Restored Map comes back Home Seventy years after
By DAVID W. DUNLAP | May 11, 2008 | in NYTIMES
Seventy years after it was booted out of the World’s Fair and 60 years after it was last seen by the public, a gorgeously sculptural relief map of the New York City watershed has finally reached its intended destination: the New York City Building, now the Queens Museum of Art, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
Freshly restored by a conservation company in Ohio, the map arrived at the museum on Thursday as 25 panels in 25 packing crates. These were eagerly pried open by museum staff members in what became a game of “Find the City.” The first crate yielded the seashore around Sandy Hook, N.J. The second, landlocked Hunterdon County, N.J. It took an hour to locate the panel with four of the five boroughs.
As the crates lay open on the museum floor, some showing the astonishing topography of the Catskill Mountains and the enormous reservoirs nestled among them, the search underscored the magnitude of the watershed. The city is a tiny fraction of the 2,000-square-mile expanse from which its water comes.
“We really wanted people to see the whole watershed,” said Emily Lloyd, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which financed the $150,000 restoration.
It is to be on public view at the museum beginning June 22.
The environmental agency inherited the map from its organizational ancestor, the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity, which planned to exhibit it in the New York City Building at the 1939-40 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. The map, contoured plaster on built-up plywood sections, was constructed for $100,000 by the Cartographic Survey of the federal Works Progress Administration.
Not only was the cost amazing (roughly $1.5 million in today’s dollars), so were the dimensions: 18 by 30 feet, or 540 square feet, larger than many apartments. And that was the problem faced by the planners of the fair, including Louis Skidmore, a founder of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In July 1938, they decided they could not possibly allocate enough space for the map in the city pavilion.
The archival trail seems to go cold for a decade. The map does not re-emerge until 1948, at the city’s Golden Anniversary Exposition in the Grand Central Palace, an exhibition hall that used to stand on Lexington Avenue, north of Grand Central Terminal.
Under the headline “Wonders of City Graphically Told,” The New York Times described a second-floor exhibit by the Board of Water Supply including a “great relief model of the system, reaching from the city to the watersheds in the Catskills.” Aqueduct routes and pumping stations were illuminated with tiny lights.
The map hibernated in storage in Brooklyn and Manhattan until its rediscovery in 2005, peeling, chipping and spalling, with damage from real water and dust so thick it rendered landmarks illegible. Shoes had crossed the terrain. Mountains had crumbled.
The environmental agency and the Queens Museum joined to save it. “The model was built for the World’s Fair site, so it seemed like a completely logical decision,” Tom Finkelpearl, the museum director, said at the time. “We feel it’s the only place for it.”
It was sent to McKay Lodge Inc., an art conservation company in Oberlin, Ohio, from which 25 of the 27 panels returned last week. Two others had come back earlier. Dee Pipik, a conservation technician for McKay Lodge who spent a year and a half working on the map in sections, said her only glimpse of it in its entirety had come from old photographs.
“I’d love to see it myself — as a whole,” she said by telephone.
Ms. Lloyd, the environmental commissioner, called the map a civic treasure. “We really felt that it was not only part of New York history,” she said, “but we also thought it was such an extraordinarily important teaching tool.”
Because the far-flung water system is substantially the same as it was in 1938 — by virtue of its monumentality and the immutability of gravity, the principle on which it all works — the map is quite up-to-date.
“That,” Ms. Lloyd said, “says something about the vision of the people who designed it.”
