Day 176 - World's Biggest Road Map

For the 1964-1965 World's Fair, modernist marvel Philip Johnson was asked to design a pavilion to celebrate the host state: New York. You all know it, I'm sure, even if you don't realize it. Many of you have probably seen the most notable component--the flying saucer lollipop-looking contraptions--while driving by Flushing Meadows Corona Park on the Grand Central Parkway. The rest of you probably know it from Men in Black.

Less known today, since it's mostly gone, is the adjacent Tent of Tomorrow whose colored panels (think '60s) were suspended over the artistic piece-de-resistance of the pavilion: the world's biggest road map. The map is a terrazzo reproduction of the 1964 Texaco Roadmap for New York State and one of the most fabulous pieces of pop art you are likely to see--whether you're a map geek or not.

Most of the World's Fair structures were constructed just for the fair and did not last much beyond its two seasons. The NYS Pavilion as a whole has been in limbo since then. It was too grand and ostentatious to dismantle. And yet it was too operationally challenging to be used effectively after the fair. It hung on for a bit as a restaurant and viewing platform, as it was during the fair, but it could not hold its own financially. The futuristic heaven-pointing monument that the City--or, more correctly, the World's Fair Corporation--was willing to subsidize during the world-renowned event of the fair itself, was harder to justify for a city slipping into fiscal purgatory.

The towers remain (or, at least, have persisted); their external elevator now frozen in place partway up the side and their internal stairwell rusted out from four decades of rainwater pooling upon their treads. The spectral plexiglass panels of the Tent of Tomorrow fell in many, many yesterdays ago; the criss-crossing guy wires hold nothing in place today. And the gorgeous terrazzo map of the Empire State has been rent apart by mosses and ailanthus, succeeding in creating a rift in the Mohawk River valley in 40 years that the Earth's tectonic movement couldn't do in 40 million years. There have been several attempts--most half-hearted, a few zealous--to create a justification and a funding stream to stabilize and possibly renovate the pavilion. The most recent one I remember involved creating a space museum that would be sited there. Each has been done in by a combination of municipal malaise and the daunting
sums of money needed to make it happen.

Recognizing at least part of this vanishihing landscape, the NYC Parks Department, along with the University of Pennsylvania's historic preservation program, recently began documenting and conserving parts of the Roadmap. With an eye toward telling a new generation of aficionados about the map, the Queens Museum of Art just opened an exhibit this weekend that explains and celebrates some of this work. Dave Jacoby and I attended. I was pleased to see such a variety of folks there and interested in this relic. All hopefully will be motivated to help develop a broader constituency for it.