A tourist in Queens

Last weekend, while Jenn was in Ireland, I took the 7 train to Queens to check out the panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum of Art. (Photo is by Scott Gordon Bleicher. Here’s a bigger version.)

The panorama fills a room the size of a high-school auditorium, and you view it by going up a gradually sloping walkway that takes you from Inwood down to Battery Park, past the Statue of Liberty, over part of Staten Island (which you view through a glass floor), then around Coney Island and into the farthest reaches of Queens and the Bronx.

If you’re a tourist I imagine this must be overwhelming, but even if you’ve lived here for a few years the model reinforces the epic scale of the place, your own insignificance, and how little of it you’ve probably managed to see. There are all kinds of trivia to know, but the ones I remember are that the Empire State Building is 15 inches high, and that the major bridges are the most accurate element, each one painstakingly cast in bronze (then apparently painted white—why?).

While I was in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, I took in the other major sites: the Unisphere, the New York Hall of Science with the real rockets outside it, and the modest but pleasant Queens Zoo, featuring the animals of the Americas. My favorite animal was one I hadn’t heard of: a miniature deer called the pudu.