The world's largest architectural model captures New York City in the '90s

CNN

17-03-2025

The Empire State building stands approximately 15 inches tall, whereas the Statue of Liberty measures at just under two inches without its base. At this scale, even ants would be too big to represent people in the streets below.
These lifelike miniatures of iconic landmarks can be found on the Panorama — which, at 9,335 square feet, is the largest model of New York City, meticulously hand-built at a scale of 1:1,200. The sprawling model sits in its own room at the Queens Museum, where it was first installed in the 1960s, softly rotating between day and night lighting as visitors on glass walkways are given a bird's eye view of all five boroughs of the city.
To mark the model's 60th anniversary, which was celebrated last year, the museum has published a new book offering a behind-the-scenes look at how the Panorama was made. Original footage of the last major update to the model, completed in 1992, has also gone on show at the museum as part of a 12-minute video that features interviews with some of the renovators.
The Queens Museum's assistant director of archives and collections, Lynn Maliszewski, who took CNN on a visit of the Panorama in early March, said she hopes the book and video will help to draw more visitors and attention to the copious amount of labor — over 100 full-time workers, from July 1961 to April 1964 — that went into building the model.
'Sometimes when I walk in here, I get goosebumps, because this is so representative of dreams and hopes and family and struggle and despair and excitement… every piece of the spectrum of human emotion is here (in New York) happening at the same time,' said Maliszewski. 'It shows us things that you can't get when you're on the ground.'
The Panorama was originally built for the 1964 New York World's Fair, then the largest international exhibition in the US, aimed at spotlighting the city's innovation. The fair was overseen by Robert Moses, the influential and notorious urban planner whose highway projects displaced hundreds of thousands New Yorkers. When Moses commissioned the Panorama, which had parts that could be removed and redesigned to determine new traffic patterns and neighborhood designs, he saw an opportunity to use it as a city planning tool.
Originally built and revised with a margin of error under 1%, the model was updated multiple times before the 1990s, though it is now frozen in time. According to Maliszewski, it cost over $672,000 to make in 1964 ($6.8 million in today's money) and nearly $2 million (about $4.5 million today) was spent when it was last revised in 1992.
As to why the Panorama hasn't had another update since, Maliszewski believes that the labor and financial resources required to capture three decades of new buildings would be 'unparalleled.' Additionally, the unique nature of modelmaking requires specialists that are hard to come by. While the craft was once utilized by many architects, city planners and designers, it has largely been replaced by digital modeling, Maliszewski explained.
Nonetheless, the model's historical accuracy adds to its charm. 'What we're looking at is January 1, 1992, which is bonkers, as far as thinking about how much has changed (and) how many whole neighborhoods would not even be recognizable if you shrunk yourself down and were on this model,' Maliszewski said. 'The world continues to evolve so quickly, right? But in (New York) city, infrastructurally, it's at an even faster clip.'
The Panorama is supported by 497 steel legs, with layers of wood and foam that were sculpted to resemble the topography of New York City, according to the book. Tiny bridges made of brass and several acrylic cars, buses, trains and subway cars adorn the model, which was originally designed to be walked across by visitors — at least for the areas with flatter and smaller buildings and large waterways and parks.
The model contains around 895,000 replica buildings, including brownstones and private homes, made through acrylic injection molding, and distinctive structures, such as skyscrapers, museums and churches, made from hand-painted wood and paper.
From the five updates that took place between its original construction and the last renovation, the most prominent additions include the gigantic World Trade Center complex — the twin towers are still represented on the model — as well as Battery Park City, a former landfill that was redeveloped in the 1970s, and the Lincoln Center, the city's cornerstone for arts and culture. Among the notably missing new landmarks, however, is the Hudson Yards neighborhood (also home to one of CNN's headquarters), the High Line, a 1.45-mile-long walkway converted from a freight railroad in the late 2000s, and the numerous 'super-skinny' skyscrapers now dominating parts of the city's skyline.
One of the crew members involved in the 1992 revision, Tom Jarrow, remembers seeing the model during the 1964-1965 World Fair, when he was about seven years old. At the time, there was a plastic tracked car 'helicopter' ride that circled around its perimeter, allowing riders to view the model city at a simulated 20,000 foot elevation.
'Looking at (the model), it's daunting to think that any set of human beings could create something so massive and large (with) so much detail,' Jarrow told CNN on a phone call.
Jarrow, who had worked for Lester & Associates, the origin architectural modelmakers of the Panorama, for 15 years before starting his own exhibit specialist company, S-Tech Associates, recalled some of the meticulous tasks carried out during the renovation, which marked the only time the model, weighing about 45,000 pounds, had ever been removed from the room it currently sits in.
Some of the labor included acid etching the finer details of the windows and doorways, casting hundreds of new shapes for additional buildings, and producing tiny trees and shrubbery from painted sponges. 'If we had 3D printers back then, it would have been fantastic — we could have 3D printed everything, but everything was done by hand,' Jarrow said.
Jarrow's main work was electrical — the Panorama used to be lit up by over 3,000 tiny colored light bulbs that needed to be manually unscrewed each time one needed to be replaced. As part of the renovation, Jarrow updated the model with brighter lights, although he had to use technology that even at the time was considered outdated because of price restrictions, he recalled. 'There's miles and miles of wires underneath that model, and it's all low voltage lighting,' he said. Most of the bulbs, which originally served to color code different municipal facilities around the city, are no longer functioning today.
Both Jarrow and Maliszewski agree that the current model would benefit from a more modernized lighting system that would be easier to manage, and also be more interactive for guests, which the museum is working to achieve by 2027 through a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Additionally, the museum would like to digitally add subway lines, which do not currently feature on the model but plays a key role in the average New Yorker's experience, said Maliszewski.
To maintain the model's appearance, it is cleaned by the museum in its entirety at least twice a year. From dusting its intricate features with brushes of different sizes to using a low intensity vacuum to carefully suck up the dust, it's a process that can take up to two weeks, Maliszewski said. To finance the museum's efforts, a long-running program allows visitors to 'adopt' a piece of the model, whether that is their apartment building, a restaurant, a park or any other feature that speaks to them. By paying a yearly 'rent' or donation to the museum, they can receive a deed to owning a property on the model.
'This model brings out so much for people, as far as their history and nostalgia and memory,' Maliszewski said, adding it shows that 'we're really not that far apart from each other, even if you never leave your neighborhood, or if you never leave your borough… there's still millions of people just a few miles away from you.'