Benjamin Haber should realize he is “Wrong on the World’s Fair” (TimesLedger Newspapers, May 16-22). Haber’s pathetic misunderstanding of the fact that the 1939 fair was not conceived as a “little people’s park for the less privileged” to kick a soccer ball around the greens.
Thanks to then-Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Parkway and then-city Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and a group of concerned citizens who conceived a plan to make a former dump a place to bring greater tourism to the Big Apple. Their plan to have connecting parkways and the Whitestone Bridge lead to “The Greatest Fair of the Century” and “The World of the Future” were all designed to bring us out of the Great Depression.
As a 10-year-old, I remember the amazed expression on my mother’s face when she saw an electric dishwasher perform for the first time. I remember seeing television for the first time.
And if you ask anyone old enough to attend the ’39 fair, they will recall personal experiences that were a wake-up call in their lives, attending national and state pavilions, etc., until a dictator named Adolf Hitler started marching his Nazi troops across Europe … and the rest is history.
I am an artist/dreamer/conceptualizer who has spent the last 25 years in retirement working as a volunteer to bring the memories of the ’39 fair to Queens youth. We are in the midst of a “brain drain” whereby we lose our most brilliant scholars to out-of-town establishments, and in most situations never have them come back to the city.
I have been working with senior residents, CUNY establishments, city Department of Education commissioners, politicians and local newspapers to have the honor students of Queens high schools receive a free education at Queens College through graduate school in the America’s Mentor/Peer Program to create their own 501(c)(3) nonprofit entrepreneurship.
Liberty Fair, the permanent World’s Fair dedicated to peace, would bring local, national and world tourism to New York year-round.
Carl Zimmerman
Founder
AMP Program
Oakland Gardens
