Right here to your right is the former site of one of the most bizarre exhibits of the 1964 World's Fair. While the rest of the pavilions celebrated a sparkling, united future above ground, this plot of dirt held a much darker vision. It was the Underground World Home.
The Fair opened just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the globe to the absolute brink of nuclear destruction. That intense Cold War paranoia spurred a sudden, highly lucrative market for luxury bunkers, promising survival with all the comforts of a modern suburb.
Architect Jay Swayze and millionaire Girard B. Henderson decided to capitalize on that terror. They excavated a massive fifteen-foot-deep trench right into the Flushing Meadows marsh and dropped in a six-thousand-square-foot, ten-room subterranean mansion. It was encased in twenty inches of steel and concrete, with a roof built to support two million pounds of insulating soil.
This was not your average survival tin can. It was pitched as the ultimate escape from the unpredictable world above. But living in a sealed box can drive a person crazy, so Swayze installed a dial-a-view system. Instead of windows, occupants looked at backlit murals painted by Texas artist Mrs. Glenn Smith. By turning a dial, you could swap your faux window view from the New York City skyline to the Golden Gate Bridge. You even had a dimmer switch to simulate a rising sun in the kitchen, or cast a star-filled night sky over your underground patio. There was a snorkel-like air conditioning apparatus that purportedly filtered the air so well you only had to dust once a month.
It was a complete, artificial utopia, a highly engineered bunker disconnected from the messy reality of human community. And fairgoers were not exactly buying it. First, you had to pay a dollar fifty just to get inside the exhibit, which deterred many tourists. And if you actually wanted to buy the house? The price tag was eighty thousand dollars, which is roughly eight hundred thousand dollars in today's money. Not a single home was commissioned.
Swayze's partner, Henderson, remained a true believer in the nuclear threat. He eventually built an even more lavish fifteen-thousand-square-foot underground mansion in Las Vegas, buried twenty-six feet down, complete with a swimming pool, a putting green, and fake trees hiding steel support beams.
For decades, a tantalizing urban legend floated around Queens. Historians and explorers whispered that Swayze, hoping to avoid high demolition costs, had simply emptied the home of its furniture and left the massive concrete shell completely intact beneath the dirt. The idea of a pristine luxury bunker sleeping silently in the dark fueled endless searches. But sadly, a 2017 archival discovery ruined the mystery. Documents proved the home was completely demolished on March 15, 1966. If anything at all is left down there, it is just the concrete foundation.
The Underground World Home offered a paranoid fantasy of complete isolation, trading the vibrant, shared spaces of the city for a heavily armored, private cavern. But humans naturally crave connection, not sealed vaults. So let us head back up to the surface and look at something completely different. We are going to walk toward a highly elevated, equally strange structure that is just a five-minute walk away. Follow the path toward Terrace on the Park.
