Joe Macken is a truck driver who also drives a bus on weekends, but in the basement of his home near Albany, he has spent more than two decades quietly building all five boroughs of New York City out of balsa wood and foam board. The model now includes over 800,000 structures, stretches 50 feet long and nearly 30 feet wide, and has become the centerpiece of a Manhattan museum exhibit that has drawn a steady stream of visitors since it opened.
Macken's project began in 2004 in his Middle Village, Queens basement, where he built 30 Rockefeller Plaza out of leftover balsa wood after watching a television documentary about New York City, according to WNYC Studios. He chose that building because he could see its upper profile from a neighborhood park near his childhood home. As reported by The Daily Gazette, Macken started with Rockefeller Center and its main tower before spending about a decade building out midtown Manhattan alone, with the Empire State Building's Art Deco spire proving the most challenging piece to recreate.
Macken has no background in model building, architecture or design, per the same Daily Gazette report, and instead relied on materials found at hobby shops, hauling supplies with him even on family trips to the New Jersey Shore. He began the model in his 40s and has poured nearly all his free time into it since, working on sections during late-night basement sessions and during lulls on his weekend bus route.
A Childhood Promise Made at the Queens Museum
The seed of the idea took root decades earlier. Macken's motivation to build a replica of New York City originated during a first-grade field trip to the Queens Museum, where he viewed the city's official scale model and told a classmate he would build one himself someday, according to Newsday. Macken grew up in Queens, where he could watch Manhattan's skyline landmarks from his bedroom window.
That childhood inspiration, the Queens Museum's Panorama of the City of New York, was commissioned for the 1964-1965 World's Fair and built by 100 workers over three years. Before Macken tackled his five-borough version, his first miniature project was a 6-foot hybrid bridge made from tongue depressors combining the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, which was damaged during his family's move to Clifton Park, notes Hyperallergic. That setback nudged him toward recreating entire urban blocks instead of single structures.
From Basement Hobby to Ten Million Views
For most of those 22 years, the model remained a private project. Macken had no social media applications installed until he downloaded TikTok last summer at his daughter's urging, after finishing the five boroughs and beginning work on Westchester County, as detailed by Hyperallergic. His initial blurry three-minute video gained 10 million views within a week, and the clips of the model kept spreading, eventually catching the attention of the Museum of the City of New York, which reached out to Macken about displaying his work.
The resulting exhibit, He Built This City, opened in February in the museum's Dinan Miller Gallery and drew nearly 75,000 visitors within its first five months, according to Newsday. The museum sits along Manhattan's Museum Mile across from Central Park. Elisabeth Sherman, the museum's chief curator, has said the model appeals both to social-media followers and to traditional museum-goers, and the exhibit is scheduled to run through October 12.
Puzzle-Piece Panels and a Deliberately Blended Timeline
Getting the model into the gallery required an assembly-line installation process. To piece together the roughly 342 individual foam-board panels, the museum used a custom numbering system Macken created himself, per Hyperallergic, treating the model as a modular puzzle that can be dismantled and transported in sections. Visitors have been given binoculars to study the fine details up close.
Macken's model deliberately blends different eras of the city rather than freezing it in a single moment. It features both the original Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and One World Trade Center, and it retains the old Kosciuszko Bridge even though the real span was demolished in 2017 and replaced. Macken has said he preserved the original Twin Towers because he watched them being built from his childhood window.
Dialogue With the Museum's Permanent Collection
The museum placed He Built This City on its first floor near the permanent exhibits New York at Its Core and Timescapes, where the exhibits offer a conversation about the city's evolution, per the Museum of the City of New York. New York at Its Core covers 400 years of city history across four central themes.
The model itself spans all five boroughs along with parts of New Jersey and suburban Long Island, and includes landmarks from Yankee Stadium and the Statue of Liberty to the Brooklyn Bridge, all at a scale where roughly each inch represents about 160 feet. Macken hopes to find a home for the model elsewhere once the exhibit closes, and he already has plans to add more than 50 new buildings as he continues expanding his personal map of the region into Westchester County, Long Island and New Jersey.
Hoodline previously reported on Macken's viral rise when the museum first announced its plans to feature his work. Decades after Macken's first-grade field trip, the driver who once promised a classmate he would build his own version of the city is still adding to it, one foam-board panel at a time.
