The show benefits from the gallery’s high ceilings, which allowed Lubell and Goldin to arrange illustrations of multiple projects planned for the same site on the walls in columns. The effect is a familiar if somewhat chaotic density, augmented by the gallery’s close quarters.

Many of the unbuilt projects on display would have radically altered the DNA of New York—and perhaps none more so than Robert Moses’s six- and 10-lane elevated roadways, against which Jane Jacobs and others lobbied vehemently. The Midtown Expressway would have connected New Jersey to Long Island through the middle of Manhattan, obliterating all the buildings on the south side of 30th Street, while the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), planned to run from the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, would have decimated SoHo and Little Italy, leaving what remained obscured by its literal and figurative shadow. But the drawings of the LOMEX presented at NBNY paint a starkly different picture, with pedestrians enjoying the pleasantly landscaped public areas created beneath the arterial expressway. “Today we would say ‘no way’ to plowing a freeway through a residential neighborhood,” said Goldin, “but this rendering makes you realize that those planners who we think of as nefarious believed that what they were doing had genuine social value.”

The second part of Lubell and Goldin’s show takes place in the panorama room. Conceived by Robert Moses, then director of the corporation running the 1964 World’s Fair held on this site, and built by a team of more than 100 people, the panorama—a 1:1200 scale model of the city spread out over 9,000 square feet—is the crown jewel of the Queens Museum’s permanent collection. For NBNY, scale models illuminated from within have been placed across the miniature city. Joshua Jordan, director of the Fabrication Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, led students in creating some 50 models, which are further enhanced by a station of virtual reality glasses that allow viewers to see some of these unbuilt works as they would appear if viewed from the city streets today. The company Shimahara Illustration designed the truly memorable visualizations, which are not to be missed.

Finally, in the museum’s central skylit gallery, the curators have arranged concepts for the Queens Museum site in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Colorful illustrations and renderings orbit a bounce house–version of Eliot Noyes’s proposed pavilion for Westinghouse Corporation at the 1964 World’s Fair. Large enough for an adult to enter, the central room of the spaceship-like inflatable structure is surrounded by a series of large silver spheres where, in Noyes’s concept, the manufacturing company would have showcased their technology.

Throughout the three segments of the show, the curators succeed in identifying a unifying theme from the myriad concepts—however implausible—represented in NBNY: the architect’s impulse to solve the ills of urban society through design. Goldin pointed to the citywide scale of many of the schemes, which were driven more by designers’ ambitions to improve the built environment than by their egos. “Here,” he said,“we see their attempts—sometimes painted in much too broad strokes—to answer questions that perpetually perplex the city.”

Never Built New York runs through February 18, 2018, at the Queens Museum.