Miniature Manhattan Up Close

A fascinating complement to the sweep of Moses’s Panorama can be found in the work of Alan Wolfson, who for nearly twenty years has been building painstaking miniatures that reveal the humble underpinnings of those skyscrapers —a seedy world of bars and hot dog joints, X-rated movies and strip shows. Wolfson, out in California making models for movies, felt the tug of his native Brooklyn, and eventually built from memory a tiny subway station. Thus launched, he has gone on creating New York environments at a pace of about a half-dozen a year, putting gumdrop-sized half-empty cartons of Chinese food on a desk in a private detective agency, pasting minute pinups to the wall of a desolate Times Square hotel room, managing, with a combination of reporting and imagination, to imbue every one of his cityscapes with the sad poetry of the familiar.