New York’s Memory Palace: An Interview with Blagovesta Momchedjikova

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on Gotham, Editor Katie Uva talks to Blagovesta Momchedjikova about her work studying and interpreting The Panorama of the City of New York.

First, for those who may not be familiar with it, what is the New York Panorama?

The Panorama of the City of New York is an enormous scale model of all five New York City boroughs. It has 895,000 structures in the scale of 1:1200 (1 inch = 100 feet, making the Empire State Building only 15 inches tall on the model) and stretches over 9,335 square feet in the Queens Museum. Commissioned for the New York World’s Fair of 1964/65 by the infamous city planner Robert Moses, the Panorama took one hundred people three years to build from geological and survey maps, and aerial photographs. It was created in 273 sections offsite under the supervision of Ray Lester, a long-time model maker for Moses, and his company Lester Associates. The Panorama was installed in 1964 in the same space it occupies today, in what was then the New York City Pavilion and is now the Queens Museum. There, fairgoers experienced the miniature metropolis as a short helicopter ride with a pre-recorded narration.

In 1972, the Queens Museum took over the building and inherited The Panorama. It has been updated several times since, most notably between 1992-1994, when the model was temporarily shipped back to Lester Associates; close to 60,000 changes were made to it, while architect Rafael Vinoly modernized its gallery in the museum. He added the ascending, circumferential ramp, which enables visitors to walk around the model at their own pace and in their own direction, with greater freedom to stop, wonder, point at places. Once the Panorama acquired this wondrous, circumferential skywalk, it needed narration; it needed a tour guide, and that’s how the walking tours came about, as Janet Scheider, the director of the museum back then, shared with me.

The Panorama of the City of New York.
Photo courtesy of Nikola Bradonjic.

How did you become interested in it?

I was taking a World’s Fair class in the department of Performance Studies at NYU in the late 1990’s, with my advisor, the amazing Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. I wanted to work on some tangible evidence from a world’s fair, and my friend Susu suggested the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. I took my pair of rollerblades there one weekend and saw not just the Unisphere but also the Queens Museum right next to it. And, when I strolled into the museum, I happened upon the Panorama and Philip Jackson, the museum’s community outreach coordinator, who was giving a public tour of it. I was mesmerized! There was so much to learn about each borough, each building, each bridge...everything held a story! The city is immense, and so is its model, yet, in the museum, the city is at our feet; the model of the city is at our feet, like a toy! The Panorama gives us the impression that we dominate the city, which, of course, is a total illusion. Yet, we can orient ourselves in the city from this model, and that’s what I have always loved about it!

Ultimately, I decided to write my doctoral dissertation about the Panorama, and began to work with the Queens Museum, giving my own public walking tours of it every Sunday. In my Panorama tours, I talked about Robert Moses, the New York World’s Fairs, the history of man-made parks in the city, but also, about how the Panorama serves as a Memory Palace.

The Memory Palace is a mnemonic device used by Cicero and the ancient orators to recite a speech in the correct order. You encode each of  the speech’s paragraphs with a familiar image and virtually “deposit” these images in a building, a neighborhood, a city. When you need to recite the speech, you virtually “walk” through the building or neighborhood, “retrieving” the images, which then evoke the previously memorized paragraphs. The Panorama is a found Memory Palace in two ways: first, you can use its structures to memorize the order of a narrative. For instance, I realized that as a tour guide, I am unknowingly conjuring up the walking tour narrative of the model: each building is already an image, and a repository for a story. All I need to do to give the tour of the model is to look from building to building, and the narrative unravels itself. But the Panorama is also a Memory Palace in the sense that it holds memories - all our memories of the lived city - and by visiting the model, we recall the lived city and our experiences there.

What is it about panoramas as a form that captivates people? How do you encourage people to engage with the Panorama in your work?

There are several paradoxes about the Panorama that captivate people without them even knowing them explicitly: it is a miniature but it is gigantic; it offers aerial views but it is pedestrian; it is accurate but it is ideological. Finally, it is not a panorama, in the sense of a 360 degree painted panorama that surrounds the viewer, but it is panoramic because it offers a comprehensive view. The illusion of painted panoramas is created through perspective; the illusion of scale models (also called panstereoramas), such as our misnamed Panorama, is created through miniaturization. What also appeals to us, as a form, is the fact that it is a miniature: we are giants strolling around it in the museum, unlike the way we are dominated by the architecture of the city on a daily basis. It appeals to us to dominate the city, even in this fictional, representational form. Most importantly, however, I feel that the reason why the Panorama in particular intrigues us is because of all the memories about the real city and the experiences we’ve had in it that flood us while we view it, walk around it, point at it, talk to others about it. It is a pretty unique experience of perceiving and ruminating about the city.

What is the Panorama Handbook, and how did you set parameters for it?

The Panorama Handbook: Thoughts and Visions On and Around the Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York (Queens Museum, 2018) is a mini-encyclopedia about everything related to the larger panorama phenomenon, including terms ranging from “amusement” and “illusion,” to “map” and “spectacle.” The 100 pages contain 141 alphabetically-arranged categories (including the 16 names of artists in the exhibition Bringing the World into the World - an exhibition in 2014 inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Panorama). The entries (sometimes more than one under a certain category) consist of short excerpts from existing works that relate to the Panorama as well as original contributions submitted for the project.

Hitomi Iwasaki, the director of exhibitions and curator at the Queens Museum, and myself co-edited the volume, with the help of two research assistants, Emmy Catedral and Chloe Wyma, and two designers, Noelia Lecue and Zeynab Izadiar. We launched the idea about the book at the annual symposium of The International Panorama Council, held at the Queens Museum, in September of 2017; and the printed book, at IPC’s annual symposium in Atlanta, Georgia, this past Fall of 2019. Ultimately, the Panorama Handbook answers a need, as Hitomi notes in her Introduction, for a “more discursive space” beyond the exhibit, the museum, and our small-scale conversations. It is “a panorama of love” as it captures not only a comprehensive approach to panoramas but also the intricate and long process to see this volume come to life.

What does the New York Panorama help us understand about New York City?

The Panorama model helps us see NYC in its entirety, something unavailable anywhere else;even if you are circling in a plane, waiting to land, certain boroughs fall out of sight due to the natural curvature of the earth. It also reminds us that a city is not a containable product; it is not frozen in time and space; it is an ongoing process, and as such, it is uncontainable, messy, strange, but also fascinating. It also helps us see that New York is past, present, and future, all at the same time. There are so many stories here, so many memories, but to access these, you need time. At the Panorama, you need to take your time in order to let the model speak to you. I always appreciated this about the model. First, you take the time to go all the way to Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Then, you take the time to actually go around the model and listen to what it is trying to tell you. And then, you take the time to return to wherever you are coming from, and process what you just saw at  the miniature city. In the day and age of constant digital distractions, the Panorama encourages us to slow down and take the time to truly see New York City in a miniature format, in order to then see the real city with new eyes, so to speak, and appreciate it differently.

Blagovesta Momchedjikova, PhD, is the editor of Captured by the City: Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies (2013) and Streetnotes: Urban Feel (2010) as well as co-editor of From Above: the Practice of Verticality (2019),  and The Panorama Handbook: Thoughts and Visions On and Around the Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York (2018). She teaches writing, art, and the city at New York University.