Panorama of the City of New York

Queens Museum

The Panorama of the City of New York, originally created for the 1964 New York World's Fair, is an urban scale model of New York City that is a centerpiece of the Queens Museum.

In June 1961, the New York City Board of Estimate awarded a contract to the architectural model makers Raymond Lester Associates for the construction of a scale model of New York City within the City Building. The Panorama was built by a team of 100 people working in the three years before the opening of the fair.

Commissioned by World's Fair Corporation president Robert Moses as a celebration of the City's municipal infrastructure, the 9,335-square-foot model includes every single building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs, at a scale of 1 inch = 100 feet. The model was constructed in 273 sections of 4 by 10 feet Formica boards and polyurethane foam, originally depicting 835,000 individual structures. The section showing the Far Rockaway neighborhood was never installed, due to space limitations.

The original Panorama included about 25,000 Plexiglass models of major buildings, 100,000 handmade models of less substantial structures, and 50,000 models of churches. For other structures such as tenements and brownstones, Lester Associates created 50,000 copies of each type of structure. In total, two to three million buildings, including duplicates, were manufactured.

The Panorama was among the most successful attractions at the 1964 Fair, and one of three colossal representations of geography along with the Unisphere and the New York State Pavilion.

The panorama was also intended to serve as a standing urban planning tool after the fair. It remained open to the public, and Lester's team updated the map in 1967, 1968, and 1969.

After another update in 1974, very few changes were made until 1992, when again Lester Associates was hired to update the model to coincide with the re-opening of the Queens Museum, after a two-year total renovation of the building. The model makers changed over 60,000 structures to bring it up-to-date at that time. There are now 895,000 structures including buildings made of plastic or wood. There are also bridges made of brass.

In March 2009, the museum announced the intention to update the Panorama on an ongoing basis. To raise funds and draw public attention, the museum will allow individuals and developers to have accurate scale models made of buildings newer than the 1992 update created and added, in exchange for a donation of at least $50. More-detailed models of smaller apartment buildings and private homes, now represented by generic models, can also be added.

As of 2025, the original Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are still on the map, even though some new buildings have been built on the actual site; the museum has chosen to allow the destroyed structures to remain until construction of the entire new version of the World Trade Center is complete, rather than representing the ongoing construction. The first new building to be added under the new program was the new Citi Field stadium of the New York Mets, while the model of the old Shea Stadium was to be displayed elsewhere in the museum.

A scale model of the 1964 New York World's Fair site, showing all the buildings and pavilions of the time, is located in a separate area devoted to World's Fair exhibits. It is built to the same scale as the Panorama by Lester and Associates.