Futurama 2125

April 22, 2025 will be a Tuesday. Coming on the heels of both Easter and Passover, it would be a good day for the City of New York to declare a once-in-a-century holiday -- a day for observances, celebrations, memorials, tours, debates, heated arguments, and quiet contemplation. Some people will go out and enjoy the City. Some will join parades, marches or demonstrations. Most people will just enjoy the extra day off.

And some people will visit Futurama 2125. Because April 22,2025 will be New York City's 400th birthday.

There are good cases to be made for several days between 2024 and 2026 to mark this occasion, but i'm pinning April 22,1625 as the city's founding date, because that's when the Dutch West India Company voted to erect a fort at the lower tip of Manhattan. Some settlers had been on Governors Island for a year or so before then, but this was the moment when the fledgling settlement was given its first fixed shape by European standards. (It's safe to say the Dutch West India Company didn't consult with the island's original inhabitants before making that decision, though.) The original Governors Island encampment was transitory. Fort Amsterdam was the zero point from which everything to follow sprang forth.

There's not a lot of time left to whip together a big, thorough observance of this anniversary. A while back, I proposed a sort of nontraditional World's Fair, with subject-specific exhibits flung across the five boroughs, from music to health to recreation to working life to dozens of other topics. It's too late for that now -- the last World's Fair in New York City took 5 years to put together -- but one memorable element of both the 1939 and 1964 fairs could be revived and transformed to reflect our times.

When it debuted in 1939, General Motors' Futurama exhibit threw audiences from their electric Art Deco world into 1960, and a Robert Moses fantasyland of limited-access highways, cities planned around traffic systems, and neatly separated residential, commercial and industrial areas. "On all express city thoroughfares, the rights-of-way have been so routed as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible," whitely intoned the narrator of Futurama's 1939 promotional film. What was good for General Motors, after all, was good for America. GM's Futurama II in 1964 didn't fix its vision to a particular year, but broke the bounds of terrestrial living, envisioning lunar colonies, underwater hotels (and resource extraction), and buzzsawing through an old-growth forest with an automated road-laying machine. (The narrator of Futurama's 1964 promotional film gets particularly, um, aroused during this segment.) Futurama II also had a city. To be fair, mass transit and pedestrians were more evident here than in 1939, but it was still a modernist, roadway-oriented vision, where efficient movement of traffic was paramount.

For all their many faults, these exhibits were memorable. My grandparents recalled Futurama I to me decades later, and one way to give today's youth something to tell their grandkids about would be a Futurama III -- a series of visions that would spur conversations about what New York City could be like when it turns 500.

However, there would be three major differences between the first two Futuramas and this one:

1. There would be multiple visions of the future, not just one. Nineteen sixty-four was about the last possible year when someone with a straight face, no less an automobile company, could impose a single vision of the future on the popular imagination and get away with it. That world is long gone now. We're in a more pluralistic public landscape, and visions of the City 100 years hence should reflect that. Eight to twelve teams should be selected by a far-flung panel of around 20 to 30 judges, selected in equal measure by elected officials, public vote, community boards, advocacy groups, unions, and corporations, who would vet proposals and select the most achievable, visionary and thought-provoking. Each team would win a budget of $200,000 (split between public and private endowments) to help create their Futuramas.
2. Futurama 2125 would be a multimedia experience. Yes, each exhibit will need to have a physical component that people have to actually go visit to see, and while they may not all span the immensity of the Panorama exhibit still at the Queens Museum, they'll need to offer up a tangible taste of their imagined futures, even if it's at the level of a single streetscape or apartment building. However, we're in a world where interactive websites, roleplaying, immersive theater, robotics and who-knows-what-else can be part of those experiences. Futurama's teams should only be limited by what's possible.
3. Some of these visions may not be of an ever-upward Utopia. A few, actually, might be pretty damn bleak. Climate change, sea level rise, resource scarcity, political instability, predatory capitalism, encroaching authoritarianism, and Kidz Bop do not fill the mind with wondrous images of cloud cities where everyone lives to 140 and has VR orgasms and free dental care. We shouldn't be afraid to confront darker visions of our collective future, discuss them, and figure out how to avoid them. It was, after all, only 9 years between Futurama II and Soylent Green. If movie audiences could handle that level of dystopia in 1973, live audiences half a century later can too.

Futurama 2125's exhibits can all be situated in Flushing Meadows Park, or they can be scattered around the five boroughs on a rotating basis. Regardless, they can give New Yorkers a memorable, thought-provoking way of thinking about where they live now and the multiple paths the city's future can take. Let's do it.