(1) A quote from Before Tomorrowland by Jeff Jensen, Jonathan Case, Damon Lindelof, and Brad Bird:

“The cloaked Plus Ultra zeppelin, still visible in his alternate spectrums, hovered over the fair’s theme center, a pair of structures known as the Trylon and Perisphere. The former, a 180-foot-tall spike-shaped tower, doubled as the docking station for the invisible airship. The latter, a 180-foot-wide globe with a bumpy stucco exterior, was emblazoned with the words Le Monde de Demain. The World of Tomorrow. The interior held an elaborate diorama for a model city of the future, rings of idyllic suburbs surrounding an urban center of glittering factories, humanity wrapped around a mechanical heart.”

(2) A quote from Staying Up Much Too Late by Gordon Theisen:

“By the 1940s, when he [Hopper] painted Nighthawks, New York was as much a giant machine as the modernized house described previously as a big computer posing as shelter. Manhattan was almost totally constructed from layers of technology, from skyscrapers to elevated commuter trains to circuit-board street grid to a vast subterranean infrastructure of power lines, sewers, water mains, and fifty miles of iron pipes to carry steam throughout Manhattan.”

“The need to be reminded that such things as grass and leaves still exist, and are more than tasteful ornaments, can become acute in New York, now and in 1942. But way back in 1844, William Cullen Bryant, already fearing that massive development would obliterate all signs of Manhattan’s pastoral past, used his position as editor of the New York Evening Post to campaign for what would eventually become Central Park, an 840-acre swath of greenery in the gray sprawl of the city. This gem of urban planning was revitalized in the 1930s, when Robert Moses made visiting Central Park easier and more comfortable, adding playgrounds, a cafeteria in the zoo, and evicting a small herd that still grazed in an area known as Sheep Meadow. In fact, Moses, when not destroying entire neighborhoods to make room for an expressway, was planting some two million trees throughout the metropolitan area.”