★★★★★ 5.0
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Queens Museum
That tiny Empire State Building standing just 15 inches tall represents something absolutely MIND-BLOWING... you're looking at the world's largest architectural model, stretching across 9,335 square feet with 895,000 miniature buildings! This incredible building started as a stinky ash dump in the 1920s, then became the star of TWO World's Fairs, housed the very first United Nations meetings, and now it's the only survivor from the 1939 Fair. Here's your treasure hunt - somewhere in the Jamaica Bay section of this massive model, two sneaky artists hid their signatures in tiny bushes! Can you spot "N.P." and "BILL" hiding in this concrete and steel jungle? Every single street, bridge, and building you see in real New York is perfectly recreated here at a scale where your school would be smaller than your fingernail!
Did You Know?
- The Queens Museum is housed in the historic New York City Pavilion, originally built for the 1939 World’s Fair and later used as the temporary home of the United Nations General Assembly from 1946 to 1951, making it the only building in the world to have hosted both a World’s Fair and the United Nations.
- The museum’s centerpiece is the Panorama of the City of New York, a massive 9,335-square-foot scale model of the entire city built for the 1964 World’s Fair—originally commissioned by Robert Moses as an urban planning tool, it contains over 895,000 tiny buildings and was required to have less than 1% margin of error from reality.
- The Queens Museum uniquely shares its building with an ice-skating rink (in the southern half) while the museum occupies the northern half—a rare example of a cultural institution and a recreational facility coexisting under one historic roof, a setup that continued for decades after the museum’s 1972 opening.