Truck Driver's 800,000-Structure NYC Model Goes on Display at Museum

For more than twenty years, truck driver Joe Macken filled his spare time with a singular pursuit: constructing an enormous scale model of his native New York City from balsa wood and foam board.

When the project was finally complete, his daughter persuaded him to share the basement creation — which contains more than 800,000 structures — on TikTok. The clips went viral almost instantly, drawing more than 10 million views in a single week.

That attention led the Museum of the City of New York to reach out. The resulting exhibit, titled "He Built This City," opened in February along Manhattan's museum row near Central Park and will run through Oct. 12.

"I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it," Macken said during a recent visit to the exhibit.

The museum's chief curator, Elisabeth Sherman, described the model as a rare attraction that appeals to both social media audiences and traditional museum visitors.

"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. "We rarely have anything these days that reaches everyone in that way. We love that kind of energy it brings."

All five boroughs, along with parts of New Jersey and suburban Long Island, are rendered in street-level detail across more than 300 large foam boards fitted together like puzzle pieces. The model measures 50 feet long and nearly 30 feet wide, with each inch representing about 160 feet.

The structures — mostly fashioned from light balsa wood — range from Manhattan's skyscrapers to single-family homes in Queens, and include landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty, Yankee Stadium and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Macken traces the inspiration to an elementary school trip to the Queens Museum, where he saw the Panorama of the City of New York, the famed scale model built for the 1964-1965 World's Fair, complete with an overhead gondola ride. It was not until he was in his 40s, however, that the Queens native began his own version. At the time, he and his young family had just moved from Long Island to the Albany area.

"I think, subconsciously, I might have missed New York," he said.

Working with basic materials from hobby shops, Macken started with Rockefeller Center and its main tower, "30 Rock." He then built out Midtown Manhattan, a process that took about a decade. The Empire State Building and its Art Deco spire proved the most difficult challenge.

"I wanted to make it perfect," Macken said. "People are gonna be looking at it."

Macken has no background in model building, architecture or design, joking that his closest experience was building Legos and Lincoln Logs as a child. Over time, he became faster and more efficient.

"I wish I would have done it 20 years earlier, knowing that I would have enjoyed it so much," he said. "I can build one of the buildings in my sleep right now where it took me hours when I first started."

Nearly all his free time went into the model. He brought materials on family trips to the New Jersey shore in summer and worked during lulls while driving a bus on weekends.

"It was just something that I couldn't stop doing," he said.

As the model neared completion, it became all-consuming.

"Before bed, I'd be so tired sometimes, and I wind up being there for four hours, falling asleep at the table," he said. "It got bad. It was an obsession. It still is."

The miniature city is not an exact snapshot of the modern metropolis. In Queens, Macken recreated his favorite childhood diner rather than the high-rise that now occupies the site. He kept the old Kosciuszko Bridge linking Brooklyn and Queens, even though it was demolished in 2017 and replaced. In lower Manhattan, the twin towers of the World Trade Center still stand alongside One World Trade Center and other skyscrapers built after the 2001 attacks.

"I kept a lot of my own parts of the city," Macken said. "Just for me."

On a recent weekday morning, visitors filed steadily into the first-floor gallery, approaching the edge of the raised platform to seek out familiar landmarks or old neighborhoods. Some used the binoculars provided for closer viewing, while others simply squinted and pointed.

Jonathan Skolnik, visiting from the Washington, D.C. area, positioned himself at the corner nearest lower Manhattan and traced his family's history across the boroughs as his son, Tosha, listened. He pointed out his father's first address in America on the Lower East Side, near the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, the Queens neighborhood where he was born, and the cemetery where many relatives are buried.

"I'm trying to do it all from memory," he said. "I don't have it all exact."

After decades of working in anonymity, Macken hopes to display the model elsewhere once the exhibit closes on Columbus Day. In the meantime, he plans to add more than 50 new buildings and expand the model into New Jersey and Long Island.