NEW YORK— There were more attention-grabbing attractions at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, but the one that caught the eye of many natives was the Panorama of the City of New York. The idea of scale-model cities had been around since medieval times, but the 9,335-square-foot model of New York was enormous, and a ride that took viewers around simulated a helicopter tour, a medium-tech way to view a low-tech thing.

Forty-five years on, the Panorama is going strong. Earlier this year, the Queens Museum of Art, which houses the Panorama, began selling real estate on it, offering people and companies the right to own various properties on the model and to update it with new buildings. Now, it is being used as an element in an art project that illustrates the current housing crisis.

As part of a project for the Queens museum's "Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center" exhibition, artist and urban planner Damon Rich has placed neon-pink triangles on the model, showing blocks where there have been three or more home foreclosures in the last year. The project paints an interesting portrait of the city, with the bulk of the foreclosure blocks in Brooklyn (582) and Queens (140), which both have many single-family homes. The Bronx has 151 triangles, concentrated in the Wakefield neighborhood, while the least populated borough, Staten Island, has 140. Manhattan, which is mostly apartment buildings and has many residents either too rich or too poor to be affected by the crisis, has just two. The areas in the other boroughs that show the most foreclosures are predominantly populated by people of African-American and Latino backgrounds.

Read more at the New York Times.