The “helicopters,” molded plastic tracked cars that encircled the model, also came with a guided tour, “The City of Opportunity,” read by broadcast legend Lowell Thomas which you can listen to here. The nine minute ride provided a “god’s eye” view of the complex topography of the five boroughs and their waterways, allowing sightseers to view the City at sea level and from a simulated 20,000 foot elevation. The Panorama was one of the most successful attractions at the ‘64 Fair with millions enjoying what was billed as an indoor helicopter tour of New York. Ongoing building additions are made by architectural model makers of laser cut/etched acrylic generated from computer aided designs. The buildings were constructed of wood, plastic and hand painted paper, and the bridges of etched brass. The original materials used to construct the Panorama itself are a sign of the times in which it was built – Formica panels and Urethane foam mounted on wood. Other special effects in the Panorama included moving airplanes that took off and landed at LaGuardia Airport every few minutes. PANORAMA ROOM NYC WINDOWSBlack light fixtures mounted a few feet above the surface of the model illuminated trees and grounds of the city’s parks and the windows of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, all painted with phosphorescent paints that glowed green in the “night” cycle. In addition, an automated program of 3,172 colored lights highlighted the City’s municipal buildings – police precincts, firehouses, schools, hospitals, courthouses, libraries, public housing projects, as well as water, gas and electric stations. When introduced in 1964, the Panorama’s special features included a continuous lighting cycle that went from dawn to dusk to night. Long Island and New Jersey peek onto the model as black shadowy masses to the east and west. In this miraculously scaled cityscape, the borough of Manhattan measures a seemingly vast 70 x 15 feet and the Empire State Building is a towering 15 inches tall while the Statue of Liberty is only 1-7/8 inches in height. Each of the city’s 895,000 buildings constructed prior to 1992 and every street, park and some 100 bridges are represented and assembled onto 273 individual sections comprising the 320 square miles of New York City. In planning the model, Lester referred to aerial photographs, Sanborn fire insurance maps, and a range of other City material as the Panorama had to be accurate, with the initial contract demanding less than one percent margin of error between reality and the “world’s largest scale model.” Comprising an area of 9,335 square feet and built to a scale of 1:1200 where one inch equals 100 feet, the Panorama is a metropolis in miniature. Lester was familiar with building larger-than-life model environments, having worked with Norman Bel Geddes as an artist, designer and fabricator for the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair, and later, on other large scale models of civic projects for Moses. Conceived as a celebration of the City’s municipal infrastructure by urban mastermind and World’s Fair President Robert Moses for the 1964 Fair, the Panorama was built by a team of more than 100 people working for the great architectural model makers Raymond Lester & Associates over the course of three years. The Panorama of the City of New York is the jewel in the crown of the collection of the Queens Museum and a locus of memory for visitors from all over the globe.
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