A little more than two decades separated the New York World’s Fair of 1939 from Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition of 1962, but the future changed dramatically between them.
In New York, visitors were invited into a carefully designed “World of Tomorrow,” filled with streamlined buildings, new consumer products, television, highways, synthetic materials, and visions of technologically planned cities. By the time Seattle opened its gates in 1962, Americans were living with jet travel, satellites, nuclear power, computers, and an accelerating space race. Seattle’s fair looked upward, promising life in the Space Age.
The souvenirs from these fairs captured those changing ideas almost perfectly. The rounded Perisphere and soaring Trylon dominated New York memorabilia. Twenty-three years later, the Space Needle, monorail, and rocket-age graphics took their place.
For collectors, the two fairs offer an unusually clear opportunity to watch the American idea of the future evolve through ordinary objects.
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