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What was once a vision of tomorrow is now a very real construction site in Queens.
The New York State Pavilion, the space-age behemoth that was built for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, is finally getting its comeback. The Parks Department has signed off on a stabilization and restoration effort budgeted at roughly $50 million (the agency’s project total is $56.8 million), aimed at rescuing the Pavilion’s weathered concrete, steel and platforms after decades of rust, closures and scaffolding.
If you know the structure from pop culture, you know it as the “alien spaceship” from 1997’s Men in Black. (They were the three Jetsons-esque observation towers that looked like they were a button-push away from lifting off.) If you know it from New York history, you know it as Philip Johnson’s retro-futurist “Tent of Tomorrow,” built to embody the World’s Fair promise of “man’s achievement on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe.”
It’s also the landmark that a lot of people have only ever clocked from the expressway. “There were two groups of people,” Queens Historical Society executive director Jason Antos told CBS News. “[There were] those who remembered it and those who had never experienced it, who would drive past it on the expressway and wonder what it was.”
Now, the plan is to make it experience-able again, at least in a limited form. NYC Parks expects guided tours to begin as soon as late 2026, once the current phase wraps. (As of now, construction is slated through October 2026.) The first phase of work was completed in 2023, including repairs and upgrades that restored the towers’ lighting, making the Pavilion read less like an abandoned sci-fi set and more like a New York icon once again.
The Pavilion is one of the few major structures left from the 1964 World’s Fair era, a sibling in the same park family as the Unisphere, Queens Museum and New York Hall of Science. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable famously called it “a runaway success… a sophisticated frivolity… seriously and beautifully constructed. This is ‘carnival’ with class.”
Now’s your chance to go see it up close, before everyone else remembers it exists.