With its soaring space-age turrets, its candy-striped roof and its Tent of Tomorrow, the New York State Pavilion astonished visitors to the 1964 World's Fair. Is it about to stage a comeback?

Heady days … the State Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York, 1964.

Rising 70 metres above the treetops on the edge of Flushing Meadows in New York are a trio of concrete watchtowers, their circular platforms topped with rusting rotor blades, like flying saucers retired from service. Below, a gargantuan steel ring hovers 10 storeys above the ground, its perimeter adorned with metal spikes. A spider's web of cables extends from this corroded crown to a great central oculus, as if ready to channel some cosmic force into the earth.

Sealed off by an oddly festive candy-striped hoarding, this sinister contraption is the remains of the New York State Pavilion, constructed for the 1964 World's Fair. "It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen," says Christian Kellberg, who grew up in Flushing, Queens, and sneaked in under the fence as a 10-year-old while the fair was being put together. Now he is producing a book on the building. "It was impossibly futuristic, with those Jetsons towers and an endless ceiling of multicoloured tiles, turning the sky into one big stained-glass window."

View of the 1964 World's Fair at sunset. Photograph: courtesy Everett Collection/REX

Thousands of visitors streamed into the park to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the fair, to be greeted by armies of jugglers and fire-eaters, magicians and Belgian waffle stalls – peddling the snack that was introduced to America here in 1964. This fleeting festival brought back a tiny bit of the merry chaos that reigned for two years over this 1,000-acre site.

The State Pavilion is not the only remnant of those heady days. There is the majestic concrete table-top of Terrace on the Park, a T-shaped mega-structure built as the city's first heliport-cum-banqueting hall, where the Beatles landed for their first US concert. There is the skeletal steel globe of the Unisphere in front of the neoclassical Queens Museum– built to represent New York City at the 1939 World's Fair, which was held on the same spot. There is the rippling curtain wall of the Hall of Science, and the geodesic dome of the Winston Churchill pavilion, now repurposed as an aviary for the local zoo. But above it all towers this rusting carcass, the one remaining structure that has failed to find a use....Continue Reading

> via The Guardian