"Michelangelo and Walt Disney Are the Stars of My Show"

"Instead of France and Britain, Mr. Moses got Thailand and Pakistan. Esquire dismissed the majority of foreign pavilions at Flushing Meadow as geopolitical 'small potatoes.'

"What the critics didn’t understand was that a world’s fair, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Children marveled at Disney’s Audio-Animatronics and beamed with excitement as they rode with their families in a new Ford Mustang. Old and young alike gaped in wonder at the Picturephone, with its video screen allowing callers to see each other (and predating Skype by decades), as well as the life-size replica of NASA’s Saturn V rocket engine that would, in just a few years, power the Apollo mission to the moon."

Joseph Tirella in The New York Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 New York World's Fair.