AA-2026-9224BB
On the image
A crowd lines up behind a velvet rope outside the General Motors pavilion at what was billed as one of the largest annual fairs in the world — the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, identifiable by the CNE's characteristic midway architecture and the railway car bearing a Canadian railroad livery parked to the right. General Motors had secured not one but two numbered pavilions, which in the 1950s was the kind of fact a corporation announced with a sign the size of a dining table suspended from a triumphal arch decorated with abstract pastel discs, because the future was arriving and it was important that everyone queue up for it in an orderly fashion. The men in the crowd wear the off-white summer slacks of a decade that had decided prosperity looked like a clean press, and the uniformed attendants at the rope exist to manage the demand for a company that, at that particular moment in American industrial history, was the largest corporation on earth. General Motors would spend the next several decades explaining, from a position of steadily decreasing authority, why the future it had promised in exhibits exactly like this one had not quite arrived on schedule.
Visually related — by likeness
General Motors Pavilion No. 2, Canadian National Exhibition, 1950s. 1953–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-9224BB. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/general-motors-pavilion-no-2-canadian-national-exhibition-1950s.
@misc{aaAA20269224BB,
title = {General Motors Pavilion No. 2, Canadian National Exhibition, 1950s},
year = {1953–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-9224BB},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/general-motors-pavilion-no-2-canadian-national-exhibition-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - General Motors Pavilion No. 2, Canadian National Exhibition, 1950s PY - 1953–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-9224BB UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/general-motors-pavilion-no-2-canadian-national-exhibition-1950s ER -
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