Slavs at the 1939 World's Fair in Queens

The other week, Slavs of New York was lucky enough to join the Municipal Arts Society’s walking tour of Bohemian National and the Sokol Halls, led by Joe Svehlak. Everyone is encouraged to visit Bohemian National Hall, but Sokol Hall is a bit less of a public space so getting inside was a treat.

Just inside the door is a small pub, and among the decorations are five large medallions – one each for Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus (Ruthenia), the five parts of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1939. The guide said they were originally from the Czechoslovak pavilion from the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens.

The Munich Agreement was in September 1938, and Hitler invaded on 14 March 1939. Slovakia declared independence on 14 March, and Ruthenia on 15 March (the latter was then occupied by Hungary just about 24 hours later). The rest of Czechoslovakia was reorganized as the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Czechoslovakia would not reemerge until the close of World War II.


So how was there a World’s Fair pavilion for a state that did not exist?

Turns out, the contract with the fair organizers was signed in 1938, and at the time of the Nazi invasion the following March the building was already about half-done. The plans were scaled down, but preparations went forward.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia emerged as a leading proponent of Czechoslovak independence, quickly meeting with Czechoslovak representatives and assuring that so long as the United States did not recognize the German moves the Czechoslovak envoys would keep their titles and authority. When Nazi Germany (the only major country not participating in the fair) tried to keep the Czechoslovak pavilion from opening, La Guardia set up a “citizens’ committee” to raise funds to help complete the pavilion and its exhibits.

The pavilion became a symbol of Czechoslovak resistance to Nazi domination. Former Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes spoke at the dedication of the pavilion on 31 May, highlighting the struggle of the Czechs, Slovaks and Carpatho-Russians (Rusyns) in Europe and thanking La Guardia, noting that “This pavilion, ladies and gentlemen, is the free and independent Czecho-Slovakia of the near past and the free and independent Czecho-Slovakia of the near future.”

The Czechoslovak pavilion stood between the pavilions of the Soviet Union and Japan. Here’s a description of the finished pavilion from the New York Times on 30 April 1939:

The progress of the country during its twenty-year existence is the central theme, and the products and resources of the land and people are represented and demonstrated – such products as iron, steel, textiles, shoes, beer, hams, Glass blowing and etching are shown. A restaurant and open-air beer garden are included in the project.

Yugoslav pavilion featured a large, illuminated map of the country, as well as a model of the oldest pharmacy in the world, from Dubrovnik. Also highlighted were Yugoslavs who have made contributions to the United States, such as Nikola Tesla and Michael Pupin.

Mayor La Guardia spoke in Croatian, a language he learnt while stationed in the United States Consular Service in Fiume (Rijeka), at the opening of the Yugoslav pavilion in May. Among his comments:

The people of Yugoslavia are generous, kindly and peace-loving. Whenever there is trouble in the Balkans, look for the reason, and it will be found to come from without and not from within. Let the strong and big nations leave the Balkans alone and peace will prevail there.

Among the 60 states participating at the 1939 World’s Fair were three more Slavic states: Yugoslavia, Poland and the Soviet Union.

The

The Polish pavilion was built around the 348th anniversary of the first Polish Constitution, and included – among a wide variety of exhibits – the Jagellonian globe, which is believed to be the first to show the name “America.”

The statue of King Jagiello by Stanisław K. Ostrowski, originally placed in front of the Polish pavilion, is one of the rare artifacts of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair still publicly displayed in New York. The statue now sits in Manhattan’s Central Park, near the Turtle Pond.

The Soviet Pavilion was universally acclaimed as a major highlight of the fair. The building was the tallest on the fairgrounds, other than the iconic Trylon structure. Estimates for its cost ranged from $4 to 6 million, by far the most of any World’s Fair structure. Among the materials used in its construction were nine different sorts of marble brought over specially from the USSR.

