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My heart’s in the small lands

Touring the miniature city in the museum

New York University, bmm202{at}nyu.edu

To make his own input in the consolidation of New York City visible at the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65, the controversial city-builder Robert Moses commissioned a scale model exhibit offering an up-to-date comprehensive aerial view of the metropolis - the Panorama of the City of New York. Located in the Queens Museum of Art, the Panorama is, to this day, periodically updated in order to accommodate all changes and new buildings of the city. A model of the city, the miniature metropolis is also a model city: unpeopled, clean, clear-cut, safe, and quiet. Complete as a view, the scale model is, hence, incomplete as a representation: the visibility of the architectural environment precludes the visibility of those who inhabit it.

Despite its stasis, the Panorama exhibit offers a non-static experience of the city; once viewing the scale model from rail-cars simulating a helicopter ride along the periphery, today observers walk around it on an ascending ramp, finding their way through pamphlets and labels or following the museum guide who narrates it. The exhibit is, then, paradoxically, both aerial and pedestrian, allowing observers to read, listen to, or remember historical facts and personal movements in the actual metropolis, while walking around and above its miniaturized still version. They thus constantly negotiate two cities: the visible built one of the scale model in the museum and the invisible lived one of people and their interactions in mind and memory. In this article I will argue that the dynamics between the moving, remembering observer and the static view transforms the miniature city into a memory palace of the lived city and examine the roles of the tour guide and the commemorative World Trade Center (WTC) installation in this transformation.

Key Words: authenticity • city • commemoration • form • heritage • memory • palace • scale model • story • tour guide • walking tour

Tourist Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, 267-281 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/14687976020023003


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