The New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940 was a bold assertion of modernity. Everywhere visitors looked they saw harbingers of the future. At the Westinghouse Pavilion, a 7-foot tall robot named Elektro teased the crowd and smoked cigarettes, while a mural at the Food Focal Exhibit depicted technology’s aid in vanquishing food waste and scarcity. Before the fair had even opened, the people of the 1930s staked their claim on the future by burying a time capsule on the grounds to be opened in 6939.
Historians and writers have long commented on and debated the meaning of this fair.[1] Was it poignantly innocent, with its faith in technology and human perfectibility as war broke out around the world? Was it ominous and sinister in its insistence on efficiency and systemization in every aspect of life? In retrospect, was it amusingly far-fetched or surprisingly prophetic?
Yet one of the most significant legacies of the 1939 World’s Fair was not immediately visible to fairgoers or preserved in postcards and souvenirs; instead, it was budgetary. Long after the Perisphere was disassembled and the fifty cows on the Rotolactor had returned to their pasture, the fair’s impact as an antecedent of urban public-private partnerships remained. Public-private partnerships in New York City are typically discussed as an impact of the fiscal crisis in the 1970s; as the city’s budget tightened and a climate of austerity prevailed, public-private partnerships seemed like an attractive way to keep the city running and growing while shifting the burden of the costs away from government. But the extensive implementation of public-private partnerships from the 1980s onward should instead be recognized as the maturation of an idea that was born during a different moment of crisis in the city: The Great Depression.
City planners in New York during the 1930s experimented when it came to conceptualizing and funding large-scale public works. The energetic lobbying of Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses helped New York receive $58 per capita[2] in New Deal funding and reshaped much of the city in the process. They remained pragmatic in their attempts to find additional sources of funding and opportunistic in their efforts to tie different agencies and projects together in order to gain greater budgetary flexibility. In this climate, the 1939 World’s Fair was a unique opportunity to achieve multiple goals at once. It generated construction jobs, increased tourism, provided a public relations boost for New York City, and created a basis for raising private bonds to supplement the public dollars supporting the fair. The fair was innovative in the way it collected public funds from multiple levels of government and combined them with private bonds to create the event itself and also build the infrastructure that nominally supported the fair but became a permanent part of the city afterwards.