The building was topped by a 79-foot-tall worker holding aloft an illuminated red star, nick named Big Joe. After complaints, Fair officials had to put a US flag atop the Parachute Jump (which was later relocated to Coney Island) to ensure it flew higher than the Soviet star.

Exhibits inside included a map of the Soviet Union covered in precious stones, two cinemas, a restaurant, and even a full-scale replica of a portion of Moscow’s Mayakovsky metro station (the station was brand new, having just been completed in 1938).

At the end of the 1939 season, the Soviet Union pulled out of the fair, and its building was taken apart and shipped back to Moscow.

On 3 January 1940, the New York Times ran a story about the dismantling of Big Joe entitled “Soviet Worker at Fair is ‘Purged’” commenting tongue-in-cheek that “Stalin’s extended his purge to the United States yesterday and ‘Big Joe’… was decapitated by a derrick.”

Initially, there were plans to reassemble the pavilion at Gorky Park in Moscow, but this was never done and the final fate of Big Joe and the rest of the exhibits remain a mystery.

Croatian Hijacker to be Paroled

Sunday’s New York Times noted the parole of Zvone Busic, a Croat involved in a hijacking of a TWA flight in 1976 designed to draw attention to the Croatian independence movement (Croatian Leader of 1976 Hijacking Is Granted Parole, but Faces Deportation).

When Croatian hijackers took over TWA Flight 355 not long after its departure from La Guardia on 10 September 1976, they announced they had put five bombs on the plane and a sixth in Grand Central. As it turned out, there were none onboard, but the one in Grand Central was real – and one New York City police officer, Brian J. Murray, was killed trying to defuse it. Another officer was blinded in one eye and two more were injured.

Busic, now 62 years old, served more than 30 years, and was granted parole on Friday but will not be allowed to remain in the United States.

About a week after the hijacking, the Times ran the story, New York’s Croatians: Close-Knit and Fiery, which describes the community at that time. The article states that up to 35 percent of the 60,000 Croats in the city in the late 1970s arrived after World War II and were very politically active; they tended “to think of themselves as exiles rather than immigrants…” Many fled following the 1971 of the “Croatian Spring” reform movement in Yugoslavia, which was quickly extinguished by the Communist authorities.

Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito died on 4 May 1980, but already on 23 March the Times published Violent Acts in U.S. Feared on Tito’s Death, which predicted “Croatian separatists, Serbian nationalists and Yugoslav security police officers” in the US and elsewhere would see Tito’s death as an opportunity to advance their causes. Croats and Serbs in New York, Chicago and elsewhere often alleged that Yugoslav security services had executed terrorist attacks to tarnish their names, complicating the situation.

An earlier hijacking by Croatian nationalists, that of JAT Flight 367, saw the plane explode above Srbska Kamenica, Czechoslovakia. Of the 28 people on board, only stewardess Vesna Vulovaic survived – having fallen 33,300 feet.

She ended up in the Guinness Book of World Records (highest fall without a parachute) and in the New York Times again in April (Serbia’s Most Famous Survivor Fears That Recent History Will Repeat Itself) in the run-up to the recent elections in Serbia.

Forum of Slavic Cultures finally online!

Founded in 1994, the Forum of Slavic Cultures has only recently debuted on the internet. The international cultural organization unites representatives from all 13 Slavic countries to join forces to promote Slavic cultures at home and abroad. The organization is based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The Forum's members are: Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine, with The Czech Republic as an observer status. Attention is also paid to Slavic minorities in non-Slavic countries, including the Lusatian Sorbs in Germany.

While the Forum has a variety of projects, among the most pressing right now are those designed to highlight Slavic cultures in Brussels in honor of Slovenia's current stint as the first Slavic president of the European Union.

So far, no activities have been planned for New York, but Slavs of New York is nevertheless very proud to be among the Forum's links!

