The 64’/65’ New York World’s Fair

Possibly the last great world fair prior to the internet age was the 1964-1965 New York World’s fair. Nestled shortly after the inception of household television and prior to the dawn of cable TV and the internet, the quickly growing world was still small for the fairgoers. While not an officially sanctioned world exposition, the NYWF has remained on a brief list of iconic fairs along with the 1889 Exposition Unviverselle in Paris and the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. A whopping fifty-one million people visited Flushing Meadows Park to see the New York World’s Fair in the summers of 1964 and 1965 and the fair stands as a space-race-era time capsule of American optimism.

Unfortunately the fair has largely been forgotten and most of the structures were removed from the park or destroyed. What remains however is a vast amount of souvenirs and printed materials from the fair. Items that would have normally been thrown away but instead have sat in collections for the last sixty years. Our goal is to take one collection of NYWF relics and share it with the world. These photos are not meant to be a comprehensive collection of items from the fair. Instead this collection is meant to give the viewers a taste of what those two summers in Queens were like. We hope that you find this collection of items as interesting as we do.