Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
IT HAPPENED AT THE WORLD'S FAIR
Known officially as the Century 21 Exposition, Seattle's 1962 World's Fair set out
to depict the future, as envisaged through the eyes of an affluent Cold War gener-
ation still trapped in the rigid social mores of the 1950s. Looking back today,
many of its exhibits look like relics from a Flash Gordon movie, although the
expo's larger infrastructure has endured, most notably the monorail (an early ex-
periment in mass transit that was way ahead of its time), the Space Needle (a
distinctive city icon) and the Pacific Science Center.
Running for six months between April and October 1962, the fair attracted 10
million visitors, including a freshly demobbed Elvis Presley in the throes of a skin-
crawlingly trite movie career.It Happened at the World's Fairwas partly filmed in
Seattle, and Presley's presence caused quite a stir - although not with the critics,
who called the movie a lemon. The fair itself garnered more plaudits and turned a
tidy profit (unusual for the time). It also helped cement Seattle as a top-tier
American city.
Overshadowed by the Cold War, the fair's main themes were science, the future
and 'outer space' (President Kennedy famously pledged to put a man on the
moon, in a speech made in September 1962 while the fair was still running). The
'World of Science' exhibit hosted a fantastical Spacearium that took visitors on a
virtual journey to the outer galaxies, while the 'World of Tomorrow' sported a
Bubbleator, a hydraulic elevator that lifted visitors through a series of aluminum
cubes and foretold the future. For all its playful predictions, Century 21 was more
an end than a beginning. It closed under the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis
with Kennedy crying off the closing ceremony to deal with more urgent affairs (ie
possible nuclear annihilation). In little over a year, the president would be dead,
US soldiers would be dispatched to Vietnam and America would be taking off its
'50s straitjacket and embracing the hippie-dippie 1960s.
