The Little Big Apple

September 9, 2015

New York City’s tall buildings and busy sidewalks make it easy for the average pedestrian to feel, well, pretty small. Visitors to the Queens Museum, however, have the chance to reverse that feeling by taking a trip to the Panorama of the City of New York. The panorama depicts all five NYC boroughs in super-small 1:1200 scale (one inch equals 100 feet).

Originally built for the 1964 World’s Fair, the panorama was billed as an indoor helicopter tour of New York (the helicopters were actually plastic cars on a rolling track.) Since then, it has been updated several times (the last being in 1992) to reflect new skyscrapers, parks, and other new features. In 2009, the Queens Museum launched an Adopt-a-Building program to help preserve the model and bring it up to date yet again. At $50 a building, that’s the cheapest rent in NYC!
Photo by Scott Rudd, courtesy of Queens Museum.