More than one hundred fifty pavilions and exhibits spread over six hundred forty-six acres helped the fair live up to its reputation as "the Billion-Dollar Fair." With the cold war in full swing, the fair offered visitors a refreshingly positive view of the future, mirroring the official theme: Peace through Understanding. Guests could travel back in time through a display of full-sized dinosaurs, or look into a future where underwater hotels and flying cars were commonplace. They could enjoy Walt Disney's popular shows, or study actual spacecraft flown in orbit. More than fifty-one million guests visited the fair before it closed forever in 1965. The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair captures the history of this event through vintage photographs, published here for the first time.
Bill Cotter and Bill Young are longtime members of the World's Fair Collectors Society. Cotter's many visits to the fair as an adolescent inspired him to become a submarine designer for the United States Navy and later an entertainment executive. Young hosts a prominent website that explores the history of the fair and its space-age attractions. Both are avid collectors of world fair memorabilia.