Project Woodhaven took a ride over to the Queens Museum of Art today with the sole purpose of visiting the Panorama of the City of New York.  It was built for the 1964 World's Fair and covers all five boroughs.  It covers nearly ten thousand square feet and represents nearly 900,000 individual structures.  While it sat untended for two decades, in recent years it has been refurbished and updated to reflect recent changes to the city's infrastructure.

Admittedly, our main interest was to see how Woodhaven was depicted in the panorama, but as we walked into the room we had to take a moment to admire the Manhattan skyline.  This was our first time seeing the panorama and we were immediately struck by two things.  First, the enormity of the entire piece.  It's one thing to read that it's 9.335 square feet -- it's another thing entirely to be standing atop a piece of art that size.  The second thing that struck us was how wonderfully detailed it was.  A tremendous amount of skill, effort, and patience went into making this.

What can one say?  As we made our way around the room, we noticed that everyone who came in after us stopped at the same spot as we did, and spent a few extra minutes looking down at the Twin Towers.  We won't go into the details of how we felt, but we will say it was nice to see them again, even if it was just only a model.

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge coming into Brooklyn.  We're not going to nit-pick, but if they wanted to be truly accurate they would have had bumper-to-bumper traffic sitting on the Belt.

John F. Kennedy International Airport.  When they began building this panorama in the early 60s this was still called Idlewild.  If you let your eye wander up and to the left, you'll see Aqueduct Racetrack (it could be they'll have to revise this panorama to include an itty-bitty casino there soon).  And if you look further up to the left you can see our Woodhaven in the distance.

And there she is -- Woodhaven.  From this distance, all you can really make out is Forest Park and Woodhaven Boulevard bisecting it.  We'll be looking at this piece much closer, but we enjoyed standing back and admiring just how large Forest Park really is.  

Here's a closer shot of Woodhaven.  The original picture was a bit dark so we've lightened it a bit.  Let's look at her from another angle.  In this image, we've labeled a few landmarks, just to give you an idea of where things are.

The best way to view this is full-sized -- click HERE to view the Woodhaven panorama is all it's glory.  To give you an idea of the sort of detail you'll see in the full-sized picture, take a look at this:

There's the Wyckoff buildings, and P.S. 60.  You can see Columbia Savings Bank and St. Thomas the Apostle.  And to reflect the construction of recent years, St. Anthony's has been replaced by the housing block that went up a few years back.  We stood for quite a while, looking her over, having fun pointing out everything we could.  And, finally, it was time to go.

We stopped for one last look at the entire piece of art.  They had a cool thing going on at LaGuardia Airport -- a moving line hooked up to a wheel on the ceiling so that airplanes were constantly arriving and departing.   

During the World's Fair this was a ride -- you would get in a car and they would "fly" you over the entire piece, so you could look down upon it as if from an airplane.  It was a wonderful experience -- the rest of the museum was well worth the visit.  They had a lot of World's Fair memorabilia that was fun to see. 

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Photos:  Joey Wendell

If you have any comments, or would like to suggest other projects, drop us a line at info@projectwoodhaven.com or projectwoodhaven@aol.com