For 21 years, Queens-born truck driver Joe Macken spent his off-hours in a basement workshop building a scale model of the city he grew up in, one balsa-wood building, painted window by tiny window, at a time. Today that model, depicting more than 890,000 structures across New York's five boroughs plus slices of New Jersey and Long Island, sits on public display at the Museum of the City of New York, where the exhibition "He Built This City" closes October 12.
Macken began the project in 2004, working first out of Middle Village, Queens, and later Clifton Park, New York. The finished model spans 50 by 27 feet across more than 340 interlocking foam-board sections, with each inch representing roughly 160 feet of the real city. He built it from little more than hobby-shop balsa wood, cardboard and glue, sculpting and painting each structure by hand.
From basement to museum
The model might have stayed a private obsession if Macken's daughter hadn't convinced him to post video of it on TikTok. The clips almost immediately went viral, racking up more than 10 million views in a single week, enough to catch the attention of the Museum of the City of New York, which reached out about giving the sprawling piece a public home. The exhibit opened in February near the museum's stretch of Manhattan's Museum Mile.
Macken has said the scale of the undertaking never weighed on him the way it might sound. "I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it," he told CBS New York.
His inspiration traces back to a childhood school trip to the Queens Museum, where he saw the Panorama of the City of New York, the model built for the 1964-65 World's Fair. It wasn't until his 40s, decades later, that Macken decided to build one of his own, a hobby that has now, however briefly, put his handiwork in the same conversation as the original.