New Orleans: Foul Times for a Fair

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"Let the good times roll!" exulted Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards when he opened the World's Fair in New Orleans last May. Alas, the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition has seen nothing but hard times. The fair has been losing $1 million a week; average daily attendance has been 40,000, a sorry response to the spring predictions of 70,000. And last week the fair defaulted on a $40 million bank loan by failing to make its $450,000 monthly interest payment. The festival on the levee has no chance of breaking even, but New Orleans has Beleaguered exposition agreed to postpone collecting city taxes from the exposition to enable the fair to limp to its scheduled closing date, Nov. 11, instead of folding early.

Why did the World's Fair fail so abysmally? Some blame a poor marketing strategy, others the $15 admission price. It may also be that the attraction of the onetime, small-scale exposition is over, outmoded by well-promoted, futuristic extravaganzas like Walt Disney's Epcot Center in central Florida. Or, as some soured Louisianans observed, it could be that the Knoxville World's Fair of two years ago, though financially successful, was so boring it discouraged people from going to New Orleans.