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To quote David Letterman - “New York, New York. The town so nice, they named it twice.”

Well, folks, here you go. The Manhattan Skyline - Legoland style. This is the pride and joy of Legoland, California. This entire model is build from standard Lego bricks and includes the following:

• The Empire State Building and the proposed New World Trade Center on the right-hand side of the photo.
• Grand Central Station, in the middle, complete with working escalators, the clock in which Melman the Giraffe from the movie Madagascar got his head stuck, and even a mini versin of rock legend Elvis Presley!
• The New York City Subway system near the bottom.
• Probably can’t see it, but there’s even street performers in the form of DJs and breakdancers.

Straight from the Legoland, California web site:

More than two million LEGO bricks are used in the reconstruction of the city that never sleeps. During [a recent] renovation, Master Model Builders completely rebuilt and replaced five buildings including the Citicorp and UN Buildings. All buildings inside the Big Apple were blasted by environmentally-friendly powdered walnut shells, checked for repairs by Master Model Builders, recoated with a UV lacquer then reinstalled in Miniland New York.

Most buildings in Miniland are built to a 1:20 or 1:40 scale, but the model of the Empire State Building is built using 4 different scales! The ground floors are built at 1:20, to match the size of the people on the street, and then the main body of the building is built at 1:40 scale. Closer to the top, it changes to 1:60 and the very top tower is built at 1:80 scale! This tricks the eye by giving the building the look of being much taller than it is. If you were to build the Empire State Building completely in 1:20 scale it would be over 62 feet tall vs. our version, which stands at 20 feet tall!

There you have it, folks! Happy HNT! For more information on all of this, click the blue HNT button in the sidebar.

WARNING: The image that this image is based on is very large. This is a stitched photo consisting of four smaller photos. But even those were huge. The final version of this image is over 7,000 pixels wide. If you click the link, you’ll see an image that’s 25% smaller, but still over 1800 pixels wide. Please keep this in mind when you folks who are stuck in the stone-age with dial-up service click the link.

Oh, and yes, I’m still working on my next entry on my Journey of a Thousand Bricks series. Please continue to be patient. There’s a lot to organize on this one, and I don’t have a lot of time.