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. Built by a team of more than 100 people working for architectural model makers, Raymond Lester & Associates over the course of three years, the miniature metropolis comprises an area of 9,335 square feet and built to a scale of 1:1200 where one inch equals 100 feet. In planning the model, Lester referred to aerial photographs, Sanborn fire insurance maps, and a range of other City material. 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 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. queensmuseum #MuseumInstaSwap => the swap includes 42 participat...