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1965. "New York World's Fair -- Kodak Pavilion at night." Medium format color transparency, photographer unknown. View full size.
I went to the Fair a couple of times while I was in high school. I must have been captivated by the Unisphere because the sole surviving black-and-white film strip from my visits contains only photographs of it.
Every summer we piled into Dad's Studebaker and visited our cousins in New Jersey, so it was easy for us to visit the Fair in 1964. Among my memories the ferris wheel shaped like a giant Firestone tire, the Unisphere, and the Court of the Universe, which was a truly spectacular sight at night with its illuminated fountains sending water flying around in every direction.
The Fair coincided with my senior year at nearby West Point, and I visited several times, both with the Glee Club for gigs and with my fiancée and parents, just rubbernecking. It was indeed a magical place, though how much of that enchantment reposed in the Fair itself and how much in just the allure of verging on genuine adulthood after four years of relative monasticism I cannot determine.
But you can sign me up to go back to 1965 Flushing Meadows to find out!
The person who took that photo knew what they were doing. Beautiful.
Those are actually gigantic photographic prints, specially illuminated to resemble color transparencies in direct sunlight as well as at night. How they did that.
As a 16-year-old New Yorker, I lived within walking distance of the fair. The nighttime colors and lighting were awesome, magnificent, superb.
Daytime was great but the nights were MAGICAL; everything was awash in the blending and merging lights; you felt transported into another world, another realm.
God! How I miss it!
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