Expo '67 - The future was then!

Breaking news now, from Expo '67! Everything will look cool in the future! No it didn't. The actual future seldom lives up to the giddy optimism of the World's Fair. Ah well. We'll always have these pictures from the April 28th, 1967 issue of LIFE magazine.

The Australian pavilion. Nope. Those picto-trumpets aren't video screens. They're just backlit photos. Expensive and elaborate? Check. Cool looking? Super check. Loud? Not check.

The Cuban pavilion, which came in a flat box and was assembled with a 5mm hex wrench (included) in about three hours.

The Jenga Japan pavilion.

La Ronde, a futuregasmic amusement park just inside the gates of the expo.

World's Fair Week - Pavilion of American Interiors.

Today we're at the '64 World's Fair again to see the Pavilion of American Interiors. Ooo! Such a Googie building! What goes on in there? Uuuh, not much, I'm afraid. Mostly, it was a showroom of stuff you could buy to decorate your home. The husbands must have gone to the International Beer Pavilion while the wives swooned about in here.

Well, not everything at the Fair can be exciting. Maybe they had some nutty furniture on display? Maybe? Please?

Well, in '64, they were starting to get over the national obsession with minimalism and space age design. It looks like they were already looking forward to the overall shittiness of The Seventies and its emphasis on clutter and pointless ornamentation.

This looks like my Aunt's living room, and not in a good way.

And now, something for everyone. If you think the Pavilion of American Interiors is simply fab, here's a picture of it under construction. Here's to anticipating a neato expo of kitschy furniture!

And if you think the Pavilion of American Interiors is a pathetic commercial pox on what should be a display of science and technology, here's a picture of the P.A.I. being demolished. Good riddance! Bring on the parking lot of the future!

And then there's whatever the hell this is, which was in that brochure....

Over at NYWF64.com, they have an excerpt from a brochure explaining this photo. Text pasted without permission, for your sanitation:

No? Come to our Moon Room. It is beautiful and strange. A moon dining room floating in cosmic space. (So you can see what a sit-down dinner on the moon would be like!) It is the most heavenly part of the International Silverware Exhibit at the World's Fair.
Here by the light of the moon you will see Vision -- sterling flatware ten light years ahead of its time. Find a silver coffee service you'd fly to the moon for. Water pitchers too ethereal for water. Futuristic design far too advanced to go on the market. (Although our culture is going at such a fast clip -- who knows?)
Another thing about our Moon Room. It lets those scientists know no matter what we'll be eating 20 years from today -- even if it's little blue food pills -- dinner will still be served on gleaming silver platters. By candlelight.

Ugh. A LIGHT YEAR IS NOT A MEASURE OF TIME! IT IS A MEASURE OF DISTANCE YOU WILLFULLY IGNORANT FOPS!! I like the spacey tableware and stuff, but when interior designers try to talk about the future in terms of meal pills and actors on wires, a column of puke slowly rises to the top of my throat. I'm leaving. Look for me in the International Beer Pavilion.

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World's Fair Week - AMF Monorail, Monorail, Monoraaaaail!

World's Fair Week continues with a quick stop at the '64 World's Fair in New York. The best place to get a good overview of the park was the AMF monorail. Monorails were space-age technology that's bound to really catch on any decade now. Just keep your monofinger crossed!

You may know AMF from their many years making equipment for bowling alleys. Their flexibility in engineering and design shows in this rendering of the monorail station, which looks an awful lot exactly like a giant ball return for humans. Can't get enough of those crazy boomerang  shapes and vertical stripes, can you?

So what's there now? Not bloody much. The monorail station was located at A8 on the World's Fair map, which is now a triangle formed by two branches of Meadow Drive and Meadow Lake Trail. Sometimes life just completely fails to be interesting.


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There's nothing on Earth like a genuine bon-a-fide electrified six-car monorail. Here's Phil Hartmen as Lyle Lanley selling a monorail to Springfield.

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World's Fair Week - U.S. Science Building

Here's the U.S. Science pavilion at night, from the '62 Seattle world's Fair. Pretty!

