There's a fun NY Times City section article about the Queens Museum of Art's Panorama Challenge. The Queens Museum of Art's panorama is a to-scale model of New York City: One inch equals 100 feet (the Empire State Building is 15 inches tall) and the model was originally designed for the 1964 World's Fair, as a "helicopter" ride over New York City. (And, yes, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses commissioned the panorama in 1964, just as he commissioned the Queens Museum of Art's building, the former New York City Pavilion for the 1939's World Fair.)
The museum held the first Panorama Challenge last weekend, and the NY Times' Ellen Barry writes that those present were "history buffs, mavens, plane-spotters, savants, parkies, tour guides and the offspring of cabdrivers: a cross-section, in other words, of those New Yorkers who might spend three hours on a Saturday night debating the names of bridges." The challenge involved clues like "still wooden, and still rattling" with a laser beaming pointing at South Brooklyn.
One of the participant was Kevin Walsh of Forgotten NY, the website and book, who did well, but wanted to challenge the challenge itself over an answer that was eventually revealed as the Queens County Farm ("laser pen south of the Flushing fairgrounds," clue being "Baaas?"). Walsh felt the laser was pointing at the Jamaica subway yard.
The Triborough Destroyers, which included someone who had a telephoto lens to zoom in on the buildings, won the challenge. And there's a Family Fun Panorama Challenge on Sunday, April 29, if you think your family if up to it. We wonder if family can also mean "family of friends," because for a lot of New Yorkers, friends are family.
And did you know the U.N.'s General Assembly met in the Queens Museum of Art's building between 1946 and 1950? Before moving to the Secretariat Building in Manhattan, among the U.N.'s decisions in Queens were the formation UNICEF and creation of Palestine.
Detail of the part of the panorama that shows Flushing Meadows Park - and the Queens Museum of Art and the World's Fair Unisphere
