The Queens Museum of Art - New York City Building

The New York World’s Fair 1939 and 1940

Under construction: The New York City Building in its early days.

The New York City Building was built to house the New York City Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, where it housed displays about municipal agencies. The building was centrally located, being directly adjacent to the great icons of the Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere, and it was one of the few buildings created for the Fair that were intended to be permanent. It is now the only surviving building from the 1939/40 Fair. After the World’s Fair, the building became a recreation center for the newly created Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The north side of the building, now the Queens Museum, housed a roller rink and the south side offered an ice rink, as it still does today.

A north view of New York City Building with the Trylon and Perisphere to the left, and on the right, the Grand Central Parkway, originally planned by Robert Moses as a tree-lined roadway providing "an easy way to reach Jones Beach." Construction of the parkway began in 1931, and was finished in 1936 -- in time to serve traffic heading to the 1939 World’s Fair.

The building’s architect, Aymer Embury III, was one of Robert Moses favorite designers and his other work includes the Central Park Zoo and the Tri-Borough Bridge. He designed the building in a modern classical style, which was perhaps a little ironic given that the theme of the 1939 Fair was the “World of Tomorrow”. The exterior of the building featured colonnades behind which were vast expanses of glass brick punctuated by limestone pilasters trimmed in dark polished granite; the solid corner blocks were also constructed from limestone.

West side façade of New York City Building with Trylon and Perisphere in the background.

United Nations

One of the proudest periods in the history of the New York City Building was that from 1946 to 1950 when it housed the General Assembly of the newly formed United Nations. Until the site of the UN’s current home in Manhattan became available, Flushing Meadows Corona Park was being considered as the organization’s future permanent Headquarters site. During the early post-war years almost every world leader spent time in the New York City Building and many important decisions, including the partition of Palestine and the creation of UNICEF, were made here.

The presence of the United Nations General Assembly in the building require substantial interior renovation and the addition of a substantial new cafeteria building on the north side of the building. In the interior, the skating and roller rinks were covered and, in the space now occupied by the Queens Museum, the General Assembly was laid out. Offices, meeting rooms, translation, press, radio and television facilities, and other services were made available through the rest of the building. When the United Nations left the addition was removed and the New York City Building again became a recreation site for the Park and the skating and roller rinks were restored to the old use.

World’s Fair 1964 and 1965

In preparation for the 1964 World’s Fair the New York City Building was again renovated. Under the architect Daniel Chait, a scalloped entry awning was added to east façade and concrete brise-soleil used to cover all of the areas of glass brick. The building once again housed the New York City Pavilion and the most dramatic display there was the Panorama of the City of New York, which remains in the building and open to the public as part of the Museum’s collection.

As in 1939, the New York City Building, was at the center of the 1964/5 World’s Fair. It was (and still is) adjacent to the 140 foot high, 900,000 lb steel Unisphere; that great symbol of the Fair’s theme of “Peace through Understanding”. After the Fair the Panorama remained open to the public and the south side of the building returned to being an ice rink.

Today

In 1972 the north side of the New York City Building was handed to the Queens Museum of Art (or as it was then known, the Queens Center for Art and Culture). Almost twenty years after it opened, the Museum undertook its first major renovation. In 1994, Rafael Viñoly significantly redesigned the existing space, creating some of the most dramatic exhibition galleries in New York. In the near future, the Museum will begin a second renovation; it will double in size by expanding into the south side of the New York City Building. The architects for this new expansion are Grimshaw/Ammann and Whitney.