Queens Museum of Art

Housed in the historic building made for the ’39 World’s Fair (and once home to the UN), this great museum’s most famous piece is the Panorama of New York City, a 9335-sq-ft miniature New York City, with all buildings accounted for in a sweeping room the size of three tennis courts. Walking around the 895,000-structure piece – and its 15-minute dusk-to-dawn light simulation of a New York day – feels like descending in a plane over New York (without the tiny bag of mixed nuts or the ear pops). It was last updated after the events of September 11. The rest of the museum isn’t to be missed either – a fetching collection of modern art and an excellent World’s Fair exhibit to recount the days, in ’39 and ’64, when the rest of the globe looked at Queens. The museum will keep open hours through an ongoing expansion, to be finished in 2012.