Let's Go To The Fair

I've always been fascinated by the 1939 World's Fair which was held on the site of an ash dump in Queens New York, a landmark immortalized in the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The dump was miraculously transformed, for the Fair, into what is today Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, an oasis of greenery and fresh water in the middle of Queens. The park also served as the site of the 1964 World's Fair, and the iconic landmarks that remain today date from the later Fair. For fairly obvious reasons, the '64 Fair does not invoke anywhere near the level of affectionate nostalgia that is typically associated with the '39 Fair.

The 1939 World's Fair took place against the backdrop of the looming Second World War, the shadow of which was inescapable. It also coincided with the Great Depression, which had been going on for a decade by that point, and full economic recovery was still several years in the future. So understandably, people were eager for anything that might take their minds off of their immediate concerns, while simultaneously holding out the promise of a better tomorrow. The 1939 Fair fulfilled both of those desires, as demonstrated by the two gentlemen offering their own memories of the Fair in the videos that I am embedding at the bottom of this post.

As you watch the wonderful color footage of the Fair, pay attention to a couple of things. First, notice the almost-total absence of any litter or trash blowing about on the ground. 1939 predates the birth of our modern packaging industry, an industry that is a decidedly mixed blessing. We pay a heavy price for convenience, as one look at our blighted landscape of today will quickly show. And it isn't just the Fairgrounds that are free of trash. The footage of the city streets that you will see shows the same thing.

Next, notice how well-dressed everyone at the Fair is. I firmly believe that there is a strong correlation between the way people dress, and how they conduct themselves in public. When citizens dressed in a civilized manner, they tended to behave accordingly. Today, when you have the spectacle of people attending church in t-shirts and sweatpants, it is no wonder that our society has suffered a complete breakdown in so many respects. The plain truth is that most people today dress exactly the same for almost any occasion, a deplorable trend if ever there was one.