Tomorrow-Land: The 1964–65 World's Fair and the Transformation of America

To mark the 50th anniversary of New York's last spectacular, but dysfunctionally managed, world's fair, journalist Tirella integrates three subjects: the story of the fair, the rocky identity of the fair's host city, and the birth of the Sixties. Robert Moses—the longtime urban planner known today largely for cementing over much of what made his city so distinctively one of neighborhoods—was hired to run the corporation in charge of the fair. He is Tirella's protagonist. Readers witness Egypt and Israel squabbling over their respective nation's pavilions, the art exhibits that inspired fascination but generally critical contempt, and Moses's alienation of one senior bureaucrat after another. Figures as disparate as President Johnson, the Congress of Racial Equality's leader James Farmer, and the Beatles intersected with the fair surprisingly frequently. Tirella argues convincingly that such intersections really mattered in the transformation of the early 1960s into "the Sixties." Because too many potential fair tourists, worried about the city's rising crime rate and racial unrest, stayed home, the fair lost money, sticking New York City with the debt.