New York is frowning, tight-lipped, short-tempered. It is a city without grace. . . . It is a city that cries “Jump” to a would be suicide perched on a window ledge. —“New York: A City Destroying Itself,” Fortune, September 1964 By August 1964 the New York media had reached the general consensus that the World’s Fair was becoming a financial fiasco. They knew the Fair—which Robert Moses had described that month as “a summer university education, as well as a world tour”—would fall short of the forty million visitors Moses and company had predicted for its first six months. On August 4 the Fair celebrated its twenty millionth visitor; there was now less than eleven weeks left before the Fairgrounds closed for the year. The failure of the three biggest musical revues at the Fair—Radio City Musical Hall producer Leon Leonidoff’s Wonder World, an “aqua-stage spectacle”; the Texas Pavilion’s To Broadway With Love; and Dick Button’s Ice Capades—didn’t help dispel the growing sense that Moses’ Fair was in trouble.
