Billy Rose's Aquacade was a music, dance and swimming show produced by Billy Rose

Billy Rose

William "Billy" Rose was an American impresario, theatrical showman and lyricist. He is credited with many famous songs, notably "Me and My Shadow" , "It Happened in Monterey" and "It's Only a Paper Moon"...

 at the Great Lakes Exposition

Great Lakes Exposition

The Great Lakes Exposition was held in Cleveland, Ohio, in the summers of 1936 and 1937, along the Lake Erie shore north of downtown. The fair commemorated of the centennial of Cleveland's incorporation as a city...

 in 1937.

Later Aquacade moved to the 1939 New York World's Fair

1939 New York World's Fair

The 1939–40 New York World's Fair, which covered the of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park , was the second largest American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people...

 where it was the most successful production of the fair (Lowe). The Art Deco

Art Deco

Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

 11,000 seat amphitheatre was designed by architects Sloan & Robertson. Shows were staged by John Murray Anderson

John Murray Anderson

John Murray Anderson was a theatre director and producer, songwriter, actor, screenwriter, and lighting designer. He worked almost every genre of show business, including vaudeville, Broadway, and film....

 to the orchestrations of Ted Royal

Ted Royal

Ted Royal [Dewar] was an American orchestrator, conductor and composer for Broadway theatre. He was most active in the 1940s and 50s, being associated with the very successful original productions of Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon and Paint Your Wagon...

. The pool and the 300 by 200 feet (61 m) stage could be hidden behind a lighted 40 feet (12.2 m) high curtain of water.

The inaugural Aquacade starred Olympians Eleanor Holm

Eleanor Holm

Eleanor G. Holm was an American swimmer. An Olympic champion, she is best known for having been suspended from the 1936 Summer Olympics team, after she had attended a cocktail party on the transatlantic cruise ship taking her to Germany...

, Johnny Weissmuller

Johnny Weissmuller

Johnny Weissmuller was an Austro-Hungarian-born American swimmer and actor best known for playing Tarzan in movies. Weissmuller was one of the world's best swimmers in the 1920s, winning five Olympic gold medals and one bronze medal. He won fifty-two US National Championships and set sixty-seven...

 (later replaced by Buster Crabbe

Buster Crabbe

Clarence Linden "Buster" Crabbe was an American athlete and actor, who starred in a number of popular serials in the 1930s and 1940s.-Birth:...

) and newcomer Esther Williams

Esther Williams

Esther Jane Williams is a retired American competitive swimmer and MGM movie star.Williams set multiple national and regional swimming records in her late teens as part of the Los Angeles Athletic Club swim team...

. Rose married Holm after divorcing his first wife, comedienne Fanny Brice

Fanny Brice

Fanny Brice was a popular and influential American illustrated song "model," comedienne, singer, theatre and film actress, who made many stage, radio and film appearances and is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series, The Baby Snooks Show...

.

Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions...

 played in a 1955 edition for several weeks. It is here that Ellington is said to have created a drink called the Tornado.

For the New York Aquacade, Rose interviewed 5,000 applicants and chose 500 dancers, actors and swimmers. Gertrude Ederle

Gertrude Ederle

Gertrude Caroline Ederle was an American competitive swimmer. In 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Gertrude Ederle was the daughter of a German immigrant who ran a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan; she was born in New York City. She was known as...

, a Flushing, Queens

Flushing, Queens

Flushing, founded in 1645, is a neighborhood in the north central part of the City of New York borough of Queens, east of Manhattan.Flushing was one of the first Dutch settlements on Long Island. Today, it is one of the largest and most diverse neighborhoods in New York City...

 resident and the first woman to swim the English Channel

English Channel

The English Channel , often referred to simply as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates southern England from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. It is about long and varies in width from at its widest to in the Strait of Dover...

, was an Aquacade star. Queens Borough President Donald R. Manes dedicated the pool to her in 1978.

In 1940, Aquacade also opened in San Francisco at the Golden Gate International Exposition

Golden Gate International Exposition

The Golden Gate International Exposition , held at San Francisco, California's Treasure Island, was a World's Fair that celebrated, among other things, the city's two newly-built bridges. The San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge was dedicated in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge was dedicated in 1937...

.

The New York State Marine Amphitheatre was torn down in 1996 because of local opposition to renovating the asbestos-contaminated structure as a concert venue.

Music used for the Aquacade is held by the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Sources

• Art Deco New York; D. Lowe; 2004; Watson-Guptill
• So Long at the Fair; New York Times; Jun 11, 1995
• Love in the Ruins; Preservationists Fight to Save Crumbling Queens Aquacade; L. Holloway. New York Times; Jun 6, 1995
• 1939: The Lost World of the Fair; David Gelernter
  David Gelernter
  David Hillel Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University. In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system...
  
  ; Free Press, 1995
• aqua-; Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2d Ed.
• THE ROSE ON THE WATER; Being a Brief Description of What Cleveland Will See in 'Aquacade; New York Times; February 28, 1937
• A Woman's New York: 4,000 Applicants Turn Up... Alice Hughes; The Washington Post (1877-1954); Feb 28, 1939;
• The Water Show; Wall Street Journal; May 6, 1939
• Eleanor Holm Jarrett Breaks With Band Leader-Husband; The Washington Post; Jul 21, 1937
• Hard Times, High Visions: Golden Gate International Exposition; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley