It’s a Small World After All: Image Crisis and the End of New York City Boosterism

Perhaps no single event in New York’s history was more freighted with ambition and symbolism than the World’s Fair of 1964 and 1965 in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens. This extravagant celebration of New York’s tercentenary and “world city” status was meant to serve as a “graceful exit” for the Fair’s planner, Robert Moses, New York’s phenomenally productive, famously cantankerous, and increasingly embattled “master builder.”1