Want to see the logo they chose for that' year's fair? Nope? Well here it is!

What the.. ? Well, apparently Austin Powers was on the Expo '62 design staff. Despite the distinctly male direction of the logo (and maybe because of it), I'm sure the ladies were more than welcome at the Expo, where they could field questions all day regarding whether or not various men make them horny. 

So what's there now? Well what do you know! The U.S. Science Building is there now, but now it's called the Pacific Science Center! How about those particular apples?

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It's a nonprofit science museum that's been yanking and cranking pretty much since the Expo closed in '62. It's not every day you find an old Expo facility that hasn't been bulldozed or turned into a parking lot.

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World's Fair Week Preview - La Ronde.

Next week will be World's Fair Week here at Phil Are GO!, because the Garage Sale Assault Squad found a cache of super cool postcards, and you need to see them. The World's Fair was a thing that used to be relevant back before we had the internet and FaceTube and everyone could know everything instantly. Nations would get together to show off their technology, industry, architecture and generally pretend they lived in The Future. Now that we're here, we've decided we're a disease on the planet. Whee. Next week we're going to forget that and look at some crazy buildings and wallow in memories of optimism, whatever that was.

As a preview, please enjoy this picture of (I think) Hudson Bay, at Expo '67, in Quebec. Cable cars,pirate ships and Logan's Run's summer home. You want weird? We'll weird you up but good at Expo '67!

Milliron's Department Store, 1949 - Mod-ular.

This picture was left on my desk this morning by the Images and Scanning Them team. Good work, people. This department store is a frikkin' masterpiece. Just look at those curves.

This picture was found in a 1949 issue of Fortune Magazine, and the caption reads as follows...

New way to shop in Los Angeles. Customers of Milliron's new store park cars on roof, ride escalator to sales floor. Building cost: $14 per square foot (vs. $25 for conventional design). Sales: two and a half times expectations.

So this building was not only a modernist work of art, but it was clever, efficient, successful AND about half the cost of conventional buildings of the era? Well, if it were still there, I'd be interested to see if the structure had stood up to years of use... what's that? It may still be there? RESEARCH AND GOOGLING TEAM, ASSEMBLE! Pksshoww!

Milliron's grand opening, 1949.

Corner shot, featuring the windows of the Garden rooftop restaurant. In Street View, you can see that these doors
are now cleverly bricked in.

Milliron's central escalator, leading to the restaurant and rooftop parking area.

Built in 1949 by Milliron's, the building is located at 8379 South Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles, just north of LAX. It remained a Milliron's for few years, until being bought out by Broadway stores, and the Broadway-Westchester operated at this location for decades. At some point it became a Mervyn's department store, until closing in 2008, at which point it was put into use as a Kohl's store. So, there's some testament to the solidity of the cheapo construction. But was it still sturdy enough to park cars on the roof? Probably not. The Google Street View images show the rooftop ramp archway as being artfully blocked in by a wall, whose design only makes the feeblest attempt to blend in with the rest of the building. The trail of smeary rust color implies that this might be where the garbage exits the building! Exciting!


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The building was built to impress with cleverness, luxury and comfort. Now it's clearly intended to maximize profits. Mission accomplished. What a bummer. I'm going to scroll up and imagine the lead  picture being used for a jazz album cover.

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Westinghouse - Tribune Tower

From the publication of Rich Uncle Pennybags, the Monopoly guy, comes this ad for Westinghouse, which was apparently still pretty cranked in 1936 about their air conditioning system for the Tribune Tower, completed ten years before. Must have been quite a job if it was still at the top of their resume after ten years.

Yep. Westinghouse still had their chest puffed out all big about their HVAC kung fu on display at the Tribune. They even call the air "pasteurized", but they had the good sense to put the term in quotes to deny any literal implication.

This painting looks to be a watercolor by Somebody Hughes. I'm afraid that's not enough for the Research and Googling team to do an artist search. Sorry. However, we do have a match for the font used in the headline. If you want to duplicate this exact text, you'll be looking for Stymie Black. If you're not, then don't. Suit yourself.