Slavs at the World Cup

We've gotten a few emails lately about where to watch the five Slavic teams compete at the World Cup, and so we figured we should blog it. Games begin on Friday, and not all bars will show all of the games so call ahead to figure out where's best to go. In no particular order, here's the list:

• Czech Republic: Bohemian Hall (29-19 24th Avenue, Astoria, 718-274-4925). You can't go wrong with this big giant beer garden behind the historic Czech cultural center in Astoria. Aside from Czech beers, they're also having BBQs.

• Croatia: Scorpio (3515 Broadway at 35th Street. Astoria, 718-956-8233). We're not 100% sure they're playing the games, but if anyone is rooting for Croatia, it's Scorpio. Be sure to try the bijela kava (like a latee), certainly the best in the city.

• Serbia and Montenegro: Serbian Club (72-65 65th Place, Glendale, 718-821-9875). The mothership for Serbian fans. We've never been, but we hear it's well worth a visit. They've got cold beer, Balkan food and a big-screen TV. Can't go wrong.
  
  Fans of Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro can also check out Zum Stammtisch (69-46 Myrtle Avenue between 69th and 70th Streets, Glendale, 718-386-3014), which of course caters to Germans, but is also frequented by the x-YU communities in the area.

• Ukraine: Ukrainian Sports Club (122 Second Avenue between 7th and 8th Streets, East Village, 212-475-1340). If you're a Ukraine fan, there's no other place to be. Aside from the full bar with Ukrainian beer, there's a five-foot projection screen TV. The game schedule is on the front door, pass by and check it out.

• Poland: Smolen Bar and Grill (708 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, 718-788-9729). There must be a stack of places rooting for Poland, but we came up with nothing. Sage, a Slavs of New York reader, came to the rescue by pointing out Smolen, a neighborhood bar frequented by Russians and Poles serving up Polish beer.

UPDATE: Croatia's games will also be shown at the Croatian Center (502 West 41st Street, 212-563-3395) in Manhattan, open to the public and free admission. Croatia v Brazil (13 June at 2:55 p.m.), Croatia v Japan (18 June at 9:00 a.m.) and Croatia v Australia (22 June at 2:55 p.m.).
And Cafe Blue Light (30th Street & 35th Avenue, Astoria) also has a live feed on a plasma TV, as well as Balkan food and $3.50 beer.

Slavic Sheepshead Bay

Earlier this week, Forgotten NY spotlighted Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, home to a couple of thought-provoking Slavic sites.


First up, check out Babi Yar Triangle (Corbin Place and Brighton 15th Street), a park named after a 1941 pogrom led by Nazi Einsatzgruppe soldiers and Ukrainan militiamen at Babi Yar, near Kyiv. Nearly 34,000 Jews were killed in just two days, and over the course of the 778 days of Nazi rule in Ukraine a ravine in Babi Yar became the final resting place for over 100,000 people - Jews, Roma, handicapped people, Soviet POWs homosexuals and others. This park was dedicated in 1989.


Sheepshead Bay is also home to the only Holocaust memorial park in New York City, dedicated in 1985.

The monument in the park also commemorates the mass killings at Jasenovac, a concentration camp run by the Croatian Ustase from 1941 to 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs, as well as Jews, Roma, anti-fascists and others were put to death there, and Jasenovac has been a wedge between the Serbs and Croats ever since.
The neighborhood is also home to the Bethel Russian Baptist Fellowship (2310 Voorhies Avenue), and the (gay?) bar Secrets (1321 Avenue Z between East 13th & East 14th Streets). And in nearby Gravesend Neck you'll find the Russian restaurants Elrisha (2364 McDonald Ave between Gravesend Neck Road & Villa) and Anyway Cafe (1602 Gravesend Neck Road), as well as the Russian Baths of NY (1200 Gravesend Neck Road, Gravesend Neck).

GLBT Slavs of New York

The East Village, Manhattan's Slavic heartland, is now home to the city's first official Slavic gay bar (sort of). Back in December, Eastern Bloc (505 East Sixth Street at Avenue A) opened for business with a decidely SocArt theme. The clientel might not be Slavic, but the decor is ochen' Soviet.

