#Trylon and Perisphere
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Rosalie Fairbanks, a guide to the New York World's Fair, points to the fair's joint symbols, the Trylon and Perisphere, February 22, 1939. The entire sheath of scaffolding was removed for the first time on this day. The Trylon and Perisphere symbolized progress—the theme of the fair was "The World of Tomorrow." (In those days, people believed that life would improve in the future.)
Photo: Associated Press
#vintage New York#1930s#1939 World's Fair#NY World's Fair#Trylon#Perisphere#Feb 22#22 Feb#optimism#vintage NYC
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New York World’s Fair Comics #2
#New York world’s fair comics#superman#clark kent#kal el#Batman#bruce wayne#robin#dick grayson#world’s fair#perisphere#trylon#team up#jack burnley#dc comics#comics#40s comics#golden age comics
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The Trylon and Perisphere of the 1930-1940 New York World’s Fair.
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“I'll admit to initial misgivings when I pored over the first few pages of Jerry's pencils for #19 (March 1983). Not that they weren't good--in some ways they were very good. I was especially impressed by his renderings of the Trylon and Perisphere and other artifacts left over from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Still, I wasn't quite 100% sold--
--until I flipped over Page 8, and saw his powerful full-page panel of six All-Stars staring wide-eyed at eight comatose but upright, tube-encased members of the Justice Society of America!
At that moment I fell in love with Jerry's work all over again.” -Roy Thomas
#All Star Squadron#Jerry Ordway#Firebrand#Tarantuala#Steel#Robotman#Liberty Belle#Johnny Quick#Justice Society of America#Doctor Fate#Wonder Woman#Doctor Mid Nite#captain atom#Sandman#Hawkman#Johnny Thunder#Starman
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New York Central Railroad’S "Dreyfuss" streamlined steam locomotive in front of the Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Queens (at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnDP44cuOcj/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux, architects
Trylon & Perisphere
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Kodak pavilion. 1939 New York World's Fair . Trylons and Perispheres.
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If you were to attend the 1939 World’s Fair, you would be greeted with two structures named Trylon and Perisphere. The former was a tall, spire-like structure equipped with what was then the world’s longest escalator. The latter was a humongous sphere. These two modernist structures were the Fair’s mascots.
By stepping into the Peripshere, a new world would be unveiled to you. Inside, a diorama of a future utopian city was constructed called “Democracity.” It was designed to be inhabited by a million and a half people, covering 11,000 square miles.
Trylon and Perisphere, along with Democracity inside, were the symbolic heart of the Fair. But the branding behind it all was intentional for more reasons than one would initially assume. The idea was created by the Fair’s publicity director, Edward Bernays. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s cousin, known as the man chiefly responsible for bringing his psychoanalytic theories to the United States during the 1920s.
While Sigmund himself fell into despondency in Europe after World War I, Bernays became widely successful in the United States. Using ideas of the unconscious, he quickly gained a reputation as someone who could conjure up mass public opinion for products and issues like no one else. While his later critics likened it to “manipulation,” Bernays himself called it “public relations,” a term he coined.
Yet, reading his work, one finds a deeply cynical man. Bernays rationalized his activities by arguing that the management of mass desire was preferable to the alternative—that is, “letting the unconscious run wild” with its repressed urges. If these dark forces were actually unleashed, he believed, they could undo society itself. Consumerism was hence viewed as a bulwark against the primitive mind of the crowd, and managing its desires was rationalized as necessary in saving society against itself. As he stated openly in his work Propaganda (1928), “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” He was therefore one of the first theorists of what can be called "managed democracy."
Whether he really believed in his own rationalization or not, Bernays did become incredibly wealthy from his services. By the late 1920s, he was “living in a suite of rooms in one of New York’s most expensive hotels, where he gave frequent parties.” According to an employee of Bernays, the events were a “who’s who” of the business elite, the arts, media leaders, and the mayor himself. In due time, his clients also included those within politics and the state. He became a "sort of magician" of public opinion, even though he openly viewed this same public with open contempt. Given his reputation, it was unsurprising that Bernays was tapped for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Given that the American public was just coming out of the Great Depression, it was known that the reputation of “big business” in the United States was at historic lows. By framing the World’s Fair through the prism of desire, Bernays sought to rehabilitate this perception by giving Americans an open door—one that they themselves did not even know they wanted. Bernays’s daughter confirms this aspiration of his in an interview with Adam Curtis for his documentary A Century of the Self (2002).
