The U.S. Space Park at the 1964 New York World’s Fair displayed rockets, spacecraft and other artifacts from America’s rapidly developing space program. Created during the height of the Space Race, it embodied the technological optimism of an era when astronauts had become national heroes. The early astronaut corps consisted entirely of white men; women and people of color did not fly as American astronauts until the 1980s. Portions of the Space Park survived after most of the fair disappeared.

When I was seven, growing up in the Bronx, my friends and I all wanted to be astronauts. The Space Race pulled me toward science, and for my eighth birthday my parents gave me a Digicomp, a plastic working computer that taught me binary numbers. Photographing the abandoned Space Park years later connected that childhood optimism with questions I had never asked then about who was included in that vision of the future.</em></p>"