World: Figures v. Dreams

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(3 of 4)

What has kept the attendance below estimates is anybody's guess. Some guesses: 1) entrance fee too high; 2) unfavorable reports of high food prices, etc. (an 85¢ dinner, 40¢ lunch, can be got at the Fair but its swank restaurants charge five times as much); 3) New York City itself is too much competition for any world's fair; 4) antagonism of country's press toward New York; 5) absence of community pride among New Yorkers; 6) hard times. Whatever the reasons, the Fair failed to get its expected Big Push in July. (For that month its average daily attendance was 137,456, only 6% better than Chicago's record.)

Loudest boast of dressy, horsy Grover Whalen was what the Fair would do for New York City. He talked about a billion dollars worth of business to be split between the Fair and the city. A good guesstimate last week was that the Fair had brought not more than $100,000,000 of extra spending to the city. The available facts:

≫ July department store sales were up 2% (U. S.: 3%) over 1938 (a poor year). But smart Lord & Taylor President Walter Hoving reported a 47% increase the first week of August, attributed 75% of it to Fair visitors.

≫ Only about 3,000,000 out-of-town patrons have visited the Fair. There they stayed an average seven hours, spent an average $2.06 apiece ($1.44 plus admission. Coney Island average: 16 1/4 ¢).

≫ American Express has done "easily half" the Fair business it had anticipated. Since the Fair opened, Baltimore & Ohio traffic has been double 1938; Pennsylvania Railroad up 20%; New York Central a meagre 5%.

≫ Business of 34 big Manhattan hotels is up 50% from last year, but others show only a slight increase.

≫ The day the Fair opened, Manhattan restaurant business took a nosedive, is now 15-20% under last year.

Unable to pull his top-heavy Fair out of the red this year, Grover Whalen is faced with the problem of running it a second year. But there he will tangle with the League of Nations. In 1928, under the League's friendly wing, 22 foreign nations formed the Bureau of International Exhibitions. Under its rule signatories cannot participate in any fair longer than six months. That would mean curtains for next year's World of Tomorrow, because, if the nations which erected buildings tear them down, there will be ugly gaps in the Fair's landscape.

Like many another treaty, this one can be stretched. It was stretched when many signatories put up their own buildings in defiance of the Bureau's designation of the New York World's Fair as a Category 2 fair (meaning it must build pavilions for foreign exhibitors who are supposed to build them themselves only at Category 1 fairs).

Whether the 22 foreign nations who put up their own pavilions* will return next year (if Whalen can raise the money) remains to be seen. At present they are angry because: 1) they have spent $55,000,000 to date; 2) they have exceeded their budgets; 3) overtime payments to labor cost them $5,000,000 they hadn't figured on (the Fair's figure: $1,000,000); 4) trucking charges have been exorbitant; 5) Grover Whalen and Washington have ignored their protests (they were warned in advance that they would have to employ U. S. labor, that it would be expensive).