WAY back in 2015, the Long Island Garden Railway Society created several mock-ups of World’s Fair 1964-65 exhibitions and displayed them in the Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing, which I attended and duly covered on this FNY page. Among them, of course, were Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion (Tent of Tomorrow) and the Unisphere.
From Forgotten New York, the Book:
Designed by Philip Johnson, the NY State Pavilion was among the most striking buildings in a Fair full of them. It consists of the “Tent of Tomorrow” consisting of 16 100-foot columns that supported a 50,000 sq. foot roof of multicolored panels (which was removed in the 1970s) as well as three towers, measuring 60, 150 and 226 feet tall. Fairgoers could ascend top the top of the towers via “Sky Streak” capsule elevators. Inside the pavilion, there was a scale model of the new St. Lawrence River hydroelectric plant, NY State industry information, artwork from the 19th-century Hudson River School, and portraits of NY State colonists.
The NY State Pavilion contained striking visuals both above and below. Texaco funded a giant map of New York State on the pavilion floor with 567 mosaic terrazo panels weighing about 400 lbs. each. Rand McNally supplied the topographic information, and Texaco furnished the location of each of its gas stations in the state. When the pavilion’s roof was removed due to its deterioration borne of general negligence, the Texaco map was open to the elements. It’s still there, but padlocked and severely decayed. The “Sky Streak” elevators are still there, awaiting reactivation if that ever happens.
That 35-ton 140’x120′ behemoth, the Unisphere, has become Queens’ symbol in the 4 decades it has been in Flushing Meadows, and can be a surprising and impressive sight for those who aren’t familiar with it: it seems to rise above the trees and buildings like a second moon when you are in the surrounding park and nearby neighborhoods of Corona and Queensboro Hill.
Though Earth has no rings, unlike Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the Unisphere has three. Its rings represent the orbits of the first American astronaut, the first Russian cosmonaut and the first communications satellite to orbit the Earth. It was quite an engineering feat to make the Unisphere stay in place, because the Pacific Ocean part of it is much lighter than the section showing Africa, Asia and Europe. The Unisphere tilts at the same approximate 23.5-degree angle the Earth does as it orbits the sun.
I was surprised to later see the NYS Pavilion and Unisphere mockups in the lobby of the Quinn Funeral Home at Broadway and 36th Street in Astoria, pictured here. Between 2012 and 2018 I spent quite a bit of time at the Quinn, where I served as a docent and did clerical work such as scanning and labeling postcards for the Greater Astoria Historical Society, where I served and still serve as a board member. Check out its revamped website.
The Quinn Building changed hands and GAHS was evicted in 2018, and I do not know where these replicas wound up, sadly.
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4/22/26