Meanwhile, Siberia (356 West 40th Street) has recently started up a Saturday night GLBT party called Cruising. Cover is $5.00 before midnight, $10.00 after. And the 23-29 November 2005 issue of the NY Press mentions Secrets (1321 Avenue Z between East 13th and East 14th Streets) out in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, near the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach. Though it is surrounded by Russian bars, the Press does not indicate that this bar is itself frequented by Russians.

GLBTs from the former Yugoslavia aren't quite left out in the cold, either. Though it (so far) only has a website and a message list, Queer Ex-YU Diaspora is doing its job to link like-minded people from the Balkans, many of whom are in the five boroughs. There is also apparently a Polish organization in the city as well, called Razem (email razem@juno.com), but it does not seem to be active at this time. Email Slavs of New York if you have any additional information.

And for the sake of being comprehensive, it also stands to point out that New York has seen its share of prominent GLBT Slavs of New York, first among whom is surely the Carpatho-Rusyn Andy Warhol. Another is the Russian artist Yaroslav Mogutin, a.k.a. Slava Mogutin. Born in 1974 in Siberia, he became the first Russian to be granted asylum in the US on the grounds of sexual orientation in 1995 and settled in New York. Since then, his celebrity as a poet and photographer has grown so much that he is now able to split his time between New York and Moscow, where he has also found an audience. Check out this interview from a 2002 issue of Index.

Croatian terrorists...in New York?

A couple weeks ago, Slavs of New York ran the post Slovenes in the East Village, which caught the eye of Glory of Carniola. To be mentioned on such a fantastic blog was great, but what was even better was the comments by DarkoV.

Apparently, back in the 1970s and 1980s New York City had its very own Croatian nationalist terror attacks. Who knew?

The group was called the Croatian National Resistance, or Otpor (or Odpor) for short. It was founded by Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburic, a leader of Croatia’s World War II-era Ustasha government.

Aside from New York City, the group was also active in Chicago and Los Angeles, with other members also in Cleveland, San Francisco and Toronto as well as in South America and in Europe.

Their primary goal was to secure the independence of Croatia from the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia but their activities mostly consisted of attacks on pro-Yugoslav or moderate Croats in the US and elsewhere.

Among the incidents:

29 December 1975 – LaGuardia Airport attack. Croatian Nationals at LaGuardia Airport kill 11 and injure 75 after detonating a bomb with the force of 20 sticks of dynamite in a coin operated locker at the TWA terminal. The force of the explosion turned locker doors and metal pieces from baggage carousels into deadly shrapnel.

10 September 1976 – TWA hijacking. Terrorist Zvonko Busic, his wife and three other Croatian terrorists, as a result of concerns about the plight of Croatia within then communist Yugoslavia, hijack a TWA jetliner from LaGuardia Airport, bound for Chicago and re-routed to Paris, seizing 86 passengers. There were no weapons aboard the plane, but genuine explosives were left behind in a Grand Central Station baggage locker in order to create the impression that there were weapons on the plane. Bomb Squad Officer Brian Murray tragically lost his life attempting to deactivate the bomb. Another Glory of Carniola reader adds, that was the flight where Vesna Vulović secured the most terrifying world record of all: surviving the highest fall without a parachute. And apparently Vesna landed straight into a folk song, “Vesna stuardesa” (check out Aviation Security International, How to Survive a Bombing at 33,00 Feet)

1977 - Assasination attempt on Radomir Medic at United Nation mission.

1978 - Two killed. Yugoslav immigrants Ante Cikoja and Krizan Brkic were killed in New York City and Los Angeles, resp.

1978 - Two critically wounded. Another two Yugoslav immigrants critically wounded in an attack in New York City.

