From the NY Times:...Terrace on the Park may be best known for the view from the outside, hard to miss from Queens highways: four conjoined, 120-foot, T-shaped towers, which are a dramatic leftover from the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.
The building’s roof was a Port Authority helipad and turned the structure into the fair’s aerial gateway. In August 1965, during the fair, the Beatles used it as a way station toward their record-setting concert at Shea Stadium. They made the short trip to the stadium in a Wells Fargo armored truck.
Jeffrey Kroessler, a preservationist who is writing a book on the history of Queens, said “many people in Queens are fond of it” because it is a symbol of exuberant mid-1960s optimism about a space-age future, a world where people could hopscotch by helicopter among multiple helipads, like one atop what was then known as the Pan Am Building in Midtown. A 1977 accident atop Pan Am dashed that vision.
When the fair ended, the 1,100-seat Top of the Fair restaurant, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, became an obvious site for a banquet hall. A penthouse ballroom replaced the helipad, and part of the roof became an outdoor terrace for cocktails. During its four and a half decades, practically every New York mayor has broken bread at Terrace on the Park.
10 comments:
tear it down. and the philip johnson towers. the fair was corporate propaganda. quit glorifying the past while the future is drying up
Hey this is a remnant form the fair that has been re-purposed that has been successful. I have been to many a great New Years Eve party here and weddings too. Always a good time, I remember the fair and helicopters landing there. This obviously a great symbol of Queens in it's heyday and the great potential Queens had going forward, until all those Mayors from Lindsay to the current one is trashing Queens by allowing zoning and developers to profit.
I had a wedding reception there 7 years ago. The views out the windows were beautiful, yet the the reflection in the window was the best.
quit glorifying the past while the future is drying up
Like your mother's kooch
This seems to have been a good deal for the city and the contractors who have run it.
What point was the Times trying to make by bringing up Liu's 2010 criticism of a missing "$350,000 garden" which "had since been finished"?
How strange it is that we have such little history retained in Queens that we look at 1964 with awe and wonder.
Because, Patrick, it celebrates Diversity - many claim it was Queens start at that slippery slope when a lot of workers from around the world decided to say after the fair and have their neighbors discover the joys of rat burger fumes filling hallways.
We had our wedding reception there 7 years ago.
The views out the windows were beautiful.
Yet the most beautiful site,
Her reflection in the window.
"until all those Mayors from Lindsay to the current one is trashing Queens by allowing zoning and developers to profit"
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NEVER would have happened this bad it weren't for Kennedys immigration act of 1965.
That swipe of Johnson's pen signed the country's death warrant.
It provided a direct pipe to every oozing cesspool on earth.
All the sh*t came here for the free handouts.
I remember my grandfather and uncle cursing at Johnson every time he came on TV ever since.
5 years later one of them "poor immigrants with no skills" stabbed my uncle going fishing in the back on Central ave M steps for $10.
My uncle didn't understand what the criminal wanted since he didn't understand Spanish.
Ugh...there seems to be a lot of incoherent hostility here...I think it's great that this building has always paid for itself. I'll have to go there again.
Terrace on the Park,JFK International Airport, Laguardia Airport ,Flushing Meadows new park facilities are a shining example of human achievment.Born and bred in Queens I take great pride in these landmarks.You may as well trash mouth the Empire State building, Chrysler Buliding and other wonderful landmarks of this great city. To those that don't get it MOVE! Bob L
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