The 1964 World’s Fair drove the police crackdown on New York’s avant-garde.

Evidence

The subterraneans blamed the World’s Fair. Indeed, assistant district attorney Richard Kuh said as much, insisting that the question of Bruce’s indecency be adjudicated before opening day. The Fair, first bruited in October 1959, would be Robert Moses’s last stand. As president of the World’s Fair Corporation, Moses maintained that, albeit flagrantly unofficial, the Fair would be a sure moneymaker. However dubious, Mayor Wagner and Governor Rockefeller had to take his word. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 515

Categorization

• XREF: Moses as the force behind civic ‘cleansing’ connects to the book’s gentrification-advance-guard thesis: the same infrastructural/PR powers that prepare urban renewal also police cultural scenes out of existence.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how directly did the Fair’s PR imperative translate into police resources, and did the crackdown actually precede or merely coincide with Fair season?