Truck Driver's 22-Year NYC Model Goes on Display at Museum of the City of New York

For 22 years, truck driver Joe Macken spent his spare time carving a miniature version of his native New York City by hand. That sprawling basement project is now the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.

Titled "He Built This City," the show opened in February along Manhattan's museum row near Central Park and runs through October 12.

The model is 50 feet (15.2 metres) long and nearly 30 feet (9.1 metres) wide, with each inch representing about 160 feet (49 metres). All five boroughs are laid out in street-level detail, along with parts of New Jersey and suburban Long Island, across more than 300 large foam boards that fit together like puzzle pieces.

More than 800,000 structures are fashioned from light balsa wood, ranging from Manhattan's skyscrapers to single-family homes in Queens, and including landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty, Yankee Stadium and the Brooklyn Bridge. Macken said the base is made of Styrofoam boards, the buildings are balsa wood, and the tools were ordinary hobby-store materials, including X-Acto knives.

Macken traces the idea to an elementary school trip to the Queens Museum, where he saw the Panorama of the City of New York, the scale model built for the 1964-1965 World's Fair. But it was not until he was in his 40s that the Queens native began work on his own version.

"I have my model of New York City that I built. Took me 22 years," Macken said. "It's the whole city, all five boroughs. I have almost a million buildings in total, probably around 800,000, including houses, bridges, tall skyscrapers. It's just a passion that I've had, I mean, since I was a kid to do it."

He said he was having so much fun building that he never thought about finishing, and kept going even after he did. It was his 23-year-old daughter who suggested he post the work on TikTok. The first video drew 10 million views, and the clips went viral almost immediately.

"If it wasn't for my daughter mentioning to put it on social media, I don't even know if it ever would have been displayed," Macken said.

Elizabeth Sherman, the museum's chief curator and deputy director, said the response has been strong. "This has just exploded. 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, find where you live, find where you work, where your family grew up, and people are just coming in droves," she said.

Macken said the appeal lies in the change of perspective. "A lot of people walk around the city looking up. Here you could look down at it, you know, it's like an aerial view, it is like flying in on an airplane."

He added that he enjoys watching visitors react. "They put their hands on their cheeks. Or they just stare at one spot, and then they start looking at another spot. That's when I know they're amazed."

One young visitor, Henry Fogelson, offered a simpler verdict: "It's super big and it's super cool."

For Macken, the motivation is straightforward. "New York is where I was born. So I mean, it's definitely — I made it out of the love of the city. I mean that's definitely the reason why."