Joe Macken spent more than two decades building a version of New York City in his basement, out of balsa wood and foam board, with no plan to ever show anyone but his family. Now his model, sprawling across roughly 50 feet and containing more than 800,000 individually cut structures, is the centerpiece of a special exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.
The show, titled "He Built This City," runs through October 12 near Central Park. It covers all five boroughs plus slices of New Jersey and Long Island, rendered at a scale of roughly one inch to 160 feet. Macken, a truck driver from the Albany area who grew up in Queens, began the project after his family relocated upstate, working on it in stretches over more than 20 years without ever declaring it finished.
The model owes its public debut to his daughter, who talked him into posting a video of the basement build on TikTok. The clip and its follow-ups drew more than 10 million views in a single week, and the Museum of the City of New York reached out soon after.
Macken has said the scale of the thing was never really the point. "I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it," he told CBS New York. "It was just something that I couldn't stop doing." He traces the idea back to a childhood field trip to the Queens Museum, where he saw the Panorama of the City of New York, the celebrated scale model of the five boroughs built for the 1964–65 World's Fair, and later found himself layering in landmarks the way he remembered them, including the original Twin Towers.
A curator's-eye view
Museum staff have described the pull of the piece as unusually broad for a single exhibit. "We rarely have anything these days that reaches everyone in that way," chief curator Elisabeth Sherman said of the model's appeal across ages and backgrounds.
The museum has not said what becomes of the model after October 12, and Macken has given no indication that two decades of after-hours building are actually over. For now, visitors can walk the length of his city, block by hand-cut block, before the exhibit's run ends next month.
