The first item in “Never Built New York,” a thought-provoking tour of models, drawings, and newspaper headlines at the Queens Museum, is a cocktail napkin from the Plaza Hotel. On it, Frank Lloyd Wright sketched an idea for remaking Ellis Island.

The drawing, made months before Wright’s death in 1959, is just a few barely parsable blue lines and loops. As subsequently elaborated, however — and illustrated in a 1961 magazine spread — Ellis Island becomes a multicolored, multiuse layer cake of plazas, domes and circular towers connected to ground level by giant cables painted gold.

How quickly such gaudy hubris gives way to the cement-gray reality of the New York City we actually live in.