2 July 1982 – Landmark sentencing of six Otpor activists on racketeering charges, including two planned murders.

6 July 1982 – Bombings in New York. Four New York Yugoslav sites bombed by Otpor in retaliation.

25 January 1983 - The First Otpor RICO Trial in New York City. Decision handed down in the case of USA vs. Franjo Ivic Nedjelko Sovulj, Ivan Cale and Stipe Ivkosic. All four Otpor members were convicted on various charges; Cale was sentenced to 35 years, Ivic to 30, Ivkosic and Sovulj both to 20.

14 April 1983 - The Second Otpor RICO Trial in New York City. Thirteen-week trail results in the conviction of six more Otpor activists. Defense lawyers accused the prosecution of being in bed with UDBA, the Yugoslav secret police, and alleged their clients were victims of the communist Yugoslav government, which influenced the US government to bring forward the charges.

The group was the subject of an episode of the FBI Files on the Discovery Channel which aired about this time last year.

DarkoV concludes: It was not a pleasant time to be an American of Croatian birth, who had no interest in any violent overthrow. Luckily, the main organizers were arrested or they disappeared, so life returned to normalcy again, namely, back to the times when most Americans didn't know who or what a Croatian was.

Thanks for the info, DarkoV!

Previously on Slavs of New York: Slovenes in the East Village and Manhattan's Croats

Manhattan's Croats

New York's Croatian community is centered on SS. Cyril & Methodius Church and St. Raphael's Church at 502 West 41st St. and the adjoining Croatian Center at 507 West 40th St. The buildings sit in an odd site, between the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel and Port Authority.

St. Raphael is the older of the two parishes, founded in 1886 by an Irish community. The present neo-Gothic building opened in 1914. The Irish were later supplanted by Italians, and in 1974 Croats took it over. The church reopened as a Croatian parish in 1977.

An article from June 2004 in the Daily News, "It's a pain in the glass," highlights dangers posed to the church complex by the impending development of the far West Side.

(Photo from http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID135.htm)

Slavic sculpture in Manhattan

Manhattan is home to several public sculptures and monuments featuring a variety of important Slavs.

One of the easiest to find is the statue of King Ladislas Jagiello of Poland, located at the east shore of Turtle Pond in Central Park near 80th Street. The statue is the work of S.K. Ostrowski and originally featured into the Polish pavilion at the NYC World's Fair. It settled in the park in 1945.

At East 17th Street and N.D. Perlman Place on Stuyvesant Square, you'll also find a monument to Czech composer Anton Dvořák. This one is the work of Yugoslavia's most important sculptor, Ivan Meštrović. The sculpture came to New York more than thirty years ago, originally installed on the roof of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Even though Dvořák's former home at 327 East 17th Street near Stuyvesant Square had been designated a landmark, the City Council overturned the designation in 1991 and the building was destroyed soon after. An AIDS hospice currently sits on the site. The statue was erected nearby in 1997.

Another public sculpture of interest is that of Vladimir Lenin that sits atop the Red Square building on East Houston Street.

The grounds of the United Nations, on the East Side, are a treasure trove of Slavic-related sculptures and monuments. Most visible is definitely the statue of St. George that sits on First Avenue near 48th Street. This statue, of the patron saint of Moscow, is the work of Zurab Tsereteli, a Georgian sculptor who completed several large-scale projects in Moscow in the 1990s.

Also on the grounds is "Peace," an equestrian statue by Croatian sculptor Antun Augustinčić, originally a gift to the organization from Yugoslavia. Nearby is a Soviet sculpture, "Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares." It's also worth pointing out that aside from the statues the public can also see a copy of the Vace Situla from Slovenia and an enormous stained-glass window by Marc Chagal in the visitors lobby.

Unaccessible to the general public is a monument to Saints Cyril and Methodius, a gift of Slovakia. The monument sits just outside the delegates' entrace to the General Assembly building. Also unaccessible to the general public is a statue of Kopernicus from Poland, Croatia's Girl with lute by Ivan Meštrović and also a piece of a medieval fresco from Bulgaria.

(Photos from http://www.nycgovparks.org/)