Gulliver’s Gate (March 2018) - Enjoy a Trip Around the
World in Miniature
My spouse and I visited
Gulliver’s Gate on a Saturday afternoon in late March 2018. This attraction is
open daily from 10:00 am until 8:00 pm. Adult admission costs $36 per person
($27 for children); however, a staff member was stationed outside on the street
distributing $5 off coupons (so discounts may be available). We paid our
admission using a credit card. We spent about 2 hours for our visit.
Gulliver’s Gate opened in
2017 in Times Square on West 44th Street. The attraction is named for the
main character in the 1726 Jonathan Swift book “Gulliver’s Travels”, in which
title character Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a
prisoner of a group of tiny people (less than 6 inches tall) who are
inhabitants of the island of Lilliput.
The facility encompasses
50,000 square feet of miniature world landmarks, including a large display of
famous NYC sites including the World Trade Center, NY Public Library, the High
Line, TKTS venue, Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Brooklyn Bridge,
Whitney Museum, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The street scenes
feature miniature residents and tourists, pigeons, taxis, moving cars and
trains, and even traffic accidents; a small area near the Meatpacking District includes
a historical scene with men on horseback. International destinations feature
countries in Europe,
Asia, Latin America, South America, and the Middle East, and feature
landmarks like Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, Kremlin, Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China, Iguazu
Falls, Chichen Itza, Panama Canal, Pyramids of Giza, Dome of the Rock, and Mecca.
Another area features an airport terminal and runway, where you can watch model
planes take off and land. Some of the displays are interactive: when you
purchase your ticket, you receive a sort of old-fashioned key on a neck lanyard
that you insert into electronic modules to make certain features of the scenery
move.
Besides the landmark models, you can observe a control room
where IT professionals monitor the systems, workshops where you can see
employees building additional/new models (which is probably busier during the
regular workweek than on the weekend), an event room (a child’s birthday
party/scavenger hunt was going on when we visited), and a nice gift shop. The
facility also features a unique 3-D scanner where you can take home a miniature
model made of yourself and/or friend/family (sizes S, M, L and priced from
about $150 to $350); however, for $40-ish, you can have a tiny replica made of
yourself to place in the exhibit.
We enjoyed our visit to
Gulliver’s Gate; it is a pricey but unique interactive attraction.
