The State of Texas Building at the head of the esplanade anchors the fairgrounds. Built with a $1.2 million appropriation from the state Legislature, the massive structure of Texas limestone is both a museum and a monument. The Hall of State is the building’s most impressive space. With columns soaring four stories to a highly decorated beamed ceiling, the great hall drew opening-day comparisons to Westminster Abbey. Almost immediately, the entire structure came to be called the Hall of State. Today, the building is one of the nation’s premier examples of Art Deco design.
Although promoters trumpeted the 1936 exposition as a world’s fair, it had no international exhibitors or representation from any foreign government. The event was a world’s fair in spirit and in scale, but it was really an extravagant state fair. Nowhere was that clearer than in the agrarian area, a collection of buildings dedicated to foods, poultry, and livestock. Despite their utilitarian nature, the agrarian buildings were designed along the same modernistic lines as the rest of Fair Park, and the area featured its own art themed to animals and agriculture. The most unusual example is Lawrence Tenney Stevens’ Texas Woofus, a chimera of Texas livestock complete with a set of chromium longhorns.
Not far away stands the Federal Building, which marked the geographic center of the 1936 fairground with a 179-foot tower topped by a stylized gilded eagle. The exhibit hall contained displays from 35 government departments and agencies, including the Post Office’s $10 million stamp collection and the Department of Labor’s mechanical man (which assured visitors that robots were not coming for their jobs). Fair officials welcomed President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Federal Building’s star-spangled reception room, which still contains its original Herman Miller furnishings under a stepped, backlit ceiling.
In the southwest corner of the exposition grounds, the city of Dallas erected the Civic Center, a $3.5 million collection of modernistic buildings that included permanent homes for the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Dallas Museum of Natural History, the Dallas Aquarium and an amphitheater modeled after the Hollywood Bowl. In contrast to the classical layout of the exposition buildings, the Civic Center facilities were arranged informally around a manmade lagoon.
As was the case at all world’s fairs, the Midway at Fair Park proved the most popular and profitable part of the exposition. Exotic attractions drew crowds of curious fairgoers, and some concessions were especially impressive. The Streets of Paris, for example, offered French-themed entertainment, cafés, and a private club in a scaled-down version of the ocean liner Normandie.