NYC Water Maps at Queens Museum

Celebrate New York City’s world-renowned drinking water with a guided tour of the Water Relief Map and Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).

For the 1939 World’s Fair, the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity built a colossal relief map to educate New Yorkers about their water supply. Too big for the allotted space, the relief map was excluded from the fair. After being stored for decades, the relief map was rediscovered, restored to its original brilliance, and brought home to the Queens Museum in 2009. The Queens Museum also houses the Panorama of the City of New York, an immense scale model of all five boroughs constructed for the 1964 World’s Fair to celebrate the city’s municipal infrastructure. Together, these exhibits help visitors understand the scale of the watershed and the complexity and foresight of the water distribution system without which New York City could have never expanded and thrived.

Department of Environmental Protection’s Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Water Supply and NYC’s tap water “master mixologist” Paul Rush, DEP’s Director of Records and Archives Samar Qandil, and Queens Museum teaching artists will help you explore the Water Relief Map and Panorama in detail, and share the stories of how these large-scale models came to be, along with the history of New York City’s vast drinking water supply system from its start in 1842.

This program is part of Water Works, a yearlong series exploring the city’s water systems and our connections to water.

Photo: NYC Department of Environmental Protection/Jean Schwarzwalder