Free Tomorrow-Land by Joseph Tirella

Excursion Module, or LEM, the actual craft that Apollo 11 astronauts would use to touch down on the moon’s surface just four years after the World’s Fair was over. The 1939–40 World’s Fair might have put the “World of Tomorrow” on display, but its Fairgoers could only dream of a spaceshipthat actually landed on the moon; in the early 1960s, NASA was working diligently to make it happen.
    As popular as these exhibits would prove to be, one of the most enticing draws was more than 450 years old. Crowds would line up to see the dramatic beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture La Pietà, which showed an almost lifelike Virgin Mary cradling a crucified Christ, at the Vatican Pavilion. It was the first time the Renaissance masterpiece was permitted to leave Italy since its creation in 1499, thanks to the personal intervention of Pope John XXIII himself and New York’s influential Cardinal Francis Spellman, a close ally of Moses and a powerful player in New York and Washington political circles. When the Master Builder bragged months before opening day that “Michelangelo and Walt Disney are the stars of my show,” it wasn’t an exaggeration.Instead, Moses left the exaggerations to the World’s Fair Corporation’s chairman and public relations executive, Thomas J. Deegan, who promised that their exhibition would be “the greatest single event in history.”

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    Thanks to some old-fashioned magic we call “imagination,” this Ford Motor Company car will be your time machine for your journey. Carrying you far back to the dawn of life on land and transporting you far out into the future.
    â€”Walt Disney
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    In early 1960, Walt Disney called a meeting with his executives in his Anaheim, California, office. He had been following the news from the East Coast about the upcoming New York World’s Fair and saw an opportunity for his Walt Disney Company, especially its design and development offshoot, WED Enterprises, to expand its horizons and reap a serious windfall at the same time.
    â€œThere’s going to be a big fair up in New York,” Disney told his executives. “All the big corporations in the country are going to be spending a helluva lot of money building exhibits there. They won’t know what they want to do. They won’t even know why they’re doing it, except that the other corporations are doing it and they have to keep up with the Joneses.” That’s where WED Enterprises—billed as an “architectural services and engineering company”—came in.
    He wanted the group to make pilgrimages to the boardrooms of the country’s biggest corporations—General Motors, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Pepsi-Cola, Ford Motor Company, Travelers Insurance, Kodak, IBM, and AT&T—all the blue-chip firms that were going to spend millions on Fair pavilions, and offer the company’s services. Disney saw an opportunity to develop new rides, new concepts, and—with the benefit of corporate subsidies—new technologies. In addition, he would charge corporate clients $1 million for the use of his company’s name in their pavilions—his surname had become synonymous with his patented, unique brand of American entertainment. (Ever eager to find new revenue streams, after one company agreed to his usage fee, Disney immediately thought he had lowballed himself.“Don’t you think you might have asked for a little bit more?” he asked the executive in charge of negotiations.)
    When a company expressed interest, Disney would personally fly in on his private Gulfstream jet for further discussions. However, none of WED’s technicians—Imagineers, they were called—thought that money was the real factor motivating their boss: Disney wanted to establish a theme park east of the Mississippi River. He knew that California’s Disneyland was only playing to one-fourth of the