Reply With QuoteI remember going on a field trip in elementary school to the Queens Museum of Art. I remember seeing the sunup and sundown cast on the model. Absolutely beautiful.
"Sized down"? Can't find anything in the article on this. Has it really been sized down?Originally Posted by Kris
I remember going on a field trip in elementary school to the Queens Museum of Art. I remember seeing the sunup and sundown cast on the model. Absolutely beautiful.
No, its the same size as it was before. They are referring to it being a miniaturization of the city.
I just went last weekend for the first time. It is really an interesting experience and I would recommend it to anyone who visits WNY. Its like the view you get from a plane, except you stay and look around as long as you want.
I was not familiar with City Island. Nor was I familiar with just how many public housing projects are here (all these buildings are red in color).
Oh, OK. My bad.
March 16, 2009, 3:45 pm
You, Too, Can Own a Piece of the (Mini) City
By Anne Barnard
When even the Metropolitan Museum of Art is laying off staff, what do you do if your financial base is less Fifth Avenue than Queens Boulevard? The Queens Museum of Art has come up with a creative way of weathering the downturn and its attendant drop in donations to cultural institutions: Capitalizing on a unique piece of New York real estate.
The museum’s most famous asset is its 9,335-square-foot scale model of New York City, originally built for the 1964 World’s Fair. The Panorama of the City of New York has 895,000 structures, replicating every street, bridge and skyscraper in the five boroughs.
It is the physical and sentimental centerpiece of the museum, located on the old fairgrounds in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, next to the Unisphere, the enormous stainless-steel globe that was also built for the fair and has become an unofficial symbol of Queens.
Now, the museum is beginning an “Adopt-a-Building” program.
Starting Monday, you can “own” an apartment in the tiny world of the model for $50. A single-family house will cost $250.
And for $10,000, developers can have their brand-new glass-tower condo buildings added to the panorama — no matter how many units are languishing on the market. “Buyers” will even be awarded their own personal deeds.
Up to now, the panorama has represented a snapshot of New York, frozen in time. In 1992, workers updated 60,000 structures to reflect the city’s constant churn of construction and demolition, but it has been untouched since then.
In the miniature world, the Trade Center still stands, for instance, and the luxury towers now lining the Long Island City and Williamsburg waterfronts are nowhere to be seen.
Now, the panorama will evolve gradually along with the city — at least, for those who pay.
The first taker was the New York Mets. In a ceremony Monday morning, Claudia Ma, a City College architecture student, walked onto the panorama and, like a giant monster in a Japanese disaster film — but with more finesse — pulled off the model of Shea Stadium from its foundations. She fastened the new Citi Field into place, mirroring the real-life replacement under way not far from the museum. (Those nostalgic for the old Shea can now visit the model in the museum’s World’s Fair exhibit.)
In the audience was Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, who donated $250 to adopt her house in East Elmhurst.
The “Adopt-a-Building” will raise funds dedicated to maintaining the panorama and the educational programs built around it, including popular tours for schoolchildren. The models are to be built by City College architecture students.
City Room was intrigued by the possibilities, which immediately raised a number of questions both selfish and civic-minded.
First of all, what if you, like City Room, have the disappointing experience of locating your own corner but finding that your building — a 12-story prewar apartment house with distinctive yellow brick and lion’s-head cornices — is represented by a generic five-story tenement? (While viewers can delight in spotting exact details from the green roof of the Carlyle Hotel to the steel-ribbed Unisphere, not every structure merits an exact replica.)
“We’d be happy to update it if your co-op board would like to get together and pool your money,” offered David Strauss, the museum’s director for external relations.
But what if we’re a rent-stabilized building?
“I’d have to boil down the price,” Mr. Strauss said. But he warned jocularly that like stabilized rents, the price might rise by a fixed percentage each year.
Seriously, though, “There is always room for negotiation when working with the general public,” he said. “Like in the real estate market.”
O.K., now a question of more general importance for the urban psyche: If the museum starts updating post-2001 commercial projects like “The Edge” in Williamsburg, won’t it be anachronistic to leave the Twin Towers standing?
The museum won’t put a hole at ground zero, Mr. Strauss said. Instead, once the new skyscrapers planned for the site are in place, a model of them will replace the model of the towers.
“That’s something that obviously we’d like the developer to take care of,” Mr. Strauss added, hinting at the $10,000 donation. “But we’d probably do it anyway, since it’s such an important structure to the city.”
Unless a tribe of enormous aliens comes up with an Adopt-a-Building program for the real city to fund the completion of cash-challenged projects, that update may have to wait awhile.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...the-mini-city/
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
^ Reminds me of the model of ancient Rome at EUR, that city's Queens.
^ An opportunity for you to acquire that West End Avenue address ablarc?
The Panorama of the City of New York
Thanks very very much for all of the posts about The Panorama of the City of New York.
i did a photo thread on the panorama last year w/ lots of pics:
http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/inde...c,16530.0.html
The Panorama of the City of New York
Thanks very very much for that website of New York City.
Yes, I enjoyed it as well.
available for private viewing?
As an artist I would like to do a photo shoot of the panaorama. What are the costs and conditions involved, who would I contact for permission to use the model.
You would have to do it on site.
Of course it would be done on site. Many years ago, as a high school student (Bayside) I visited the behind the scenes working of the panorama, I interviewed for my school paper, the attendant. My project is to do photographs depicting the contrasts of proportions, that the Panorama affords. I know that there are those with access to the models floor. that is what I am interested in.
Your best bet is to call.
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