NY Times
On the Town, Sized Down, Jazzed Up
East River views: David Strauss of the Queens Museum of Art on the New York City Panorama.
A small world after all? At the Queens Museum of Art, a panorama built for the 1964 New York World’s Fair has been revitalized.
By COREY KILGANNON
February 2, 2007
There is a spot in New York City where you can watch the dawn blush over Jamaica Bay in Queens and slip swiftly down the shore to Coney Island in Brooklyn, then hop across New York Harbor to suburban stretches of Staten Island.
As the Bronx begins to bustle and Manhattan jolts to life, the chirping of birds gives way to the snort of street sounds and taxi horns. And then a smooth voice-over reminds you that the city is “the center of civilization.”
This virtual New York City sunrise comes courtesy of the Queens Museum of Art, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, and can be experienced once an hour from any vantage point on the balcony walkways around the perimeter of its New York City Panorama, which has been closed since October for renovation and reopens Sunday with a newly installed audiovisual accompaniment presentation.
The panorama reopens with the museum’s new exhibition on Robert Moses, who had the panorama built for the 1964 World’s Fair. It became a permanent exhibit in the Queens Museum when the museum opened in 1972 in the fair’s old New York Pavilion building.
The panorama, the museum’s centerpiece, is widely known as the world’s largest architectural model of a city, and yet remains relatively obscure. Yes, there have been live tour guides and headphone tours, but for decades the extent of its presentation apparatus has been the aging dimmable house lights.
Museum officials have long wrestled with ways to revitalize the model and expand its possibilities. They even mused about asking New York developers and building owners to sponsor a model in the panorama in return for a little sign on it plugging the real building. (Are you listening, Mr. Trump?) They finally became sold on the benefits of adding a multimedia accompaniment, after seeing a temporary presentation created for the International Olympic Committee in 2005 to show how the city could be converted to an Olympic village.
“The panorama is by far our biggest attraction, and we really wanted to bring it to life and attract more viewers,” said the museum’s director, Tom Finkelpearl, who explained that the new equipment — with its ability to spotlight different parts of the city with audiovisual sideshows, could be adapted to give various types of New York theme presentations.
The model was built with incredible topological and architectural accuracy. Its roughly 895,000 tiny buildings, streets, parks and bridges are made mostly of wood and plastic and all built to scale, from bridge length to park acreage to skyscraper height.
The 321 square miles of the city’s five boroughs are sprawled over the model’s 9,335 square feet. An inch equals 100 feet, Far Rockaway is a jump shot from Central Park, and the 1,500-foot-tall Empire State Building is 15 inches. The beach at Coney Island is just over 13 feet long, the Staten Island ferry would travel 22 feet, and the Bronx Zoo covers 1,500 square inches.
The panorama, which lacks people, traffic, trash and other real-life elements, was originally built for $672,000. Other than a 1992 overhaul that modernized many of the low-rise buildings and added newer structures, this upgrade is its most significant. It cost $750,000, part of which was originally earmarked for a “Tribute in Light” to replace the 13-inch gray blocks that represent the twin towers. But tests indicated that the light would be seen only if there was dust in the air, so for now the blocks remain in place.
The new presentation equipment, a stack of computerized audio and sound equipment, sits high on a balcony. It is connected to video projectors, speakers, automatically controlled spotlights and a network of colored lights around the perimeter, near the ramp that affords viewers a bird’s-eye view of the metropolis.
Mr. Finkelpearl said the presentation recalled some of the original bells and whistles that accompanied the panorama when it opened at the World’s Fair and is meant to give viewers the feel of a helicopter ride over the city. Viewers rode in fake helicopter cars on tracks around the periphery of the model. Narration was provided by the newscaster Lowell Thomas (who uttered the “center of civilization” line).
One recent weekday Mr. Finkelpearl stood on the walkway for a demonstration of the 12-minute presentation about New York and Robert Moses and how the model was built partly to emphasize his accomplishments in consolidating the city with bridges and highways connecting the boroughs.
Each borough is spotlighted, as are the Hudson, Harlem and East Rivers. Ellis Island is lighted, and you can hear the sound of voices of the huddled masses. A strobe light depicts the chaos of Midtown Manhattan.
This is, after all, the Queens Museum, and the most fuss is made over Queens. The presentation includes audio and video clips recorded recently in specific ethnic neighborhoods like Jackson Heights’s Indian immigrant community and the Greeks and Arabs of Astoria.
Also on hand was Blagovesta Momchedjikova, a tour guide for the model whose enthusiasm for it has earned her the nickname “Queen of the Panorama.”
Ms. Momchedjikova, who helped develop the script, now teaches a writing class at New York University, using the model as an inspiration and subject matter for memories of New York. She wrote a 250-page doctoral dissertation on the model.
The embodiment of the ethnic mix of Queens, Ms. Momchedjikova is a Bulgarian immigrant who married a Senegalese immigrant, Mady Cisse, and they have a baby boy named Moussa, the Senegalese version of the name Moses.
She said she was excited about the presentation but emphasized that viewing the model also is a personal, meditative experience, a communion with your own personal New York, the cognitive model you have in your memory where all your memories — where you lived, worked, fell in love — play out.
“Most people want personal time with the model because it’s a big repository of all we’ve experienced in New York,” she said. “It gives us a tactile experience of where we’ve been and where we want to go.”