50 YEARS LATER, EXPO 67 IS STILL AN EXPRESSION OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT
This was not your average Expo 67 nut. He was not arriving on a unicycle or in a kayak.
His plan was to visit with his wife and four children as the editor of the Grafton Advocate, a newspaper supposedly servicing the onehorse Ontario town of that name but in fact invented for the occasion.
His oldest son, who also happens to be my oldest friend, still has the stationery that was supposed to summon up press credentials and easy access. “Freedom is founded upon truth and responsibility” runs the motto.
A tribute to human ingenuity, the nonexistent Grafton Advocate said something also about the magnetic pull of Expo 67.
People wanted to go. In an age of bonded families, parents wanted their children to go.
As soon as I saw an Expo preview at the movies and marvelled at the models of futuristic pavilions, I desperately wanted to be there. And as a typically selfish 11-year-old, I probably never reflected much on the fact that my mechanic father and homemaker mother, after finding the money for the Grade 6 school trip, would stay at home.
They insisted that I take pictures and the thanks and congratulations I received when I returned with three rolls made me aware of the magnitude of the adventure I had undertaken. This was the decade of media as the essence of the message. Thanks to that camera, Mom and Dad were in on the Expo experience. They made it too.
Expo 67 was international, a World’s Fair, and happily made possible by the decision in 1962 of the U.S.S.R. to drop its bid, to which the Canadian application had initially placed second in 1960.
The final tally of 50,306,608 paid admissions greatly surpassed the ballpark prediction of 30 million. We can be sure that most of the foreign visitors (44.8 per cent of the paid admissions were American and 3.7 per cent from other countries) went home with elevated feelings about Canada and what was then its most populous and powerful city. (If they went back: I know of one miniskirted hostess at the Great Britain pavilion who married a Montreal film producer.)
But the happy coincidence of the Canadian Centennial meant that Expo 67 was designed above all for Canadians.
In the first decade of aviation as a widely accessible means of transportation — which the Air Canada Pavilion duly celebrated — the fair brought citizens of the world’s second-largest country together more successfully than had any peacetime enterprise.
A Stanley Cup victory by the Canadiens or the Leafs was an expression of joy by one solitude at the expense of the other. Expo transcended the divisions by linking the dream of a united Canada with the dream — then prevalent despite, or perhaps because of, the Cold War — of a united world. It was time for such a vision. The familiar lyric from the Bobby Gimby song that became, for better or worse, the Expo anthem — “now we are 20 million” — asserted a collectivity that was then still largely hypothetical.
Once the turnstiles were passed, all bets were off. We ceased to be from Winnipeg, Moncton, Sudbury, Burnaby or Saint-Lazare. We were Canadians, which meant we were citizens of the world.
The transformation was brilliantly codified by Expo passports.
Have you been to Mauritius, Japan, Venezuela, Kenya and Ceylon? Seen United States and the U.S.S.R. in the same day? Sure. Here are the stamps.
The Expo 67 motto, Man and His World, innocently derived from Terre des Hommes, the title of the 1939 philosophical memoir by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, now shocks the sensitive ear with its single-gender exclusivity.
Fifty years ago it reflected “a feeling of belonging to the community of man and an awareness of the basic unity of mankind,” as a press release had it.
Delete the testosterone and you have a sentiment to give us pause at a time when daily headlines blare factionalism, hatred and disunity like a hundred bugles out of tune.
If Man and His World was more inspirational than categorical as a theme, something like unified content was provided by the widespread conviction in those days that progress was inevitable and technology, applied with sufficient imagination, was good for whatever would ail us.
The very creation of Île Notre Dame partly from landfill coughed up by the Metro system (not coincidentally) under construction remains a striking example of what engineering linked to inspiration can achieve.
And what a grand thing it was to build the fair in the midst of the Saint Lawrence River, evoking the giant continental islands we all live on in reciprocal harmony with the seven seas. One shudders to think that Mount Royal was among the sites originally considered.
Work started ceremonially in the summer of 1963 with Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson at the lever of a loader and Premier Jean Lesage in a bulldozer to spread the dirt. Real infrastructure construction began a year later.
To complete such a project in so little time seems, in an era when water mains detain us for eternities, an unfathomable accomplishment. Several opponents of Mayor Jean Drapeau on the federal corporation overseeing Expo 67 thought it could not be done. History has two words for those who resigned: good riddance.
