Panorama-o-rama

As you all know (I'm assuming that my 2.3 readers already know me), I like to get out to weird parts of the city on a regular basis. So last weekend I went out with some friends to check out the Korean Harvest Festival at way out in Queens. It wahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs created out of a swampy dumping ground in the 1930s by Robert Moses, and odds are that even if you're unfamiliar with the park you've seen it on tv more than any other park in NYC, if not the world. That's because inside the park are both Shea Stadium (home of the NY Mets) and the USTA National Tennis Center (home of the US Open). Also, it was the site of the both the 1938 and 1964 World's Fairs. The '38 fair was the reason the park was built, but the one in '64 is the one that left the biggest mark on the park, providing among other things the Unisphere that was featured so prominently in the movie Men In Black.

It's a huge space -- 50% bigger than Central Park -- and is mostly open space used for festivals and athletics. One of my favorite festivals there is the Dragon Boat Festival held every summer, in which people race long dragon-headed boats with a drum-pounding coxswain. There's also chinese food of all sorts, martial arts competitions and lots of Chinese businesses competing for Chinese customers.

Well, the Korean Harvest Festival ended up being pretty fun, and it's alwasy a treat to go to a place in New York and find yourself the only white guy in sight. Still, we blitzed through it pretty quickly and found ourselves at the Unisphere, and decided (at AG's suggestion) to check out the Panorama in the Queens Museum. This ended up being the best idea of the day.

The Panorama is a scale model of the entire city of New York that's about the size of a basketball court. It was built for the '64 Fair and has been updated every ten years or so since then. While we were standing on a balcony admiring it, an educator for the museum asked if we had any questions, and we let him have it. The five of us talked for about an hour about the history and technical details of the panorama, and then about the nature of development in the City.

It turns out that our guide had a bit of an axe to grind with Robert Moses (who you may remember as the hero of the first paragraph), who was responsible for a wide-ranging campaign of "modernizing" the city during the height of his power. Moses is somebody that people have a real love/hate relationship, in that everyone loves the parks he built, but reviles him for his experiments in public housing (he basically created the housing project) and his attempts to make New York a car city. Brooklyn has a special hatred for him, as he contributed to both the ruin of Coney Island's amusement parks and the relocation of the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Moses is too big a subject for a blog entry, and his legacy is still being felt (at work, for example, we're spending a giant chunk of money to correct one of his awful decisions), but you should definitely check him out. He built a ton of Parks, destroyed the Bronx, built a ton of bridges and roads, nearly destroyed Greenwich Village until Jane Jacobs brought him down and changed the way we think about the word progress.

I bring him up though, because the housing projects he built in the city were starkly visible on the Panorama in a way that gave me pause. In the picture below of lower Manhattan, the projects are the red brick structures along the East River on the right side.



They're visible all over the city, and they're always an eyesore. And it's not just because poor folks live in them, it's more that they just don't make sense in the context of the city. Too many people living in a tiny area, with these senseless grassy areas that are unsafe and ill-served for either recreation or aesthetics. Plus, they just serve to make the whole complex even more isolated from shops and restaurants, making them drab and uninviting places to live.