Take a trip around the world in one day
Gulliver’s Gate in New York has 300 miniature tableaux of famous global landmarks
NEW YORK CITY— First, I’m in Manhattan; then Moscow; then, Nepal.
Although separated by seas, I need just a few steps to reach each of them, transported only by my feet. Carrying a key around my neck, I turn it in designated locks, making the worlds before me come alive.
Lights shimmer on the towers of Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong and Beijing’s Forbidden City, and snow caps the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral and the red walls of the Kremlin.
In Paris, an engine starts chugging, pulling a series of rolling stock packed with tiny passengers, leaving the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées behind and descending down into a Chunnel that happens to run right beneath my feet, its course illuminated in the floor until the train emerges on the other side, pounding those tracks hard and headed for London, Big Ben looking poised to chime its arrival.
Covering almost 50,000 square feet of space and built at a cost of $40 million, the 300 miniature tableaux at the new Gulliver’s Gate sit just a couple blocks from Times Square.
More than just a glorified Cullen Gardens, priority was placed on culture, with every scene created by a team of local model-builders charged with the task of replicating their own country or region or city. Built at a 1:87 scale, the attraction allows you to visit 50 different countries in a single day — or even a single hour, if you move fast.
And you’ll find no shortage of whimsy. Eras intersect, and those with sharp eyes can look for “Easter eggs,” quirks intentionally built into the exhibits and left there for the seekers to find, from Spider-Man hanging off the Brooklyn Bridge to a teeny version of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road.
While it’s small, it is also huge, with some exhibits taking up to a year to create, a world populated by thousands of cars and 1,000 trains and 100,000 mini humans, at any time.
I stop by the only Canadian entry, which also happens to be the sole projection exhibit, a roaring, virtual Niagara Falls that looks like a too-real hologram, created when a Montreal-based firm called Réalisations flew 12 drones over the cascades of Horseshoe Falls over the course of two weeks, creating this pastiche.
Then I meet Adrian Davies, head of model making, who takes me to the airport. It’s the only model that doesn’t replicate a real location.
“The airport is entirely fictional, but it’s here to reproduce the experience of air travel,” he says, noting that the aprons and runways can handle up to 50 aircraft, and emphasis is placed on the parts of the trip the typical traveller won’t necessarily see or appreciate, from the ground crews to the baggage handlers to the funny little trucks that drive around among the massive airliners.
“It’s everything that happens on the other side of the glass, the people you see when the plane pushes back.”
An airport is a natural for Davies, a Brit who grew up on the Azorian island of Terceira in a house overlooking the U.S. air force base there, which doubles as a busy commercial airport.
Making model airplanes from the age of 5, he worked as an architectural model-maker for years (creating a number of projects in Toronto, including the original mock-up of First Canadian Place).
“I’m now back to model airplanes,” he says, with a smile. “The circle’s unbroken.”
But he’s never worked on a project this large, or complex. To make the airport, he had to bring in scene and set painters, as well as mechanical and electrical engineers.
“It’s taken a village,” he explains, adding that I should look for Easter eggs such as a captured UFO (I find it, after some searching). And I get a better appreciation for that hightech village when I stop by the control centre of the entire attraction, which sits near the middle of it all and is open, so you can chat with the experts.
Sitting in space that looks a little like Mission Control for the International Space Station, electrical engineer Krishna Sasikumar says that Gulliver’s Gate includes all sorts of software, controlling cars and planes and trains and animations, and her challenge has been to bring them all together and make them communicate with one another.
As I look at the futuristic screens, she adds that they all send a signal back here, so she can monitor and fix things in real time.
I walk through a 3D scanner, whose imagery can be used to create a model of any visitor (you can buy a large doppelganger for $290, a small for $130, and for $44, they’ll make a tiny one that will be placed in to a display; I don’t buy any of them).
On my way out, I take a little tour through some of my favourite places in the world, from the iconic form of the Taj Mahal to the towers of Angkor Wat and right down to my go-to steak house in Buenos Aires’ Puerto Madero.
Finally, I take a stroll past a few that I’ve never seen in person, places at the top of my list — Italy’s Cinque Terre, Lhasa’s Potala Palace — and look forward to the day I’ll see them in person, only 87 times larger. Tim Johnson was hosted by NYC & Company, which did not review or approve this article.