Photo Op At The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair Site
BY LAURA ROSEN

Triborough Bridge Authority Chairman and City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (left) holds a blueprint of the Triborough Bridge at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair construction site with New York World's Fair President Grover Whalen (center) and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in early 1939. Photographer unknown.

In early 1939, during the construction of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, Robert Moses, who was then both Triborough Bridge Authority Chairman and City Parks Commissioner, posed for a publicity photograph with Grover Whalen, then President of the 1939 New York World's Fair Corporation and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The three men held a blueprint as a prop, but it was a blueprint of the Triborough Bridge and Randall's Island, not the Fair.

The photograph illustrates how the history of the first World's Fair in Flushing Meadow Park was entwined with the early history of the Triborough Bridge Authority, the first predecessor agency of MTA Bridges and Tunnels. Both the Triborough Bridge, which opened in 1936, and the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, which opened in 1939, were built with arterial approaches that included parkway connections to Queens and Long Island. Unfortunately, the approaches had to go through the huge Corona dump located in a swamp in Flushing, Queens.

When New York was chosen to host the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, Robert Moses saw an opportunity to transform the Corona dump into a large park and persuaded the city to choose it as the site for the fair. As the dump landscape was transformed into the fairgrounds with landfill, the infrastructure for the new Flushing Meadow Park was put in place. The new park would also provide scenic landscaping for the parkway approaches to the bridges. As head of both the City Parks Department and the Triborough Bridge Authority, Robert Moses was in charge of building the two bridges, building the parkway approaches and transforming the Corona dump into the New York World's Fair and into Flushing Meadow Park. The blueprint in the photo was probably just one they could quickly find as a prop, but it is not surprising that it was for the flagship bridge of Triborough Bridge Authority.