Map of the Month - June 2014

New York World’s Fair with a new transit map of Greater New York, [1939]. Brooklyn Historical Society Map collection.

To celebrate the 75^th anniversary of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair held in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, I have selected for this month’s map a beautiful bird’s eye view map, "New York World’s Fair with a new transit map of Greater New York," published by the C.S. Hammond & Company for the Franklin Fire Insurance Company.

The beautiful color and the stunning view hardly need the further embellishment of text for enjoyment, but there are a few details worth noting. The map keeps a fairly tight focus on the fairgrounds while the vista opens up to the west, with major natural landmarks occurring in orderly and ever receding fashion: Flushing Bay, East River, Bronx, Manhattan, Hudson River, New Jersey. (Is anyone else reminded of Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover, with its telescoped view of the world from Manhattan?) This lovely aerial view is a stealth road map, however, for the artist is clearly showing how anyone driving from New Jersey, Westchester or Long Island can drive straight to the World’s Fair parking lots (rendered in a tastefully subdued navy blue) featured in the foreground of this map.

The partial list of buildings at the base of the map—Fair Buildings, Government Buildings, and Exhibition Buildings—shows a pride in industry, culture and commerce steeped in an optimism that puts behind the hard times of the past decade and denies the growing tensions in Europe.

Detail, New York World’s Fair with a new transit map of Greater New York, [1939]. Brooklyn Historical Society Map Collection.

 The generally sunny feel of this map is reinforced on the other side, where "New York: The Wonder City" is rendered in yellow, with the rapid transit system shown in bold colors and the directory of places of interest—including skyscrapers, stadiums, churches, museums, beaches and amusement parks—is studded with brilliantly colored illustrations.

Verso, New York World’s Fair with a new transit map of Greater New York, [1939]. Brooklyn Historical Society Map Collection.

The Fair opened April 30, 1939 and remained open until October. By the end of the 1939 season, Poland had been divided by Germany and the Soviet Union.  When the Fair reopened in May 1940, it opened in a very different world, with fewer European pavilions among the Government Buildings, reflecting the tensions that would intensify and finally ignite over the course of the spring and summer of 1940. By the time it closed for good in October, Europe was engulfed by war.

A map like this delights us now, inspiring a nostalgia for happier, more optimistic days gone by. Those happier days only exist in our imagination, of course, at the expense of the memory of harsher realities, much as the optimistic future embodied in the World’s Fair enterprise, so skillfully invoked in this map, could only be imagined by blocking out the ominous realities of 1939.

Cover panel, New York World’s Fair with a new transit map of Greater New York, [1939]. Brooklyn Historical Society Map Collection.

Interested in seeing more maps? You can view the BHS map collection anytime during the library’s open hours, Wed.-Sat., from 1-5 p.m. No appointment is necessary to view most maps.

This map was cataloged with funding provided by a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) “Hidden Collections” grant.