In 1846, E. Porter Belden announced that he, with the assistance of 150 artists, had built a model of the city of New York that would contain every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, tree and every other object in the city. Belden' s model, as exhibited in the Minerva Room on Broadway, took up 480 square feet and represented over 200,000 carved wooden buildings and 5,000 ships in New York harbor, according to Justin Kaplan's Walt Whitman: A Life. Belden' s giddy description of his work extended beyond the concept of representation and into a somewhat mystical realm, as if he owned a miniature city rather than a copy of one. Rather than being merely depicted, it was as if New York had been shrunk down and by some Immense Mechanical Power compressed into narrower limits! To see anything like Belden' s model now, you have to go out to the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows, near Shea Stadium and the U.S. Open Tennis grounds, to visit the immense Panorama designed for the 1964 World's Fair. The Museum is tucked away off the 7 Train among the gigantic decaying relics of the Fair, vast metal structures