Then in 1946 came the United Nations and the opportunity to convert a substantial part of Flushing Meadow into the World Capitol. An impressive committee, which included such men as Frederick H. Ecker, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Thomas J. Watson, Winthrop W. Aldrich, John W. Davis, James A. Farley and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, offered this program, but it was finally rejected in favor of a small site in Midtown Manhattan on the East River. Those of us who were connected with the Flushing Meadow Committee, however, kept on. The architects and engineers, led by Wallace K. Harrison, became identified with the new site and its approaches, and much of the preliminary work done to attract the United Nations to Flushing Meadow proved in the end to be valuable on the East River. At the same time it was agreed with Trygve Lie and his associates that the City Building at Flushing Meadow would be converted into an Assembly Hall for annual meetings of the United Nations from 1946 to 1950 until the new Capitol was completed.

PROPOSED WORLD CAPITOL IN FLUSHING MEADOW PARK - 1946

The U.N. occupancy gave us an opportunity to carry out a substantial part of the park program in the vicinity of the City Building once dominated by the Trylon and Perisphere. West of the City Building and the Grand Central Parkway, and across the bridges of Wheels and Wings, in the area where the transportation exhibits, Courts of Railways and Wheels, were located, a considerable part of the ultimate park program was carried out.

East of Flushing Meadow we added to the park system the so-called Kissena Corridor, a swampy valley leading from Flushing Meadow Park through Kissena Park to Cunningham Park. The opportunity to acquire this corridor arose through the construction of a great storm water sewer. We used sanitary material for fill. The trunk sewer is now completed. Many play fields, walks, basic paths and other recreation facilities have been installed and Flushing Meadow has thus become part of a continuous park and parkway belt extending along the entire north side of Queens to the city line. Grand Central Parkway itself, which was temporarily paved between Horace Harding Boulevard and the Kew Gardens Loop, was widened and the roadway system in the Loop revised as an extension of the Van Wyck Expressway to connect the parkway system with the South Shore and Idlewild Airport.

Soon people with short memories and no conception of the really prodigious difficulties in the way of a program of this scope began complaining that Flushing Meadow was going back to its primitive condition as a haunt of rabbits, foxes and possums. Patience, I kept repeating, patience, my fine critics, patience! Keep your shirts and shifts on! You were not conspicuous when we leveled the ash mountains, and rats big enough to wear saddles, with white whiskers a foot long, gazed wistfully at the bulldozers and junkies who disturbed their ancient solitary reign.

Came the night when the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 closed. One night late in the Fall they put out the blazing lights in The World of Tomorrow. The following morning the wrecking crews arrived. 44,931,681 visitors had attended World's Fair One. Soon old men and women were telling their grandchildren what the great Corona dump looked like in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald, how big the rats were that ran out of it, what a volcano there was over on Riker's Island, and how it was all changed overnight.

WORLD'S FAIR 1939-1940