It encompasses nearly one million buildings and it’s now on display in the city it represents.
Architectural models are common in the building trade but nobody was quite prepared for this. The hand-carved model of the city encompassing 1,500 square feet took 63-year-old truck driver Joe Macken more than two decades to create. And while it’s not perfectly accurate to the real thing it is “an amalgamation of different ‘New Yorks,’ because this is Joe’s city,” according to the curator of the museum where it is now on display.
Macken said he would walk the streets of the city — this was before Google Maps made the process easier — and then go back home and start carving, often working four or five hours well into the night. And that was after his day job of driving a delivery truck ten to 12 hours a day.
The move to display it at the Museum of the City of New York came after he posted a video of the miniature city on TikTok.
“For the past 21 years, I’ve been building a miniature model of New York City, and I’m carving the entire thing by hand out of balsa wood. I’ve made almost a million buildings.” It quickly gathered almost 10 million views and is now being shown in the museum as an exhibition titled “He Built This: Joe Macken’s Model.”
“ At the door we often ask visitors what they’re here to see,” said Chris Gorman, the museum’s director of communications, in an interview, noting a 36 percent jump in attendance numbers since the exhibit opened. “ A lot of times the most common answer is, ‘I’m here to see all the exhibitions.’ But since this opened, more visitors say they’re here to see the model than they are here to see anything else.”
A similar model of New York City, built for the 1964-65 World’s Fair, has been on exhibit in the Queens Museum for decades and in fact, Macken said he saw it himself as a kid. His model is somewhat more esoteric with buildings from different eras mixed in with each other. For instance, it shows both the old World Trade Center, destroyed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as well as its replacement, the modern-day One World Trade Center.
“He wanted every person who lives in the city to be able to find where they live,” Sherman said, “To find their story.”
Macken said he never had aspirations to go into architecture or the building trade but now, “I’ve talked to a lot of architects who have purposefully gone down there because they want to see this. One guy told me, ‘I’ve been an architect for 25 years. I’ve seen everything. I’ve never seen anything like this.’”
And he’s not done yet: back in his basement, he continues to move outward; he’s now working on sections of New Jersey and Long Island.
