From the New York Times:

January 26, 1998



TAKING IN THE SITES / By HOWARD FOUNTAIN

A Virtual Trip to World's Fairs of the Past

NEW YORK -- It has been more than a quarter-century since the last New 
York World's Fair closed up shop on a former ash heap in Queens. 
Precious little of it remains in Flushing Meadows -- just the Unisphere 
and a few other structures in varying states of decay. 



But the 1964-65 fair survives on the World Wide Web, as does its 
precursor, the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, and other grand 
expositions. And the fairs' poorer cousins, amusement parks, are well 
represented too, with sites devoted to defunct parks like Coney Island 
in Brooklyn, Freedomland in the Bronx, Palisades Amusement Park in New 
Jersey and Boblo Island near Detroit. 

These sites are lovingly created and maintained by aficionados, and 
largely devoid of commercialism. To tour them is to rekindle memories of 
sheer wonder (in the case of world's fairs) and sheer terror (in the 
case of amusement parks). In the vernacular of Disney, they are 
definitely "E" tickets. 

There are two good sites dedicated to the 1964-65 New York fair. Both 
offer extensive information about the fair's 140 pavilions, which ranged 
from an elaborate re-creation of a Belgian village to a house built of 
Formica. 

One site, by Jeffrey Stanton, an amateur historian and author in Venice, 
Calif., features clickable maps of the fairgrounds, plenty of 
photographs, and articles on the construction of the fair and the 
technology it showcased. (The latter offers the delicious tidbit that 
the fair organizers asked the Atomic Energy Commission to build a mobile 
nuclear reactor for the event. The commission declined.) 

The Web is a generational thing, of course, so perhaps it is not 
surprising that people with memories of the 1939-40 New York fair have 
fewer options. The best site consists largely of a personal essay in 
which the author points out that he created the site after finding 
nothing about the fair on the Web. 

The site has links to other articles, book reviews and photographs, and 
serves as a kind of gathering place for others who fondly remember the 
Trylon and Perisphere, the fair's symbols. 

The granddaddy of world's fairs, at least in the United States, was the 
World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 
400th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the New World. It is 
represented by two sites, one of which details everything from the 
number of tickets sold (21.5 million) to the cost of various forms of 
transportation (a sedan chair, borne by native Turks, was 75 cents an 
hour). 

There is extensive information about the fair's great innovations, 
including the Ferris wheel (invented for the event by George Ferris) and 
the Midway Plaisance, the central group of paying attractions that 
helped make the fair a financial success. 

The midway concept was so successful that it became the basis for most 
American amusement parks until the Disneyland era, after World War II. 
And some of those now-silent parks can be found on the Web. 

The site for Boblo Island, which closed in 1993 after 95 years of 
entertaining Michigan and Ontario residents, consists solely of a long 
essay. But the history is fascinating and detailed, describing, among 
other things, the origin of the name (it is a corruption of Bois Blanc) 
and several unfortunate incidents, including the time in 1941 when 3,000 
women and children were stranded on the island for most of a night 
because of a lack of ferry boats. 



There are references to Coney Island, once the grandest of America's 
amusement areas (it was actually three separate parks), all over the 
Web. The most elaborate site is one created by Stanton, who has made 
something of a specialty from researching old fairs and parks (he has 
sites for Expo '67 and the Venice, Calif., amusement piers as well). 

As Stanton's site painfully details, Coney Island is just a shell of its 
former self: Aside from the Cyclone coaster, there is little left. Two 
other parks in the New York area -- Palisades, on the cliffs overlooking 
the Hudson, and Freedomland U.S.A. in the Bronx -- have disappeared 
completely, except on the Web. 

Palisades has its own historical society, which maintains a Web site 
that, while still under construction, features a history of the park and 
some sound files, including the famous radio jingle ("Palisades has the 
rides, Palisades has the fun, come on over"). 

Freedomland's site is more extensive, with plenty of photographs and 
maps of the park, which was laid out in the shape of the United States. 
There is also a listing of where some of Freedomland's rides are today 
(the Tornado ride, for example, migrated to a park in Lake George, N.Y.) 
and even a link to Co-op City, the vast housing project that rose from 
the park's ashes. 

Even Disneyland, while obviously not defunct, has a retro site of sorts. 
Cleverly titled Yesterland, it features descriptions of attractions that 
have been phased out at the California park over the years. It also 
includes a discussion of Disneyland's old coupon policy, in which a 
separate ticket was required for each ride or attraction, an "A" ticket 
for the simplest ride to an "E" ticket for the most elaborate or 
thrilling. 

Disneyland, of course, begat Walt Disney World in Florida, the crown 
jewel of what have come to be known as theme parks. But as one other 
site shows, not all Florida entertainment ventures turned to gold. "
Florida's Forgotten Tourist Attractions" describes many that came and 
went, like the Honey Bee Factory, a glorified observation hive in Fort 
Myers, and the Anirama near Miami, a museum of animated figures that was 
soon eclipsed by Disney. 

Perhaps the weirdest was Weapons of the World, near Cypress Gardens, 
where in the 1950s visitors could use modern copies of old weapons "on 
ranges designed to simulate actual historic and native conditions." It 
went out of business in the 1960s, a victim, it appears, of the peace 
movement. 

TAKING IN THE SITES is published weekly, on Mondays. Click here for a 
list of links to other columns in the series.


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Related Sites
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New York World's Fair 1964-65 

Jeffrey Stanton's 1964-65 New York World's Fair site 

1939-40 New York World's Fair 

Interactive Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition 

The World's Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath 

Boblo Island 

Coney Island 

Palisades Amusement Park 

Freedomland U.S.A. 

Yesterland 

Florida's Forgotten Tourist Attractions 



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