Approaching on your right, you will see a massive, amoeba-shaped structure made of curving concrete, completely windowless but covered in a striking grid of deep blue glass panels. Welcome to the New York Hall of Science.
Those panels use a technique called dalle de verre. The original architect, Wallace Harrison, designed this eighty-foot-tall, undulating wall without a single straight edge to give visitors the calming illusion of floating in deep space.
Just a few minutes ago we were at Terrace on the Park, taking in another colossal remnant of the 1964 World's Fair. It is incredible to think that this entire area was once a blighted landscape. The powerful urban planner Robert Moses bulldozed those heaps to create a gleaming, top-down vision of the future. He wanted massive pavilions and grand monuments. At the time, this building housed exhibits meant to inspire awe, but they were also designed to manage some deep Cold War paranoia.
Take Atomsville USA, an exhibit built right here in the original pavilion. It was a cheerful, hands-on atomic playground for children, complete with push buttons and games. The government was desperately trying to make nuclear energy feel domestic and safe. They were so committed to this idea that in 1967, the city allocated over ten million dollars, which is nearly one hundred million dollars in modern money, to build a sprawling Nuclear Science Center right here. The star attraction was going to be the Atomarium, a spiral theater where visitors would watch a real, live research reactor go critical. A demonstrator was literally going to stand on a clear plexiglass window directly over the reactor core.
As you might expect, dictating that a live nuclear reactor be placed in the middle of a densely populated Queens neighborhood did not go over well. Local residents fiercely protested, and the project was entirely scrapped.
Without that massive infusion of cash, the grand vision for this space began to rot. By the early 1980s, the adjacent Space Park, where towering Atlas and Titan rockets stood, was a vandalized mess covered in peeling paint and graffiti. Those rockets were built for the Air Force but never saw military use, and seeing them neglected felt like the end of an era. The museum itself was abandoned. When physicist Alan J. Friedman was hired to take over in 1984, he literally had to wade through an inch of standing water just to get inside. The building was a devastated, empty shell.
But Friedman saw an opportunity to flip the script. Instead of imposing untouchable, top-down science fiction onto the public, he rebuilt the museum from the ground up to serve the actual community. He focused entirely on hands-on, interactive exhibits that kids could touch, pull, and test. It worked brilliantly. Now, the Hall of Science is a bustling, organic community hub. It even partners with a local preschool, turning the museum into a daily classroom for young children.
The grandiose utopian dreams of 1964 collapsed, but what grew in their place is so much more vibrant and real. Instead of a sterile world of tomorrow, this space now pulses with the chaotic, joyful energy of the people who actually live here. And speaking of vibrant local energy, our next stop is just a six minute walk away. We are heading to the Queens Night Market, which actually sets up right in the parking lot here. Let us go check it out.
