The Queens Museum of Art houses the world's largest architectural model, which depicts all of the buildings in the entire city of New York. Entitled the Panorama of the City of New York, the model is built at a scale of 1:1200 (one inch = 100 feet) and covers 9335 square feet of exhibit space. The only other scale city model which currently approaches the scope of the Panorama is the city model on display at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall which is built to a larger scale of 1:200, but covers less area, at 6500 square feet.

The Panorama was originally built as a featured exhibit for the 1964 World's Fair. Over 100 craftsmen worked for nearly three years to build 830,000 tiny buildings from wood and plastic. They used insurance and plat maps, aerial photos, as well as direct observation, to build the most accurate representation of the city possible, including all five boroughs, and the entire length and breadth of the city (aside from a corner of Far Rockaway which would not quite fit the space). New York's master planner, Robert Moses, conceived the idea of a model as a tourist attraction for the 1964 fair, to be later used as a regional planning tool to show public works projects.

Originally the Panorama was viewed from small cars which ran on tracks above the perimeter of the room. The ride was an imaginary helicopter tour, with famed travel writer Lowell Thomas providing an audio guide of the notable sights in each borough.

Like the axonometric maps drawn by hand by Hermann Bollman in the 1950s and Constantine Anderson in the 1980s, the mass of blocks and tiny windows of midtown merge into an overwhelming visual jumble. It astounds the visitor to think how this magical little world was created by hand.

Scale models like this allow the viewer to understand how the city is put together, in ways that are not obvious from walking the streets. It is the same reason that tourists enjoy visiting observatories at the top of skyscrapers: to gain a framework of understanding ones experiences in a place that is so large as to seem a disconnected series of streets and spaces. Whether it is simply for the tourist to string together a narrative of a short visit to the city, or for the New Yorker to understand how his/her neighborhood fits in to the whole, these are exactly the purposes for which Robert Moses imagined the model.

The Panorama has been updated and altered along with new construction in the real city, but since the construction boom of the 1990s, the model has lagged behind reality. Some of the little buildings seem to be tattered and falling apart in places. Simply maintaining and preserving the hundreds of thousands of buildings in the model must be a constant challenge against dust and occasional detritus dropped from the balconies above. Can you spot the foreign object not far from Washington Memorial Arch in the photo above?

Though the model buildings are built to accurate scale and position, if you look carefully at each one, there isn't a lot of detail. Most of the windows are depicted as punch-card style grids, whether the building is a modernist tower block or an old-fashioned beaux arts apartment house. Sharp-eyed viewers may spot odd anachronisms. Look carefully at One Times Square just left of center in the photo above. Is this a model of the original gothic skyscraper before 1961, when it was redone as a modernist box stripped of most windows and covered with advertisements?

The model is filled with charming details, like the tiny cable cars going across to Roosevelt Island, just north of the Queensboro Bridge. I expected the tiny cars to move, like train cars on a model railroad layout. There is one mechanized feature of the Panorama: tiny airplanes on wires which rise steeply from the LaGuardia airport runway, round a pulley hidden in the rafters, cross the sky above, then turn down for a quick landing again. The tiny shadows of the airplanes moving across the city are a subtle effect that adds a quiet mystery to the model.

For that 'meta' effect, you can look down on the site of the 1964 World's Fair, and see the building which houses the Panorama. Its there, across the street from the Unisphere globe. Can you imagine yourself inside, less than 1/16th-inch tall?

At a scale of 1:1200, the Empire State Building is about 12 inches high.

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Across town, at the Skyscraper Museum, there is another scale model depicting a section of New York. This one is much smaller in scale and in scope, depicting only a small part of Manhattan. Michael Chesko created a model of midtown Manhattan and another of lower Manhattan, at 1:3200 scale, from pieces of carved balsa and basswood.

While these models lack the realistic colors of the Panorama model, the minimalism of the simple wood forms give the model an elegance and beauty lacking in larger models. The tiny avenues invite us to wander along in our imaginations, and trace the streets we followed to arrive at the museum near Battery Park.

The unpainted wood of the model creates a unity from the jumbled forms of the real city, as if the dense skyscrapers were natural objects growing in a miniature forest.

Amazingly, the artist never visited New York before building these models. Using only maps, aerial photos, and reference data found online, he spent more than 2000 hours constructing each of the two models.

The micro scale of tiny wooden details gives the model a delicate beauty that must be seen in person to fully appreciate. Stop by the museum to check it out for yourself!

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Other miniature scale model cities around the world:

Beijing City Model - 1:750 scale model of the Master Plan of Beijing on display at the Beijing City Urban Planning Exhibition Hall

Boston City Model - Wooden planning model of central Boston on display at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center

Miniature Buenos Aires - 1:1500 scale model of the entire city of Buenos Aires entitled 48 Barrios, 15 Comunas

Chongqing City Model - 1:750 scale model of Chongqing, China on display at the Chongqing Urban Planning Exhibition Hall

Cincinnati in Motion - a 1:64 representation of Cincinnati from 1900-1940 at the Cincinnati Museum Center, featuring working trains and streetcars

Chicago Model City - 1:600 scale model of downtown Chicago on display at the Chicago Architecture Foundation

Indianapolis City Model - 1:960 model of downtown Indianapolis

Jerusalem Model - 1:500 scale planning model of central Jerusalem on display at the Jerusalem Center for Planning in Historic Cities

Los Angeles 1940 - A model of central Los Angeles built in 1940, on display at the LA County Natural History Museum

Pipers Central London Model - 1:1500 scale model of central London on display at the Building Centre

Minato-ku Scale Model - 1:1000 scale model of Tokyo on display in the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower

Quito en Miniatura- 1:200 scale model of the colonial center of Quito built of carboard and wood by artist Guido Falcony Palacios, in a small museum near the Mitad del Mundo monument

Moscow City Model - 1:500 scale basswood model of Moscow updated since the 1980s

Panorama of Moscow - 1:75 scale 400-square-foot model of central Moscow created by diorama artist Efim Deshalyt in 1977, moved in 2007 to the Hotel Ukraina

Nanjing City Model - 1:850 scale model on display at the Nanjing Urban Planning Museum

Prague City Model - 1:480 scale model of central Prague made from cardboard by librarian Antonin Langweil in the 1830s, at the Museum of the City of Prague

Providence Model - Unknown scale wooden planning model of downtown Providence, Rhode Island

Le Plan de Rome - 1:400 scale model of ancient Rome, built in the early 1900s by architect Paul Bigot, on display at l'Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

Plastico di Roma Imperiale - 1:250 scale model of ancient Rome, built in the 1930s, on display at the Museo della Civiltà Romana

Shanghai City Model - 1:200 scale model of Shanghai 2020 plan on display at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall

Singapore City Model - Unknown scale model of downtown Singapore on display at the Urban Redevelopment Authority

Sydney City Model - 1:500 scale model of downtown Sydney, on display beneath a glass floor at Customs House

Toronto City Model - Unknown scale model on display at City Hall

Musée des Plans-Reliefs - Hundreds of 1:600 scale models of French cities created in the 18th century are on display at this Paris museum

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Some impressionistic not-to-scale model cities:

Metropolis II - Kinetic sculpture by artist Chris Burden depicts a futuristic city of tiny cars and trains in motion, at LA County Museum of Art

Rolling Through The Bay - Kinetic sculpture by artist Scott Weaver made of 100,000 toothpicks featuring landmarks of San Francisco

San Francisco in Jello - Gooey technicolor model of San Francisco made by artist Liz Hickok