JF Ptak Science Books
I wrote earlier in this blog about a wonderful stadium-seating vision of New York City (here http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2016/02/history-of-the-future-of-massiveness-stadium-seating-skyscrapers-nyc-1938.html) produced by Con Ed for the 1939 World's Fair. What I didn't realize was that this was a drawing of what was to be a 5,000 square foot model of the buildings of Manhattan, all made to fit on a single block. The breakthrough for me came in a browse of the September 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics, where I saw a short article with a photo of NYC building models that looked very much like the jam-packed visionary cityscape of ConEd:
Here's one of the images I posted earlier:
It turns out that the first images that I posted were drawings for the models that were part of the Consolidated Edison "City of Light" pavilion at the fair, and which constituted the world's largest diorama. Here's an interesting photo showing the scale of the project:
[Source for the image directly above from Architecturalogy which hosts a number of other interesting photos, here: http://architecturalogy.com/new-york-diorama-the-city-of-light/]
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