Great Neck Plaza is an urban village near New York City that has many buildings of historic and architectural significance. The Village wants to designate historic districts that will include buildings that are representative of the Village’s historic development. To build public support for this effort, the Village, with assistance from the ESC, secured funding from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) to develop an innovative public participation tool, employing an interactive 3D visualization of the Village’s historic sites linked to a GIS.
The ESC built the 3D-GIS to examine questions of historic preservation, infrastructure improvements, and traffic calming. A 3D model simulates the Village, photo-realistically representing significant historic sites and providing the context in which to design and evaluate the effectiveness of infrastructure alternative improvements. Village officials can “fly-thru” the 3D model, click on any historic building, and retrieve historic data from the GIS. Alternative streetscape improvements can be viewed and assessed on the fly.