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"The fair is a funny business . . . It involves a strange combination of engineering and showmanship. It is part theater, part traveling carnival, part insubstantial pageant, and part - to me the most important of all - permanent park."
- Robert Moses, president of the World's Fair, in 1963
FOR PETER MAGNANI and his sister Rita, the World's Fair of 1964- 65 was a 10-minute walk from their home on 111th Street in Corona. Rita, then 22, got a coveted job as a waitress in the Minnesota Pavilion, where visitors lined up at a huge smorgasbord that, she says now, "had a faint Swedish feel to it."
Magnani,61, now deputy borough president of Queens and a longtime city planner in both the Bronx and Queens, recalls the event as a "tremendous" sight where the Ford Mustang was introduced. His sister, now known as Rita Daly and a partner in a Boston design firm, says, "The fair showed us all the edge of design.
"I was a student at Pratt Institute then and it was exciting to see that all the things we were doing on paper actually existed," she says.
Queens was the place that showed people of the whole world things things they didn't know actually existed, not once but twice. Sixty years ago this year, it hosted its first World's Fair, and then did it again in 1964-65.
It's astounding that Queens got the honor twice, in view of the fact that other American cities were "fair conscious," seeing them as a way to attract tourists and new businesses.
For residents, the fair offered something even better: fun.
Bob Ristelhueber, 44, now living in San Jose, Calif., where he edits a magazine called Electronic Engineering News, says the World's Fair of 1964-65 was "like having Disneyland in my front yard.
"We lived on Colden Street in Flushing and I could stand on our seventh-floor terrace and watch the nightly fireworks with my parents.
"I went to the fair several times," Ristelhueber recalls, "walking from Flushing to the park about a half-hour away. To me it was exciting to see and meet all these exotic people from all over the world. Queens wasn't the multicultural place it is today. In fact, there...