Truck Driver’s Massive Model of New York City Lands in Museum Exhibit

Truck driver Joe Macken spent more than 20 years building a model of New York City with over 800,000 structures, and it is now on display in a museum.

Truck driver Joe Macken spent more than two decades building New York City in miniature during his free time. What began as a personal project in his basement eventually grew to more than 800,000 structures, spread across a model roughly 50 feet long and nearly 30 feet wide.

Now, the creation has made its way into the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibit, titled “He Built This City,” opened in February and will remain on display through Oct. 12.

A Childhood Idea Took Shape Decades Later

Macken’s interest in recreating the city began when he was a child growing up in Queens. During an elementary school trip, he visited the Queens Museum and saw the Panorama of the City of New York, a massive scale model created for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair.

He did not begin building his own version until his 40s, after moving with his family from Long Island to the Albany area.

Starting with Rockefeller Center, Macken gradually expanded across Midtown Manhattan and eventually into all five boroughs, as well as parts of New Jersey and Long Island. Midtown alone took about 10 years to complete, while the Empire State Building proved particularly difficult because Macken wanted to capture the details of its Art Deco design.

Despite the scale of the finished project, he had no professional background in architecture, design, or model building. Most of the structures were created from basic balsa wood and foam board purchased from hobby stores.

More Than 800,000 Structures Fill the Model

The finished city spans more than 300 large foam boards that connect like puzzle pieces. Each inch represents approximately 160 feet, allowing Macken to recreate everything from Manhattan skyscrapers to single-family homes in Queens.

Major landmarks include the Statue of Liberty, Yankee Stadium and the Brooklyn Bridge, but the model also reflects Macken’s personal memories of New York.

Some parts intentionally preserve places that no longer exist. A childhood diner remains in Queens despite a high-rise now occupying the site, while the former Kosciuszko Bridge still connects Brooklyn and Queens. Macken also included both the original World Trade Center towers and newer buildings constructed in Lower Manhattan.

Those choices turned the project into something more personal than a precise recreation of the city at one point in time, blending present-day New York with places Macken remembered from earlier in his life.

A Hobby Followed Him Beyond the Basement

As the project expanded, Macken devoted much of his free time to it. He brought building materials on family trips to the New Jersey shore and worked on pieces during downtime while driving a bus on weekends.

Over time, the process became considerably faster. Buildings that initially took hours became familiar enough for Macken to construct much more efficiently as his experience grew.

Even after decades of work, completing the model was never his primary motivation. Macken said he enjoyed the building process itself and rarely thought about when the project might finally be finished.

TikTok Put the Project in Front of Millions

The model remained largely a private creation until Macken’s daughter encouraged him to share it on TikTok. Videos of the miniature city quickly gained attention, receiving more than 10 million views in a single week.

The Museum of the City of New York discovered the project through those videos and contacted Macken about displaying it publicly.

Visitors to the exhibit can now walk around the enormous model and use provided binoculars to search for neighborhoods, landmarks, and other familiar places throughout the miniature city.

When the exhibit closes in October, Macken hopes the model will find another place to be displayed. He is not finished building, either, with plans to add more than 50 structures and expand farther into New Jersey and Long Island.