A Short Visit To Queens

Last summer I went to see a show by the artist Robert Seydel at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadow Park.  This was the site of the 1964 Worlds Fair, which I remember going to.   But I haven't been back since; several of the monuments and buildings remain, including one which is now the Queens Museum (which was actually built for the 1939 World's Fair).

The Unisphere, which I last saw close up 50 years ago.

 

The park itself is mostly a flat, featureless space with some trees, a neglected part of the city park system.  But it is open green space.

One of the feature attractions of the museum is the giant scale model of New York City, which theoretically includes every building in all 5 boroughs.  It is quite amazing, though not all the lighting was working the day I was there.  Strangely, all of lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn was in the dark...

We live in one of those buildings..

Midtown:

A transparent floor allows you to hover directly over Queens:

Elsewhere in the museum there is also a large relief map of the NY watershed:

The show of works by Robert Seydel was interesting.  The works were primarily collages, working in the mode of Schwitters and evoking the worlds of Joseph Cornell.   He created a whole sort of fictional world with characters who lived in Queens.  He also created books with written texts along with collages.

Then it was back to Manhattan on the 7 train.