The fair opened to the public on April 28, 1967, and promptly set about exceeding expectations. At least 90 pavilions beckoned, most sponsored by nations, states, provinces or cities but some dedicated more universally to Man the Creator, Man in the Community, Man the Explorer, Man the Producer and Man the Provider.
Industry was scarcely less present. A propos to my point about photography and mediated experience, Kodak had a pavilion with a staff of experts dispensing advice on where and how to get the best shot.
There were pavilions devoted to steel, polymers and economic progress. Remarkably, you could stretch your legs at the Asbestos Plaza, which was meant to promote the usefulness of this mineral as a construction material. It was an optimistic time.
Movies were everywhere and innovation was the norm. The Telephone Pavilion offered Canada 67, a 360-degree panoramic show for which the Walt Disney Company (which would soon capitalize on such techniques in its theme parks) could be thanked.
Most dazzling of these presentations — and the Expo experience I remember best — was Kaleidoscope, improbably sponsored by a consortium of chemical companies and designed jointly by Morley Markson and Associates and the Institute of Design of the University of Waterloo.
Man and Colour was the deceptively simple title of the show. Mirrors reflecting pulsing lights into infinity created a vision of space seemingly drawn from the imagination of Albert Einstein. Unaware though I was of the visit of La Scala and the Vienna State Opera to Place des Arts under the aegis of the World Festival of Entertainment, I could claim at least exposure to the avant-garde music of R. Murray Schafer through Kaleidoscope.
Expo 67 was intoxicatingly positive. Even the male nomenclature was balanced by the enchanting presence throughout the site of helpful and smartly uniformed hostesses. Kaleidoscope was serviced exclusively by former Miss Canada contestants.
The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. were linked by the Cosmos Walk, one of several purpose-built pedestrian and rail bridges. The superpowers cooled it on the arms race and celebrated the space race.
Modernity was the dominant mode, inside and out. One presumes that Robert Fletcher Shaw, the engineer who served as deputy commissioner under Pierre Dupuy, was OK with this orientation.
While Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome will always (not least because it survives) stand as the premier architectural icon of Expo 67, the upwardly sweeping roof of the U.S.S.R. pavilion made a comparably distinctive statement.
A few nations, such as Thailand and Burma, opted for traditional temples but Germany (in fact West Germany) constructed a vast array of circus-like tents that was remarkable for having nothing whatever to do with the iconography of the nation (about which, a mere 22 years after V-E Day, there were surely some lingering sensitivities).
Many pavilions made geometric statements that still summon the adjective “futuristic.” Rather than going the Tower of London route, Great Britain lodged its displays in an angular jungle highlighted by an open and apparently unfinished 200-foot conical tower with a sculptural Union Jack.
The tour started on a moving sidewalk in the mists of time but the section that resonated most was Britain Today, with it tableaux of the Beatles, mod scooters, Carnaby Street fashions and other illustrations of how England swings. An array of vertical ribs made the adjacent French Pavilion (now the Casino de Montréal) look larger than it really was.
Would it be too cynical to comment on the propriety of this remarkable architectural illusion?
Transportation inevitably became a theme of Expo as the need to move the millions was tied to its astounding success. The Expo Express train was automated rather driven by an engineer, a great novelty in North America.
Three minirails were so popular that (as Bill Cotter recounts in his helpful volume Montreal’s Expo 67) a fare system needed to be introduced to lure passages off and give other riders a chance.
Presumably Queen Elizabeth II was exempt from this regime when she rode the minirail as part of a visit that included a stirring bilingual tribute to the emergence of Canada as a nation.
The pavilion complex devoted to Canada was, fittingly, the largest, and made of many parts. Crystal forms on the roofs were meant to reference the natural wealth of the land. And why not? Few Canadians today have a proper consciousness of how strongly their history and affluence are bonded to timber, nickel and uranium.
The Canadian Pulp and Paper Pavilion was an abstract but unmistakable forest of pyramidal evergreen trees. Nor did the Western provinces miss the point, opting for a wooden roof with real Douglas firs bursting defiantly out of the top. The Atlantic provinces collaborated on a schooner, Atlantica.
It is hard to imagine how a pavilion dedicated to Indigenous peoples could be successfully realized today, but Canadian First Nations did rather well with a giant teepee surrounded by softening trees. Nor was the form without content: Interior displays balanced traditional artwork with pleas for selfdetermination.
