The Queens Museum of Art is probably best known for housing the New York City panorama that was commissioned by Robert Moses for display at the 1964 World’s Fair. The model encompasses 9,335 square feet and 895,000 individual structures. In other words, it’s cray-cray. Above, looking at Brooklyn.
The panorama was built over 3 years by a team of 100 people at Raymond Lester Associates. The initial contract demanded less than 1% margin of error between reality and the model. Updates have been made over the years, and the World Trade Center, seen below, will be replaced when construction of the new buildings is complete:
Midtown Manhattan:
JFK Airport:
Beloved Coney Island:
Floyd Bennett Airfield [as a random aside, you can now camp there]:
Check out the museum site for more information and panorama photos. You can even adopt a building for as little as $50, which is a veritable real estate bargain.
The other awesome thing about the Queens Museum of Art is that it also houses a relief map of the New York City water supply system, originally built for the 1939 World’s Fair but never exhibited in its entirety due to space constraints [which is so weird]. It measures 700 square feet and weighs 10,000 pounds. After 70 years in storage, it has just been restored and is now on long-term display:
More information about the relief map is on the museum site. All in all, Queens rocked my socks off on my last visit, and the museum, which is in the midst of an expansion that will double its size, will need to be revisited in the future.
Department of Everyday Visualingual 
Wow! I can’t wait to go back to New York to see this in person! Whenever I visit, I never seem to make it out to Queens. I guess it seems to be really far from everything I want to see, but it would probably be fun to venture out for this.
Leslie, it’s a bit of a pain to get out to this particular part of Queens but, if you have enough time, I think it’s worth your afternoon. You could have lunch in Jackson Heights, which has tons of South American restaurants. That’s what we did on this particular visit, and it was awesome.
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