Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Panorama

I've been sick for almost a week now, so we haven't had any outings or squirrel-related adventures in about that long. I have been meaning to write about our little trip to the Queens Museum of Art, which is located on the old World's Fair fairgrounds that I wrote about a while back.

The Queens Museum of Art is small, and doesn't have much of interest to me. It was mostly modern art when we went. The major draw, though, is the giant 3-D map of New York City, which they refer to as "The Panorama."

It's a three dimensional map of New York City, all five boroughs. Some of the buildings are quite detailed, and I believe they try to keep it up-to-date now (except for the WTC Towers you see here; apparently they are keeping those in place until the new structure is completed on that site). This was originally built for the 1964 World's Fair.

It's very cool, and is kept in a large room with a walkway all around so you can get different angles on everything. Unfortunately, our part of Queens is pretty much right in the center of the thing so we couldn't get a close enough view to really pick out our neighborhood.

This was a really cool little exhibit, and I think anyone who has lived in New York City for a decent amount of time would enjoy it. I'm glad we dragged our butts out to Flushing to see it. Now I'm interested to see if my geography nerd friends chime in with interesting facts about this map.

3 comments:

  1. was at the State Office Building the other day, where the MN House and some others have their offices.... Someone notices that all the railings have tiny rodents built in as decor. now, i "know" they're gophers, but for your sake, I declared them squirrels. next time i'm there, i'll bring back pics.

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  2. It's scaled all wrong! Poor color choice! They're being nasty imperialist positivists in their hegemonic view of society!

    Okay, okay, it's actually pretty cool. I don't know what else I'm supposed to say about it. I saw the one in Boston, and the comments I had on that mostly had to do with the horrendous Boston city hall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall) and the director of urban planning giving the tour, who was under the impression that although "some people" didn't like the building, he thought it did very well (he was one of the architects).

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  3. Ben - Dude, most rodents that we call gophers are ACTUALLY a type of ground squirrel! So they ARE squirrels! Yes, please do send me pitcures and I'll post about it!

    Matt - Boston City Hall is HORRIBLE! I remember seeing it during my first trip to Boston and just being HORRIFIED by it!

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