Anna Bernays: To my father, the World’s Fair was an opportunity… Capitalism in a democracy, democracy and capitalism in marriage. It was consumerist, but at the same time you inferred in a funny way that democracy and capitalism went together.
Adam Curtis [continues]: The vision it portrayed was of a new democracy in which businesses responded to people’s innermost desires in a way politicians could never do. But it was a form of democracy that viewed people not as active citizens… but as passive consumers… [which] Bernays believed was the key to control in a mass democracy.
As Curtis makes clear, this thinking reached its symbolic high point at the 1939 World’s Fair. A democratic vision was then constructed by its very own skeptic, someone who viewed democracy as nothing other than a form of social management. Historian of public relations, Stewart Ewen, summarized this view in an interview with Adam Curtis:
“It’s not that the people are in charge, but that the people’s desires are in charge. The people exercise no decision-making power within this environment. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to the idea of the public as passive consumers driven primarily by instinctual or unconscious desires, and if you can trigger those needs and desires, you can get what you want from them.”
At the end of the century, the consequences of this vision would be criticized by writer Christopher Lasch. Published after his death in 1994, Lasch wondered whether American democracy was now merely living off the “borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism." Lasch was a critic of the kind of managed democracy that began to emerge around Bernays's time. By the 1990s, the consequences had become self-evident: when Lasch was writing, civic participation had sunk to its lowest point since World War II.
Perhaps this long trajectory—triumphantly advertised as a "new horizon" at the 1939 World’s Fair—helps explain why the state’s competency and ability to execute basic functions has deteriorated so badly in our own time. Needless to say, Bernays's model of managed democracy was not exactly resilient and built to last.
Decades later during the 1970s, optimism would dry up amid scandal as institutional trust collapsed, exposing the hollowness of this consumer model of democracy outright for the first time. The fact that the United States has still not recovered from that “crisis of confidence” is not accidental: the ultimate outcome of a Bernaysian model of managed democracy is not renewal amid crisis, but rather an entrenchment of its old managerial ways, because it has so little of an active public to draw upon.
#1939 40 world's fair#worlds fair#1939 worlds fair#1939#democracy#capitalism#edward bernays#christopher lasch#progress#futurama#public relations#managed democracy#the beginning of the end#america#substack#sigmund freud#propaganda#propagandists
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This was the winning entry in the contest for the official hat of the 1939 World's Fair. It features the fair's twin symbols, the Trylon and Perisphere. The model is standing in front of the real Perisphere.
Photos: NYPL
#vintage New York#1930s#1939 World's Fair#NY World's Fair#hats#novelty hats#Trylon#Perisphere#vintage NYC#contest
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The fair is better than ever, this year!
#New York world’s fair comics#superman#clark kent#kal el#world’s fair#perisphere#trylon#lois lane#jerry siegel#jack burnley#dc comics#comics#40s comics#golden age comics
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NY World's Fair 1940 posters in the diner
Find these freshly printed or gathered antique posters framed around the restaurant and available in smaller sizes by print at the register!
Ask Rosie about any of these famous posters for the 1939-1940 NY World's Fair. The fair boasted of the "World Of Tomorrow"
1) Go By All Means
Stanley Ekman
2) Great Art Deco - Trylon and Perisphere
Joseph Binder
3) New York World's Fair Of 1940 - For Peace And Freedom
Artist unknown
In 1940, the New York World’s Fair 1939 site was reopened using many of the buildings to once again encourage people to come and view the way of the future.
4) Travel Poster New York World's Fair Trylon Perisphere Libertas
John Atherton
Atherton’s reputation increased to a national scale when he designed the art deco stone lithograph poster for the 1939 World’s Fair that strikingly depicted Earth and its atmospheric layers in the lap of Liberty.
5) The Direct Route to the New York Fair
Sascha Maurer
The 1939 WF included an enormous exhibit on the American Railroad, read all about it here!
6) New York World's Fair - Publicity Posters - NYWF 1939 poster
Artist unknown
7) Woman at New York World's Fair 1939-1940
Albert Staehle
8) Annie Baxter - Publicity Posters - NYWF 1939 poster
anonymous
Advertising the 1939-1940 fair, creator unknown, a digital scan can be found at the NY Public Library Archives. Annie Baxter was a famous actress and model at the time.
9) The Scenic Route to New York World's Fair / New York Central
Leslie Ragan (created for 1939-1940)
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(via The Perisphere: 1939 | Shorpy)
"Perisphere and ramp at 1939 New York Word's Fair." Corpulent counterpoint to the trimmer Trylon. Uncredited acetate transparency, possibly by Gottscho-Schleisner. View full size.
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