And Then It Came to an End

One day, the New York World’s Fair, with its architecture flavored by the Space Age, was the future. Then the next day, it was history. After the debt-plagued fair closed on Oct. 17, 1965, the destruction began. Over the course of a year, as these striking images from 1965 and ’66 attest, the fair was carefully and willfully dismantled: Cranes were brought in to remove the exhibitions, buildings were demolished, and even before the official closing, people picked over the grounds, yanking plants from their beds as souvenirs.

The 110-foot tower at the Florida Pavilion had its legs cut and was slowly pulled over with a cable. A similar fate befell the IBM Pavilion. Its ovoid structure was picked apart and eventually resembled a discarded hard-boiled egg.

It is hard to comprehend how only months after the World’s Fair ended it was already the subject of primitive images of rubbish piles and buildings in decay. What, for instance, should we make of the lonesome church and ragged landscape in the picture of the Belgian Pavilion? How could this be New York, we think, when it looks so much like Dresden?

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