Bayside Author's Book Chronicles History of '64 World's Fair

Bayside resident Joseph Tirella’s first book takes on the turbulent 1960s, tackling everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Civil Rights Movement and Beatlemania and tying it all into the borough where he was born. 

“Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World’s Fair and the Transformation of America,” which will be released on Jan. 7, tells the tale of how master builder Robert Moses brought the fair back to Queens.

The book also shows how the fair’s theme, “Peace Through Understanding,” was inspired by the period of social unrest during which it was created.

Tirella, who has contributed freelance work to Rolling Stone and many of the city’s daily newspapers, said he came up with the idea for the book while writing for the New York Times’ now-defunct City Section.

“Some of the pieces I’d been doing got me thinking about Queens,” said Tirella, who is associate director of media relations at Lehman College. “I stumbled across the fair while doing Google searches. I wasn’t born around the time the fair was going on. When I was growing up, Flushing Meadows Corona Park was a place to stay out of. In the 1970s, it became a symbol of urban decay and neglect.”

Tirella said he realized that the idea of bringing the fair back to Queens was conceived amid a period of great tension. President John F. Kennedy showed up for a groundbreaking in 1962 just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the fair opened five months after his assassination.

When it debuted in 1964, the fair was a nexus for numerous events of significance.

That summer, The Beatles would play at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. Kitty Genovese had been stabbed to death in nearby Kew Gardens just a month prior to the fair’s opening.

Malcolm X was living in Queens and the Freedom Summer was in full swing. Andrew Goodman protested the fair and, shortly thereafter, was killed in Mississippi along with two other civil rights movement activists.

“This was all happening as the fair was being built in the city,” Tirella said. “There were civil rights protests all summer long about job discrimination, poor public schools and housing, lack of affordable housing and lousy hospitals. Of course, it didn’t take long before they started focusing on the fair because it was a major public works project with money from the state and federal government. And they wanted to know why they weren’t hiring more African Americans.”

The presidential election was in progress when the fair kicked off. New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, was a contender for the Republican Party nomination, but it was eventually Barry Goldwater who would go on to be defeated by Lyndon B. Johnson.

“I wanted to put the fair back into its proper historic context because the idea was that people were supposed to come there to seek ‘peace through understanding’ while America was coming apart,” Tirella said.

The book begins in 1958 when the concept was first floated of having a second fair in Queens. It had previously been held in the borough in 1939.

The first third of the book deals with the buildup to the fair.

“It was very controversial,” Tirella said. “Moses repaired all the highways and expressways leading up to Flushing Meadows, so the roads had to be torn up. Queens became the world’s parking lot.”

Tirella said he did much of his research for the book at the New York Public Library’s archives, where he scoured through tens of thousands of documents composed by Moses.

“It’s how he came together as a character,” he said. “It was like a diary. I read every letter he had over a period of five years. I saw how he reacted to the news every day and interacted with people. He was a lot more complicated than people realize.”

Tirella said “Tomorrow-Land” shows how the fair played an important role in the United States becoming a more ethnically diverse nation.

“You could go to the World’s Fair in ’64 and see the world,” he said. “Now, Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in the world. But at that time, America was becoming more diverse and it was starting in Queens.”

Upon its release, the book will be sold on Amazon as well as at retailers, such as Barnes and Noble. To read more about it, visit the book's Amazon page.