Leaving a Piece of History Intact

Museum keeps towers standing

By Herbert Lowe | STAFF WRITER

October 5, 2001

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There's a ribbon in the New York City skyline.

At the Queens Museum of Art, an unbroken red, white and blue ribbon rests above the World Trade Center that is part of the Panorama of the City of New York.

There's also a new spotlight on the area surrounding the Twin Towers on the 9,335-square-foot scale model.

And beginning this morning, museum officials said yesterday, visitors can view two memorial panels on the visitors' ramp designed as silhouettes of the towers.

The ribbon, spotlight and silhouettes are in response to last month's terrorists attacks and are the model's first significant alterations since 1994, the officials said.

Department heads discussed three options when they met two days after the attacks: Take down the buildings that had collapsed, leave the model as is or leave it standing with some kind of memorial.

"It was not a difficult decision to leave them up, because the model is a historic object," said Jean-Paul Maitinsky, director of education at the museum in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. "But we all agreed that we couldn't leave them up without a memorial."

The Panorama was the world's largest scale model of its time when presented as the city's premier exhibit at the New York World's Fair in 1964-65. The museum, which assumed supervision of the Panorama in the mid-1970s, was closed in 1992 for a major renovation, and the miniature city of New York also was updated. It reopened in November 1994.

The model replicates the city's 320 square miles and features more than 895,000 individual structures, 25,000 of which represent everything from colleges to skyscrapers to major league stadiums to bridges.

Maitinsky said museum officials also believe that keeping the Twin Towers a part of the model will help people still needing to reflect upon the buildings and their relationship to the city.

The silhouettes will have three paragraphs of text. On one will be two paragraphs on the trade center's architecture and engineering. The other will focus on the Sept. 11 attacks and the center's bombing in 1993.

Maitinsky would not disclose the inscription in advance, but said, "We worked on the text very carefully."

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