The most powerful and eccentric element of the Canadian complex was Katimavik, an enormous inverted pyramid that existed mostly to offer a good view from its 109-foot-high perimeter (although it also made a statement on the skyline). Quebec was architecturally dualistic, with a glass casing that reflected the sky by day and glowed from within by night.
Czechoslovakia was boxlike on the outside but enjoyed a phenomenal success with its dazzling interior combination of traditional glasswork and multimedia cinema.
Most notable of its screen offerings was Kinoautomat, the Radúz Činčera film that permitted audiences to vote on alternative plot directions.
Like a few Expo initiatives, this supposedly groundbreaking example of “interactive cinema” proved to be more idiosyncratic than prophetic. Even the popular Labyrinth installation masterminded by the National Film Board cannot be said to have started a multi-screen cinematic revolution, although the lead producer, Roman Kroitor, went on to develop IMAX.
To see Inside the Labyrinth now (as preserved in a simple NFB video release) is to be as baffled as the Expo crowds were then by the apparently random array of happy, sad, rural, urban, personal, public, indoor, outdoor, nautical, landlocked, daytime, nighttime, uplifting and frightening images.
Spearing a crocodile is not easily reconciled, thematically, with a baptism in an Orthodox church or a cop directing traffic. It was nonetheless possible to feel assured, with an assist from Eldon Rathburn’s evocative music, that individuals properly attuned to Man and His World could find their way out of their personal labyrinths.
To critics of an anti-establishment bent, such universalist assurances would not do. As recently as 2010 it was possible to find (in the interesting collection of academic essays Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir) a post-Marxist thinker chiding Labyrinth for its stubborn refusal to portray humanity as riven by class division.
Politicos at Expo had a few consolations: Cuba heavy-handedly celebrated the glories of the Revolution. The so-called Christian Pavilion, which offered images of lynching, concentration camps and nuclear explosions, was described by a Baptist minister in the letters column of the Windsor Star as the Ecumenical Shock Pagoda.
These, however, were exceptions. The Expo protocol was to feel good about the world and its prospects. It seems a remarkably elusive objective in 2017. If only we could revive Julien Hébert’s familiar Expo 67 logo of a pair of Y-shaped pictographs of people raising their arms in celebration.
Was the Expo message delusional even then? Some argue that Pierre Berton’s characterization of the 1967 as “the last good year” fails to account for the remarkable burst of flatulence issued by Charles de Gaulle on July 24 from the rear balcony of Montreal City Hall, the miserable transit strike that cut into Expo attendance in September, the outbreak throughout the summer of race riots in American cities, the Six-Day War that started on June 5 and the rather more protracted conflict in Vietnam whose futility was becoming apparent.
As unsettling as all these events might have been, we were able in 1967 to perceive disruptions in the universal human fabric as either exceptional or containable. They were examples of the sorts of challenges and setbacks that Man and His World were ready to overcome.
Our nostalgia for the spirit of Expo 67 is naturally tempered by perspective. Man the Producer became Man the Polluter in the 1970s, while crime flourished, wars raged, the October Crisis woke Canadians from the dream of unity, international terror got its kick-start in Munich, churches emptied, families unravelled and notions of personal morality acquired quotation marks.
Little of the whimsy that characterized Expo 67 architecture could be found in the city, where functional glass and concrete monstrosities continued to rise at the behest of architects who did not mind being called brutalists.
Even the most famous of Expo architectural artifacts, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, proved to be an isolated one-off rather than the prototype for harmonious mass production it was intended to be.
In a way, Expo 67 carried the seeds of its own undoing, and not simply because the inevitable decay of the pavilions and the failure of earnest attempts (in a climate dominated by winter) to turn the site into a garden and theme park. The admirable international reputation Montreal earned for having pulled off Expo 67 led to a successful bid for the 1976 Olympics, which is to say that Dr. Jekyll was superseded by Mr. Hyde. It is sadly fitting that the Montreal Expos, celebrating in their name the buoyant mood of 1967, were laid to rest in the mausoleum of Olympic Stadium.
Not many readers of this column will need to be reminded that there is now a movement to bring baseball back to Montreal. The prospect is far from fanciful. This city has had more ups and downs than a roller coaster at La Ronde and it is not in the slightest a fantasy to attribute the resilience of its citizens to the spirit of optimism that was embodied so gloriously by Expo 67.
Expo 67 opened 50 years ago. We celebrate the most successful world’s fair of the 20th century not as an impressive relic, buried the past, but as an expression of the human spirit that today remains both viable and essential. We should all carry a little Expo with us. It is so much better than the alternative.