Go West, Everybody

In the long tradition that world's fairs are opened by heads of state, President Kennedy last week pressed a golden key in Palm Beach that sparked the inaugural festivities of Seattle's Century 21 Exposition, the first world's fair to be held in the U.S. in more than 20 years. Amid the sound of cannon, whistles, sirens and church bells, the excited crowd at the opening ceremony was unaware that an Air Force jet fighter plane participating in a salute to the fair had crashed nearby. Before the fair is over. Seattle expects to play host to 10 million visitors who, officials estimate, will spend an average of $5.19 each and fill the fair's coffers with $40 to $50 million.

If the opening was traditional, very little else about the Seattle world's fair was. Unlike the 1939 New York World's Fair and the upcoming one in New York, it will last for only six months.* Unlike the Brussels fair and the New York 1964 fair, it is neither centrally located nor sponsored by a city widely known around the world; in their long struggle to win the fair, Seattle officials had to explain to many members of the Bureau of International Expositions that Seattle is not a part of Washington. D.C. As world's fairs go, Seattle's is compact and modest: it covers only 72 acres v. Brussels' 500 and New York's projected 646. And, mirabile dictu, it was nearly 98% completed when opened--a boast that few world's fairs have been able to make.

Core of Sense. Yet the Seattle fair, if not grandiose, is at least grand; it has a dignified, quiet beauty, a tidiness that will make it less tiresome than most world's fairs--and a core of common sense that reflects the Northwest's reluctance to waste its assets. When it closes on Oct. 21, most of its best features will remain to form a permanent $50 million civic center. Says Fair President Joseph E. Gandy, a former auto dealer who has promoted the fair over some 1,000,000 miles from Puget Sound to Tokyo to Paris: "Eighty-five percent of every construction dollar has been permanently invested here. We felt it was economically immoral to spend the taxpayers' money and not have something of lasting value come out of it."

Seattle's legacy will include most of the fair's most dramatic buildings. There is the Space Needle, typifying the theme of "the world of Century 21''; a sort of Eiffel Tower dipped in concrete, its sheaf-of-wheat shape rises 608 ft. and makes it the tallest structure west of the Mississippi. The 3 1/2-acre Washington State Coliseum, blessedly free of interior supports and decorative gimmicks, not only serves as one of the fair's chief display areas, but will be used later for sports events (capacity: 20,000) and, Seattle hopes, national political conventions. A 3,100-seat opera house, built in the shell of Seattle's grimy old civic auditorium and lined with cherrywood and Italian marble, not only presents ballet and music to fairgoers (last week's opening night gala had Igor Stravinsky, the Seattle Symphony and Van Cliburn), but will serve as a new Seattle music center.

The $10 million U.S. Science Pavilion, which stands at the summit of the fairground's gently sloping site, is a buoyant, crystalline stylization of the Alhambra (see color), with soaring arches of Gothic lacework and arcades of Moorish tracery. Covering an area larger than six football fields, it is the biggest exhibit based on a single theme ever assembled by government or private industry, will later be used for educational and scientific purposes. One of the fair's most spectacular features is its International Fountain, designed by two young Tokyo architects whose plan won a $250.000 international competition last year. Sunk in a 100-ft. bowl of white crushed limestone, the fountainhead looks like a bristling World War II sea mine, shoots jets 100 ft. into the air, and presents 20-minute programs of changing shapes, colors and music. Also to be preserved after the fair: an 800-seat theater, a 5,500-seat arena for circuses and ice shows, a monorail transit system linking the whole fair-civic center to the heart of the city.

Wonderland of Color. But world's fairs are made of more than buildings, however distinguished, and Seattle's is a wonderland of color, movement, illusion and eye-popping exhibits. Built a mile from the central business district on a plot of undeveloped land, it was planned to sit within a wall of buildings that shuts out the unpleasant surroundings. Space Needle visitors get an enchanting view of the city's lights at night, and by day a panorama ranging from America's Fuji-Mount Rainier--to the snow-capped Olympics rising beyond white-capped Puget Sound. Forty-eight governments have exhibits in the fair, ranging from France's $1,000,000 exhibit (a bargain by world's-fair standards) to tiny San Marino's stamp and pottery show.

Among the most attractive features:

>>The fair's theme show, sponsored by the State of Washington, is its most sophisticated exhibit. A sort of Jean Cocteau fun house, it is a floating grotto of aluminum cubes that gives visitors a 20-minute visit to "a world already possible but not yet here." In a huge plastic sphere called a Bubblelator, 100 visitors at a time are lifted into the cubistic caverns above, there to shuffle through a labyrinth of 3,600 aluminum cubes, and be exposed by light, sound projection and three-dimensional devices to a dreamworld tunnel of love that involves them "emotionally with the future's opportunities and challenges."

