Queens Museum

The story

Before it became a museum, this building briefly served as the seat of the United Nations General Assembly. Constructed as New York City's pavilion for the 1939 World's Fair, it spent the 1940s and 1950s as a skating rink — except during those five years when the world's nations gathered inside it. The Queens Museum opened here in 1972 and now holds the Panorama of the City of New York, a room-sized scale model of all five boroughs built for the 1964 World's Fair, along with artifacts from both fairs.