text: Beame's interim report, published at the end of August, found that the WFC had squandered money by not awarding contracts through competitive bidding and by spending nearly everything it had on expenses incurred before and during 1964. Despite Moses's denials of wrongdoing, Queens district attorney Frank D. O'Connor opened a criminal inquiry into the WFC shortly afterward. Moses also installed highway signs promoting the fair and refused to remove them, even after city traffic commissioner Henry A. Barnes called the signs a safety hazard. By mid-September, estimates of the fair's total attendance had been reduced from 70 to 50 million. By the end of September, the fair had recorded 17 million visitors during the 1965 season, less than half the number of visitors needed to break even. At this point, the WFC had barely enough money to pay its weekly expenses.
  Toward the end of the 1965 season, there was a sustained increase in attendance, and the fair recorded more than 250,000 daily visitors for three weeks straight. There were so many visitors that exhibitors worried that people would be dissuaded by the overcrowding. Architect and writer Robert A. M. Stern attributed the attendance increases to a prevailing feeling that the 1964 fair would be one of the last lavish world's fairs. Pope Paul VI visited the fair on October 4, 1965, during the first-ever papal visit to the United States. The fair ended on October 17, 1965, and recorded its highest-ever daily attendance, 446,953, on its final day. The fair's final day was chaotic, with reports of vandalism and theft. In total, the fair had recorded 51,607,448 admissions, seven million more than the 1939 fair and ten million more than Expo 58. The GM and Vatican pavilions had been the most popular. Nonetheless, the fair had lost an additional $1 million in 1965 and had a deficit of up to $40 million at the time of closure. The New York Times partly attributed the fair's underperformance to Moses's stubborn attitude and refusal to take advice.
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