>>; In the Science Pavilion, one show takes visitors, via the world's largest projection screen (spread over a planetarium-like dome), billions of light-years into inter-galactic space and back, in a zooming journey through the stars and past flaming nebulae. Handrails support those dizzied by a flip around Saturn. Admits one fair official: "We might have to provide airsickness bags."

>> The Space Needle, topped by an observation platform and a revolving restaurant, is bound to be the fair's most popular feature. Three elevator capsules with clear plastic fronts rocket visitors to the top so fast and so openly that fair officials joke about erecting a saloon at the needle's base called the Chicken-Out Inn. The dining spot above, called the Eye of the Needle, enables the visitor to watch the lakes and mountains glide by while he dines on such regional specialties as Dungeness crab, tiny, wild-flavored Olympia oysters, and grilled salmon steaks at $6.75 table-d'hote. Since the central core does not revolve, a waitress going into the kitchen for an order has to check an indicator on the wall that moves at the same speed as the dining room in order to locate customers who have orbited on in the meantime. Says Waitress Mary Ellen Harris: "Serving the soup is like catching the brass ring on a merry-go-round."

>> The fair's fun-and-game area, or Gayway, does not measure up to the taste and imagination of Disneyland, but it has plenty to keep visitors busy. Among the attractions: a German roller coaster that makes sharp right-angle turns; a "Space Wirl" that features cars controlled by riders spinning wildly in several directions; an Italian sports-car race; and an "adults only" section that includes "Backstage U.S.A.," a LeRoy Prinz production in which oglers have the illusion of walking through a show girls' dressing room.

For such exhibits, the fair has primly admitted that "some undraping of the female form will be permitted."

>>The science exhibit for children eight to twelve years old (even the low-slung staircases are built to discourage adults) is one of the fair's best shows. Here kids can poke their arms into plastic sleeves to see how heavy a grapefruit is on Mars, spin on a platform by tilting a giant gyroscope, make wave patterns in water tanks, and watch a 40,000-member ant colony go busily about its cutaway civic activities.

The fair has much, much more: the IBM building, with walls of living silver poplars, where kids must learn to think like computers to find their way out of a maze; NASA's floating, jewel-like weather satellites and full-size space-capsule mock-up (complete with a silver-suited astronaut); the Mexican Pavilion with walls of lava cubes and a startling, exquisitely crafted assemblage by Manuel Felguerez; a fashion pavilion where haughty Vogue models perch on concrete lily pads in a 5,000-gallon perfumed pool. But those who take even samplings at the fair's food spots will probably be too stuffed to get to most of the exhibits.

There are 70 eating places on the grounds, not counting, an elaborate Food Circus with 60-odd food bars. "Beefsteak saute with button mushrooms, filet of sole Marguerite and crab Louis are nonchalantly dispensed by bill-changing vending machines in 18 kiosks. Elsewhere, visitors may buy fish and chips, Mongolian steak, Belgian waffles, Cyrillic-alphabet soup from Yugoslavia, and Seattle scones.

Feeding the multitudes at Seattle is a simple matter compared with housing them. The howls of local citizens evicted from apartments to make room for visitors have been loud and anguished, and rents have pyramided. The fair's Expo-Lodging operation has already made 370,-ooo room reservations, has 60,000 beds listed within 30 miles of the fairground.

Highway "hospitality booths" outside Seattle are staffed by hostesses who have direct lines to Expo-Lodging headquarters to help reservationless visitors find a place to stay. Sales of beds and mattresses have risen some 70% (best seller: hideaways) as every available nook and cranny in Seattle is converted into sleeping space.

The fair will also be able to house visitors on the British cruise liner Dominion Monarch, an anchored dormitory that will accommodate 1,450 people. Gandy has given up hope of prying loose the Liberte to serve as a floating hotel.

Seattle's fair, like all fairs, has its critics; they grumble that concessionaires are ignoring fair standards, that some states have made poor showings, that the cultural attractions are too esoteric, that the fair's approaches are a natural for traffic jams. But the fair, nonetheless, is a remarkable accomplishment for its place and time (just two years before New York's), and the people of the Northwest who rallied behind it are justly proud. As the 40-ft gas flame danced on the point of the Space Needle at twilight on opening night last week, President Gandy looked out through his office window. Said he: "There's nothing there that hasn't meant at least a quart of blood drawn, and in some cases a bucket. But to tell you the truth, I'm amazed at the whole thing." A lot of other people will be, too.

*Under the rules of the Bureau of International Expositions, Century 21 may operate for one season only; New York's 1964 fair, with neither B.I.E. approval nor restrictions, is already planning a second run for 1965.

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