly depressing:

Corporate Art

Wandering through Flushing Meadows, one sometimes comes across huge cast-metal sculptures. Poorly proportioned and painfully self-conscious, these statues don't have a lot of artistic merit, but they say a great deal about the combination of sophistication and prudery that was New York in the mid-1960's.

One of my favorites lies between the Unisphere and the Fountain of the Planets. It has an impressive-sounding name, "The Rocket-Thrower."


For me, though, the sculpture hearkens back to adolescence, when I was first discovering the wonders of masturbation. Looking at it from this angle, the connection becomes a little clearer:


And the surprised expression on the sculpture's face also seems very familiar:


I see it as a mixture of amazement, pride, and abject terror, something along the lines of "Dear God! I'm never going to be able to clean this all up!"

Aah, childhood memories...

Oddly enough, "Spoogius, the Rocket-Shooter" seems to be flying on a huge turd:


Over the years, Spoogius has gotten a little weathered, and the streaks of water have created beautiful patterns of tarnish:







Near the U.S. Open Pavilion, there's a huge statue of a man and a woman floating on a bunch of birds. I'm sure it's called "Leda and the Swans," or something similar:


I call it "Anorexius and Minimus," after the classic Greek myth featuring a starving woman and a man with a very small "hoplite." I'm sure the sculpture is supposed to honor the ideals of athleticism and the classic ideal of victory, but the woman is really, really skinny, and her ponytail hairdo seems a little out of place:


Overall, it looks as if Joani Cunningham from Happy Days decided to go bird watching while naked.

The male counterpart is actually kind of scary. He's also really thin, and has a very, very small penis:


Ooh, look! It's an innie!

The unintentional subtext of this sculpture is that the man is allowed to be naked, but he can't be threateningly well-endowed.

All in all, the sculpture seems to have a very confused perspective regarding art and nudity. On the one hand, the sculptors realized that nudity is classical and artistic, but they couldn't bring themselves to openly support it. Going for a middle path, they offered a starving girl with bizarrely huge boobs and a man with almost no penis. The subtext is clear: heterosexual relationships bring emptiness and castration. One wonders if this was a piece of subtle homosexual propaganda, an indication of a general scorched-earth policy toward relationships, or merely evidence that the artist had never seen anyone with their clothes off.

The 1960's are so weird.

Unisphere

When I was a kid, Indiana Jones was my hero. James Bond, Bruce Wayne, and Clark Kent were all well and good, but I could imagine nothing cooler than hours of research followed with hours of fieldwork, as I pursued the world's greatest treasures, a pack of fiendish Nazi rivals hot on my heels. I knew exactly who I wanted to be when I grew up.

Somewhere between then and now, a few things went awry. I never quite got around to learning Aramaic, Hebrew, or even Latin, and my few experiments with bull whips nearly cost me an eye. I must admit that I look very cool in a fedora, but I avoid khaki pants with a passion, having been forced to wear them in High School.


While my career path has not brought me to foreign lands, I have never lost my love of discovery. When I was growing up in Northern Virginia, I spent hours traveling to Civil War and Revolutionary War battle sites, poking around ruins, and imagining the events that unfolded there. When I moved to Southwest Virginia, my interests switched to neglected railway tunnels and overgrown mining settlements, both of which were common in my area. I would wander the woods and trails, noting signs of neglected habitations and trying to imagination what the area had looked like before it was abandoned.

I thought that I'd have to give up this hobby when I went to New York. After all, in a city with millions of citizens, how could there be any areas that were abandoned or neglected? Surely, every inch of land must be constantly used and reused, adapted to the changing purposes of the community!


Surprisingly, I have not found this to be so. Sometimes, New York seems like a city without a memory. It has numerous little parks and hidden treasures that have been ignored, abandoned, or forgotten. Even when these little spots have been remembered, as is the case with Poe Cottage, there seems to be a total lack of understanding about what they symbolize or why they are noteworthy.

I've coined a term for my park explorations: Parcheology. This is the study of forgotten civic spaces. It focuses on areas that were once famous, and which city planners, officials, and citizens once spent millions of dollars developing. These spaces were fads: incredibly popular for a time, they have long since been consigned to the rubbish pile of history. Wandering around them, I've learned a lot about what people once considered vital and important. Although tastes have moved on, these places have stayed. They aren't really meaningful anymore, but they exist as mementos of forgotten eras, and they allow us to relive our cultural history.


Some Parcheology spots that I've already covered include The Hall of Fame of Great Americans, Poe Cottage, The Bronx Community College Library, Woodlawn Cemetery, and Grant's Tomb. However, the mother of all Parcheology spaces is the World's Fair at Flushing Meadow, Queens. The site of both the 1939 and the 1964 World's Fairs, Flushing Meadow was a huge trash dump until Robert Moses decided to reclaim it.

Moses spent a fortune to create the ultimate exhibition space, an area that showed New York's optimism would cement its position as one of the World's greatest cities. After the fair, many of the buildings were demolished, and fairgrounds were allowed to lie fallow.


A few decades later, several prominent businessmen had fond childhood memories of the Fair. Wanting to recreate it for a new generation, they approached Robert Moses. He had lingering disappointment over what he perceived as the failures of the first fair, so he began planning for the next one.

Several years and millions of dollars later, the 1964 New York World's Fair was ready for the public. Featuring pavilions from countries around the world, the fair focused on the idea that the world is becoming much smaller, even as the Universe seems to expand. After two years, however, the fair closed and most of its exhibits were demolished. The fairgrounds were once again allowed to fill up with grass, and the few remaining structures were permitted to deteriorate. A few statues, a few buildings, and the occasional piece of art remain, letting the viewer imagine the grandeur of the World's Fair.


The central structure of the World's Fair was the Unisphere. Twelve stories high, it weighed 900,000 pounds, and was created by U.S. Steel. Surrounded by a ring of fountains that were designed to obscure its base and make it look like it was floating in space, it had three rings suspended around it. The rings represented Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, and the first communication satellite to orbit the Earth. All of this was illuminated by a state-of-the art light display.

The light display has long since stopped functioning, and the Unisphere is starting to look a little tarnished. A few years ago, the State spent a lot of money to clean it up and get it running again. From some angles, it's beautiful; from others, it looks a little sad. It has plants growing in some spots and the fountains don't work any more. Still, it is huge and impressive at a close range.


The Unisphere, and its surrounding pool, are now the preserve of skaters. They're generally friendly and seem willing to share the space. On my second visit, I climbed up the base of the Unisphere and took some pictures. It was scary, but exciting, and I got to touch both Antarctica and South America.

One final note: from the U.S. Open Tennis pavilions, the Unisphere is a shiny, beautiful sculpture, glowing as it floats above a perfectly landscaped garden:



From the other side, it's dingy and tired-looking: