The Legacy Of Robert Moses Is That To This Day He Remains Useful If Only To Blame Stuff On

I think they mean “50-foot” structure, not “500-foot” because that would be, like, huge, but point taken:

Once your eyes adjust to the scale of the New York City Panorama, it’s easy to spot Riverdale’s most familiar sights in all their miniature glory. The Whitehall Building, Van Cortlandt Mansion, and the 242nd Street Station rise up from a shrunken Bronx in the form of petite replicas.

But look toward Bell Tower Park in search of Riverdale’s best-known landmark and you’ll find nothing but a small, lonely white patch. The traffic circle is there, as are the trees and homes and highway that surround it. Yet the Bell Tower itself, a 500-foot structure cherished by residents, sightseers and historians alike, doesn’t exist in this alternate version of the city.

Urban planning czar Robert Moses and model-builder Raymond Lester may have taken painstaking care in creating the world’s largest urban panorama for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens (now housed at the Queens Museum of Art), but when it came to Riverdale’s 79-year-old tower and World War I veteran’s memorial, also known as The Monument, the pair apparently didn’t sweat the details.

There are about 895,000 individual structures replicated in the panorama, 25,000 of which are New York landmarks like skyscrapers, museums and major churches. They are custom built with striking detail.

Countless smaller structures are represented with generic blocks of wood and plastic. But The Monument didn’t even get that. Does the museum plan to place a tiny tower on the barren spot?

“I’m not sure what went into the decision making in 1964, but we’d love to work with the folks in Riverdale to see if we can get it put on there,” said the museum’s director for external relations, David Strauss, adding that even though he’s from Queens, he knows exactly where the real Bell Tower is in Riverdale. “The fact that I know the exact spot speaks to the idea that maybe it should be on there.”

Location Scout: Bell Tower Park, The Panorama of the City of New York.