The world’s largest architectural model captures New York City in the ’90s
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The Empire State building stands approximately 15 inches tall, whereas the Statue of Liberty measures at just under two inches without its base. At this scale, even ants would be too big to represent people in the streets below.
These lifelike miniatures of iconic landmarks can be found on the Panorama — which, at 9,335 square feet, is the largest model of New York City, meticulously hand-built at a scale of 1:1,200. The sprawling model sits in its own room at the Queens Museum, where it was first installed in the 1960s, softly rotating between day and night lighting as visitors on glass walkways are given a bird’s eye view of all five boroughs of the city.
To mark the model’s 60th anniversary, which was celebrated last year, the museum has published a new book offering a behind-the-scenes look at how the Panorama was made. Original footage of the last major update to the model, completed in 1992, has also gone on show at the museum as part of a 12-minute video that features interviews with some of the renovators.
The Queens Museum’s assistant director of archives and collections, Lynn Maliszewski, who took CNN on a visit of the Panorama in early March, said she hopes the book and video will help to draw more visitors and attention to the copious amount of labor — over 100 full-time workers, from July 1961 to April 1964 — that went into building the model.
“Sometimes when I walk in here, I get goosebumps, because this is so representative of dreams and hopes and family and struggle and despair and excitement… every piece of the spectrum of human emotion is here (in New York) happening at the same time,” said Maliszewski. “It shows us things that you can’t get when you’re on the ground.”
Original purpose
The Panorama was originally built for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, then the largest international exhibition in the US, aimed at spotlighting the city’s innovation. The fair was overseen by Robert Moses, the influential and notorious urban planner whose highway projects displaced hundreds of thousands New Yorkers. When Moses commissioned the Panorama, which had parts that could be removed and redesigned to determine new traffic patterns and neighborhood designs, he saw an opportunity to use it as a city planning tool.
Originally built and revised with a margin of error under 1%, the model was updated multiple times before the 1990s, though it is now frozen in time. According to Maliszewski, it cost over $672,000 to make in 1964 ($6.8 million in today’s money) and nearly $2 million (about $4.5 million today) was spent when it was last revised in 1992.
CarlosAburl 03/31/2025 11:29 (UTC+00:00)
Narwhals may be using their tusks to play, new study finds
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Scientists say they have the first recorded video evidence of narwhals using tusks not only to strike and manipulate fish during feeding but also engage in what appears to be playful behavior, according to the latest research.
The narwhal, often referred to as the “unicorn of the sea” in a nod to its trademark tusk, has long remained an enigma. Scientists have observed few interactions of narwhals in their natural habitat, creating speculation about the purpose of the species’ distinctive spiraling tusk.
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Found predominantly in males, the tusk grows up to 10 feet (3 meters) long — and previous research has suggested it serves as a competitive display to secure mates. But now, with the help of drones, research conducted in the Canadian High Arctic has uncovered that a narwhal may use its tusk for more than just courtship.
In total, the researchers newly identified and described 17 distinct behaviors of narwhals involving prey. The findings revealed a wide range of interactions and dynamics between narwhals and fish as well as the extraordinary agility, precision and speed of their tusks to track moving targets, according to the study published February 27 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
“Seeing that these animals are not actually hunting the fish but exploring, manipulating and interacting with it was really a game changer,” said lead author Dr. Gregory O’Corry-Crowe, a research professor in the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University.
Since so little is understood about this whale species, researchers like O’Corry-Crowe and his colleagues are working diligently to conduct studies to document narwhals’ unknown behaviors to better understand how these animals adapt in a rapidly shifting habitat as oceans warm and sea ice melts.
Narwhal exploratory behavior
The study team captured the groundbreaking footage using drones in Creswell Bay, on the eastern side of Somerset Island in Canada’s Nunavut territory, during the summer of 2022.
As the researchers analyzed the footage, they noticed subtle nuances in the narwhals’ behavior. Footage even captured one instance of a narwhal interacting with a fish by repeatedly nudging it with its tusk — which is actually a giant tooth — without attempting to eat it.
When researchers observed a lack of aggression in some interactions between narwhals and fish, they realized these scenarios were more similar to a cat-and-mouse game, in which the animals were chasing or “playing” rather than hunting, O’Corry-Crowe said.
The fish collectors hoping to save rare species from extinction
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In the rural town of Petersham, Massachusetts, 78-year-old Peter George keeps 1,000 fish in his basement.
“Baseball, sex, fish,” he says, listing his life’s great loves. “My single greatest attribute is that I am passionate about things. That sort of defines me.”
All of George’s fish are endangered Rift Lake cichlids: colorful, freshwater fish native to the Great Lakes of East Africa. Inside his 42 tanks, expertly squeezed into a single subterranean room, the fish shimmer under artificial lights, knowing nothing of the expansive waters in which their ancestors once swam, thousands of miles away.
Due to pollution, climate change and overfishing, freshwater fish are thought to be the second most endangered vertebrates in the world. In Lake Victoria, a giant lake shared between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, over a quarter of endemic species, including countless cichlids, are either critically endangered or extinct.
But for some species, there is still hope. A community of rare fish enthusiasts collect endangered species of freshwater fish from the lakes and springs of East Africa, Mexico and elsewhere, and preserve them in their personal fish tanks in the hope that they might one day be reintroduced in the wild.
“I’m a hard ass,” George says. “There is hope.”
Insurance
George has been collecting fish since 1948 when, as a four-year-old in the Bronx, he would look after his grandmother’s rainbow fish. He soon developed “multiple tank syndrome” – a colloquial term used by fish collectors to denote the spiral commonly experienced after acquiring one’s first tank, which involves the sufferer buying many more tanks within a short space of time. He has not stopped collecting since.
Now, George sees himself as a conservationist; his tanks contain what is known as “insurance populations” – populations of endangered fish that are likely to go extinct in their natural habitats. He believes that when the time is right, they can be taken from his collection and returned to their homes. “I would never accept the fact that they couldn’t be reintroduced,” he says.