Rent is cheap at the Queens Museum.
The cultural institution has been recording the personal stories of misty-eyed guests who pay as little as $100 to “rent” a tiny piece of property on its “Panorama of the City of New York” — a 9,335-square-foot, to-scale model of the Big Apple.
Hundreds of so-called deeds to tiny buildings have been doled out through the museum’s Adopt-A-Building program, allowing New Yorkers to commemorate special moments in their lives or those of their loved ones.
Those include a woman who bought a miniature of the home where her mom grew up in the 1930s and a couple who honored their anniversary with a “deed” to their first apartment as a married pair.
“People get really vulnerable and intimate with this immediately when you ask them about it,” Lynn Maliszewski, the Assistant Director of Collections and Archives, told The Post during an interview at the museum Thursday.
The Queens Museum has for more than a decade been collecting tales from visitors of their life-changing memories in the city that never sleeps — but expanded the project last summer into the digital realm.
A “digital mapping system” stands on the walkway surrounding the Panorama, just above Staten Island, inviting wistful visitors to drop a pin on their special location and share a memory — for free — while looking down at the miniature city.
“Walking down 86th Street with my BFF in high school in 2009. We would go shopping and get the buffet that’s near Marshalls. I will cherish those memories dearly,” Elaine C wrote alongside her Bensonhurst, Brooklyn pin.
Stephen Yang
Near Fifth Avenue, Jared recalled “having a day out in Central Park. Just coming out of the pandemic. It was a special moment to be around loved ones and breathing fresh air.”
Because the interactive screen is so available to the public, it has plenty of silly entries likely punched in by teenagers, which Maliszewski said reflects “how we experience the city.”
“People who grow up here, people who come here for school, people who come here after school — everyone does or doesn’t realize at some point that we’re all connected and all impacting one another here just by way of how many of us exist here,” she contemplated.
The idea to document the thousands — if not millions — of stories whispered among guests came easily to museum staff.
Approximately 80% of museum visitors come to set their eyes on the tiny behemoth, according to a 2021 survey.
The visitors are a mixed bag of locals and tourists from across the globe — but nearly all have the same reaction upon seeing the world’s largest architectural model, which was conceived as an attraction for the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
“Even if you were to find your apartment, it is a rectangle that is a color, you will not see your stoop, you will not see how many floors it even is– but it’s still like you need to find it,” Maliszewski said.
“Everyone has that impulse to point out: ‘I worked there when I was 21’ and ‘That’s like the first restaurant I went to after college,’” she noted.
“There’s so many moments like that and it just opens up a book of people really talking about their experience and like why these things feel important to them personally, which is really special.”
Sentimental souls who take part in the museum’s Adopt-A-Building program are asked to share why they are seeking out that particular address being handed the deed to their miniature property — whether a childhood home, favorite restaurant or neighborhood church.
While not released to the public, the museum has collected the responses over the years, documenting all walks of life sharing space in the Big Apple.
- “This purchase is being made in honor of our mother, who grew up in this apartment in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Our family drove across the country to attend the 1964 World’s Fair and saw the Panorama exhibit. Now at age 87, our mother has dementia, but still remembers her former home and the city she loved. We, her adult children, wanted to find a unique way to express our enormous gratitude to her for opening our eyes to a wider world and, among other adventures, bringing us to the wonderful city of New York and all it has to offer.”
- “As far as we know, this apartment has never housed a future president or Oscar winner; it was never the site of any event of political or cultural importance; it has no hidden architectural treasures. But it’s where we first lived together, where we had our first fight about whether it was ok to leave pants on the floor overnight, where our friends gathered once a week to eat, drink, and watch Project Runway, where he proposed and where we planned our life together. Through three different landlords, a revolving door of graduate student neighbors, block parties, election lines, construction and infestation by that one mouse who just refused to respect our authority as humans, this was where we learned to be New Yorkers.”
- “This apartment is our first home as a married couple. I surprised him with a trip to the Panorama (he’d never heard of it and was amazed) and we spent hours looking at the incredibly detailed work of a city that we both love so much. This is in honor of our first anniversary as a married couple, with wishes for many more to come, for both us and the panorama!”
Much like the real city, costs drastically vary depending on what neighborhood one is eyeing.
“Of course, the Empire State Building is going to be more expensive than your corner in Forest Hills. But that’s just the way rent goes,” Maliszewski quipped.
The Panorama has undergone several upgrades over the decades but has seen few additions since 1992, when the museum spent $2 million to add 30,000 buildings to the model, bringing the grand total to 895,000.
A conglomeration of old and new, the model features CitiField and Brooklyn Bridge Park, both of which were introduced in the late 2000s, but still includes the Twin Towers.
And while museum staff added Greenpoint’s Newtown Creek Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility, they opted not to beef up the recent congestion in neighboring DUMBO.
According to Maliszewski, the payoff for updating the Panorama does not outweigh the opportunity to put the funds toward more important projects at the museum — especially the high cost of maintaining the intricate and extremely delicate Panorama itself.
That means the space where Hudson Yards has stood for the past five years may stay empty for several more years, and that the incoming Major League Soccer’s New York City FC at Flushing Meadows Corona Park might not ever be built, she said.
“This kind of sleepy object is capturing a place that is constantly in flux. The city is constantly being built upon. People are constantly redefining the way that buildings exist, in the way that neighborhoods are made up,” Maliszewski said.
The time-capsule effect has completely transformed the purpose of the Panorama since its first iteration.
Then-World’s Fair President Robert Moses envisioned that city planners could remove each of the Panorama’s 273 pieces and carry them to urban layout hearings, leaving gaping holes in parts of the miniature city while keeping it on display.
The idea never panned out, likely because it would ruin the enchanting allure of the Panorama, Maliszewski theorized.
“Would you take a part of the middle of Staten Island and bring it to Staten Island Town Hall for them to look at the part? What would you do with the rest of the model? Would you put a sheet over Staten Island and just pretend it’s not there?”
“If you remove any of the parts, it doesn’t really make sense anymore. The mythic quality of it is, in a way, lost because you see the scale being lost. It puts you back in reality a little bit.”
The breakdown of the plans indirectly placed the Panorama into the hands of its visitors, who have wholeheartedly embraced the Little Apple as a symbol of their love for New York City.
Every weekend, crowds of guests come in and point out the small-scale versions of their lives.
Of course, there’s always a “traffic jam” in front of the island of Manhattan.
“They love to sit and point and I’m looking at the streets that they used to walk down,” Maliszewski said, “you can just truly get lost in it.”
