A scale model of New York City with more than 800,000 structures, most of them carved from balsa wood by Queens truck driver Joe Macken over more than 20 years, fills the first-floor gallery of the Museum of the City of New York in the exhibit “He Built This City,” which runs through October 12, according to The Associated Press.
The model reproduces all five boroughs plus parts of New Jersey and suburban Long Island in street-level detail, according to The Associated Press. It runs across more than 300 large foam boards fit together like puzzle pieces. The whole thing is 50 feet long, with each inch standing in for roughly 160 feet of the real city. Everything from Manhattan’s skyscrapers to single-family homes in Queens is there, along with the Statue of Liberty, Yankee Stadium and the Brooklyn Bridge.
The museum reached out to Macken after his daughter’s TikTok clips of the basement build racked up more than 10 million views in a single week, the AP reported. The exhibit opened in February along Manhattan’s museum row near Central Park.
“I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it,” Macken told the AP on a recent visit to the exhibit.
The idea goes back to childhood. Macken traces it to an elementary school trip to the Queens Museum to see the Panorama of the City of New York, the famed scale model built for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair, the AP reported. But he did not actually start until his 40s, after he and his young family moved from Long Island up to the Albany area. “I think, subconsciously, I might have missed New York,” he told the AP.
He began with Rockefeller Center and its main tower, 30 Rock, then built out the rest of Midtown, which took about a decade. The Empire State Building and its Art Deco spire were the hardest part. “I wanted to make it perfect,” Macken said, per the AP. “People are gonna be looking at it.”
Macken has no background in model building, architecture or design, and jokes that his closest experience was Legos and Lincoln Logs as a kid, the AP reported. He worked on it during lulls driving a bus on weekends and hauled his materials along on summer trips to the Jersey Shore.
The model is not an exact copy of the current city, and that is on purpose. Out in miniature Queens, Macken rebuilt his favorite childhood diner instead of the high rise that stands there now. He kept the old Kosciuszko Bridge between Brooklyn and Queens, even though it was demolished in 2017. And in lower Manhattan, the old World Trade Center twin towers still stand, next to One World Trade Center. “I kept a lot of my own parts of the city,” he told the AP. “Just for me.”
The museum’s chief curator, Elisabeth Sherman, said the piece pulls in both social media followers and traditional museum goers. “I think people always want to get their arms around this whole city, this city that is impossible to know, impossible to grasp, and this is a way to see it from a bird’s-eye view,” she said, according to the AP. “We rarely have anything these days that reaches everyone in that way.”
Visitors get pairs of binoculars to hunt for their old neighborhoods. On a recent weekday morning, Jonathan Skolnik traced his family’s history across the boroughs for his son, Tosha, pointing out his father’s first American address on the Lower East Side near the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, the AP reported. “I’m trying to do it all from memory,” said Skolnik, who lives in the Washington, D.C. area. “I don’t have it all exact.”
Macken is not done. He hopes to show the model somewhere else after the museum run ends, and in the meantime he plans to add more than 50 new buildings and extend it into New Jersey and Long Island.
Featured image: Courtesy x.com
