KEEPING PAST VISIONS OF AMERICA'S FUTURE

STE. GENEVIEVE, Mo. -- In 1925, the future New York was envisioned a city where people "practically live in the sky." Aerial hangars were anticipated along with personal flying machines as common as "flivvers."

In the 1950s, a future in which people lived in an Atom Bomb House built to withstand shock waves seemed possible, along with waterproof homes housewives could clean completely with a garden hose.

1999 brought the Moller M400 Skycar, a personal vehicle which takes off and lands like a helicopter and follows pre-programmed aerial "traffic lanes." Whether the Skycar will turn Americans into the Jetsons is still unknown, one of the truths about predicting the future to be found in the Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit "Yesterday's Tomorrows."

The exhibit exploring "past visions of America's future" opened Saturday at the Great River Road Interpretive Center and will remain through April 28. Hours are 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. The exhibit is opening in four other states this week as well. Later in the year, the Missouri exhibit will travel to museums in Sikeston, Malden, Mexico, Point Lookout and Pineville.

Michael Bouman, executive director of the Missouri Humanities Council, was among about 75 people who attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the exhibit. He said it is an honor for Ste. Genevieve to be chosen as Missouri's first stop for the exhibit.

Carol G. Harsh, project director of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling exhibition Service in Washington, D.C., said the "Yesterday's Tomorrows" exhibit "is just the launching pad ... This is an opportunity for the community to come together and talk about today's tomorrows."

Ste. Genevieve is planning a number of activities associated with the exhibit, including a science-fiction film festival.

State Rep. Patrick Naeger and Southeast Missouri State University President Dr. Ken Dobbins were among Saturday's attendees.

Transportation has been a fertile topic for dreaming about the future. In 1959, Ford built a prototype called the Levacar Mach 1, which was designed to slide down the road on a thin layer of compressed air vented beneath the vehicle. A year earlier, Ford's brainchild was the Ford Nuclear, which had a reactor in the rear of the car.

In 1996, the California Partnership for Advanced Transit and Highways introduced a system designed to reduce accidents, congestion and pollution. Under PATH, platoons of cars with sensors move down highways, all under the control of computers.

Religious utopian communities were very popular in the 19th century but fell away. During FDR's New Deal, the federal government built a utopian suburb called Greenbelt, Md., but people and real estate agents didn't like the intrusion.

Not all visions of the future have been optimistic. For every "Just Imagine," a 1930 futuristic musical comedy, there is a "Metropolis," filmmaker Fritz Lang's dark view of what was to come.

"The failures of prediction provide a healthy corrective to our tendency to assume that tomorrow will be simply an extrapolation of today -- only bigger and better, or smaller and worse," the exhibit states.