The Panorama of the City of New York

The Panorama was commissioned by Robert Moses, the powerful city builder, for the 1964 World's Fair held in Flushing Meadows. He wanted a showpiece that would capture the sheer scale and ambition of New York, and a team of model makers spent years building it, working from maps, aerial photographs, and records to place every structure in the city.

When it opened, fairgoers rode past it in cars suspended on a track, taking a simulated helicopter tour over the miniature metropolis as the light shifted from day to night. It was an instant sensation, and it captured the postwar city's confidence in itself as the capital of the modern world.

The scale of the thing is hard to grasp until you stand over it. It covers the whole city, every borough joined together, with the rivers, harbor, bridges, and shoreline all in place. The buildings range from tiny generic blocks in the residential neighborhoods to carefully detailed models of the great landmarks, and the whole is threaded with the bridges and highways that tie the boroughs together.

Visitors love the game of finding themselves in it, tracing a familiar route, locating a home block, or spotting a famous building shrunk to the size of a thumb. A simulated day-and-night cycle still plays over the model, dimming the room and lighting up the little city, so the miniature New York glows in the dark much as the real one does.

A model of a living city goes out of date the moment it is finished, and the Panorama has been revised over the decades to keep up. Major updates have added and removed buildings to reflect the changing skyline, a painstaking job given how many structures the model holds, and the museum has periodically brought in model makers to swap in new towers as the city grows.

Even so, it cannot track every change in real time, and part of its charm now is that it captures the city at particular moments in its history. It stands as both a working map and a historical document, a portrait of New York that is constantly, imperfectly, lovingly kept alive.

The Panorama anchors the Queens Museum, which fills a building that itself served both the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs and once housed the early United Nations General Assembly. The museum's other galleries, including a fine collection of Tiffany glass made in Queens, are worth time of their own.

Outside lies Flushing Meadows Corona Park, dotted with relics of the fairs, chief among them the towering steel Unisphere globe that has become a Queens landmark. A visit can easily combine the miniature city inside with a walk through the great park and its World's Fair remnants outside.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.