Several possible options today for #stampoftheday but I’m going to go with two related to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which opened on April 30, 1939 on over 1,200 acres of land at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

(Apologies for such a long post but I’m having fun here…) Over 200,000 people attended the fair’s opening day, and over 44 million people attended the fair (which was open from April until October in both 1939 and 1940) making it the largest international event since World War I.

Two different stamps are associated with the fair. The first, which was issued on April 1, 1939, showed the image most associated with the: the “Trylon” and “Perisphere.” The former was a 700-foot-tall spire that was connected to the latter, a sphere with a diameter of 180 feet that housed a “world of tomorrow” model city that could be viewed by visitors on a moving walkway. (To promote the fair, during the 1938 season, all three of New York’s three baseball teams wore special patches on their uniforms featuring the Trylon and Perisphere.) The other stamp, which was issued on the day the fair opened, was a 3-cent stamp honoring the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s first inauguration as president, which took place in New York City. (The fair’s opening day had been selected to coincide with this anniversary.)

Here are seven fun facts about the fair and the fairgrounds site:

ONE: The site of the fair had previously been an ash-infested wasteland made famous by the following passage from The Great Gatsby:

“About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic-their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.”

TWO: The fair also featured General Motors’ Futurama exhibit, which introduced the idea of showing a car-centric city 20 years that included a network of then-little-known limited access highways. (More info about that, including a video, is online here.)

THREE: The fair also marked the introduction of television to the American public by RCA. President Franklin Roosevelt’s opening remarks and other grand opening events were captured and displayed on RCA televisions at the fair. And on August 26, 1939, visitors to the fair were given a treat in the form of the first televised baseball game, broadcast from Ebbets Field, where Dodgers played the Cincinnati Reds.

FOUR: The Westinghouse Time Capsule was another popular exhibit. Among the items placed in the tube were writings by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, copies of Life Magazine, a Mickey Mouse watch, a Gillette razor, a kewpie doll, money, a pack of Camel cigarettes, millions of pages of information on microfilm, and seeds for several common food crops. Westinghouse’s exhibit also included a seven-foot tall robot, Elektro the Moto-Man. Other popular exhibits included Vermeer’s painting The Milkmaid and a keyboard-operated speech synthesizer.

FIVE: Building the fair was overseen by Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, who hoped that profits from the fair would provide the way to create a massive park he planned for the site. While it attracted many people, the fair didn’t turn a profit so lack of funding (and the onset of World War II) prevented him from carrying out those plans. Instead, only a few buildings were repurposed after the fair closed. One of them was used as the original home of the United Nations, which moved to its permanent home in Manhattan in 1951. And in 1964, Moses oversaw a second World’s Fair held at the site as well as the construction of Shea Stadium, which opened in 1964 (and was home to the Mets and Jets and the site of a famous Beatles concert). In 1967, after the fair closed, the city finally finished the park which now is the second largest park in the city, bigger even than Central Park. The park site includes the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, home of the US Open as well as Citi Field, which replaced Shea Stadium in 2009. The old UN building now houses the marvelous Queens Museum of Art, which includes a very large diorama of the New York area watershed from the 1939 World’s Fair and a massive updated diorama of the city from the 1964 World’s Fair.

SIX: My father was very proud of the fact that the Lummus Company, where he started working in 1963, did the mechanical, structural, and electrical work for the “Pool of Industry” that sits at the base of the Unisphere, which was the symbol of the 1964 World’s Fair and the centerpiece of the current park.

SEVEN: I tore up a piece of Shea Stadium sod during the celebration after the Mets beat the Braves to win the 1969 National League pennant (the first year that there were playoffs to decide who would appear in the World Series). After ignoring an official’s demand that I put the sod back, we took it home and planted it on the lawn of our house in Summit, NJ, where, for many years, it was greener and more lush than any other part of our-otherwise bedraggled lawn.