So what's there now?



Hey! Tribune Tower! All right! I have a feeling that the building will be there long after the actual newspaper has met it's end. Either that, or the Trib will have to think of a way to make money without actually selling newspapers, poor thing, because more and more people are getting their news for free on the web. Think fast, guys!

It wasn't easy to match the angle this closely. I think the painting in the ad was "shot" from the stairs leading down to the water, and Google Street View doesn't let you drop the little yellow man down there. You can see what I mean more clearly in this night shot from Wikipedia:

I wonder if the designers of the building (John Mead Howells and Ray Hood) would approve of us bedazzling their Neo-Gothic masterpiece with disco lights.

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York Air Conditioning - All hail the windowless office building!

Today, readers, we celebrate the triumph of Mechanical Air Conditioning, which in 1936, finally allowed mankind to achieve the long-awaited dream of the windowless building. And this we owe to York Air Conditioning. Let us symbolically cover our eyes in symbolic thanks for the ultimate abolition of scenery.

Throughout history, mankind has suffered under the yoke of nature, toiling under her harsh sun and gawking at her hideous trees and recoiling in horror from her monstrous woodland creatures. Until York Inc. had the courage and wisdom to fully develop Mechanical Air Conditioning, we were doomed to an existence of squinting at papers under the brutal glare of natural light, and breathing air that had not been filtered, and possibly even breathed previously by a horse or a tree. This is why humans were so small in the past. The aborigines, for example, have no air conditioning, and they can barely be seen with the naked eye. This is because their nation is, in essence, one huge window. So savage.

Now, in 1936, Man has progressed. He has tamed the air particle, now known as the "air-o-cule". He has crushed air under the boot of Science, and forced it to do his bidding. When Man says "Be cool and dry!", the air-o-cule obeys. When Man says "Be warm and slightly moist or be punished!", the  air-o-cule  positively wets itself in terror and hurries to comply. Only through the force of York Air Conditioning can man be truly free to think about other things, like cigars and hats.

A chart.

The men of York worked tirelessly to build an Air Conditioning system for the Hershey Chocolate Corporation, so that their building could be a near featureless cube of merriment. Now, freed from the tyranny of windows, Hershey's jolly workers, or "choco-troopers", are happier and more efficient. They are no longer distracted by "looking out of things" or "daydreaming". Corrosive employee behavior has been reduced, as standard monthly brain samples show. For example, ambition and aspiration have been slashed by fifteen percent, while respiration has increased by six percent. Meanwhile, employee desire to go on living, or "livewant" has remained nearly average, factoring in a twelve percent margin of error and a seven percent margin of error, with a nineteen percent margin of error.

Additionally, the light from the overhead fluorescent fixtures is more pleasing to the eye and healthful, according to the York pamphlet "Your Eyes Should Vibrate! A Guide to Fluorescent Lighting Systems and Cellular Microstasis." No longer beholden to the natural diurnal day/night cycle, workers often put in longer hours without being asked, owing to their quantitatively elevated mood, sound physiology and the efficient deployment of clocks behind the boilers, and in the bottom of dustbins.

We can all share the pride that York must surely feel for the thing they have helped create. We must all look forward to our Bright New Future of a completely controlled environment, beautiful uninterrupted planes of concrete, and more efficient chocolate production.

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World's Fair 1964 - Hall of Education. Yes, please.

I can't think of what to call this architectural style. Modernism, Cubism, and Super Coolism are all in the running.

This is a postcard I found in an antique store while my girlfriend was looking at bracelets. It cost me a dollar, but the bracelet was a little more expensive. The following is on the back:

Gorgeous building. So what's there now? A couple of trees. Here's a map of the '64 World's Fair. The Hall of Education is number 21.

Trees are nice and all, but there are lots of uglier buildings in New York that didn't get flattened. Ah well.

 Here's what Mr. and Mrs. Namewitheld had to say about their trip...

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