No art school, just passion: Truck driver’s 21-year obsession turns into NYC’s biggest miniature marvel

It started as a simple idea to build a small model of Rockefeller Center, but over 21 years it grew into a massive handmade replica of New York City, now on display at the Museum of the City of New York.Joe Macken, 63, a Queens-born truck driver now living in Clifton Park, never imagined his basement hobby would end up filling a museum gallery. Yet his 50-by-27-foot wooden metropolis, crafted painstakingly from balsa wood, cardboard, glue and acrylic paint, is now the centrepiece of the exhibition “He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model.”

From one building to five boroughs

The journey began in 2004 after Macken, inspired by childhood memories of seeing the Panorama model at the Queens Museum, decided to carve 30 Rock.

One structure led to another. Midtown followed. Then Manhattan. Eventually, the five boroughs, and even parts of neighbouring suburbs, took shape under his steady hand.Today, the model boasts an estimated 700,000 to nearly one million individual structures, from skyscrapers and row houses to bridges and boats, all scaled meticulously using a millimetre-to-10-feet formula he devised with a home ruler.“I was just going to look at it myself,” Macken has said in interviews.

“I never imagined it being in a museum.”

A labour of Love, built between shifts

Balancing two jobs, truck driving and limousine services, along with family life, Macken carved out time late at night and early in the morning. He worked in one-foot square sections, stacking finished grids in a storage unit.Though largely accurate, the city bears Macken’s personal imprint. Handwritten notes line the waterfront edges. The skyline includes the Twin Towers alongside One World Trade Center, reflecting the view he once saw from his childhood bedroom in Middle Village, Queens.

There are even charming quirks, such as a misspelled “Verazanno” Bridge, left intentionally untouched.Curators say the imperfections are part of its power. “You can see the hand of the artist,” said Elisabeth Sherman, chief curator at the museum. “It’s not machine-made precision, it’s personal.”

TikTok fame to museum walls

The project gained fresh momentum when Macken’s daughter began posting videos of the miniature city on TikTok, where they garnered millions of views. The viral attention eventually led museum officials to track him down, reportedly even reaching out to an upstate bar where he was showcasing the model.Now occupying the Dinan Miller Gallery, the installation runs through August 31, 2026. Visitors are encouraged to bring binoculars, spotting a specific street among nearly a million structures can be a challenge.

And he’s not finished yet

If the current model seems monumental, Macken insists it’s only a chapter. He is already expanding outward, building Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, with ambitions of a 90-foot tri-state replica that could take another decade.“I’ll just keep going,” he has said. “It relaxes me.”For a man who never attended art school, Macken’s painstaking tribute to the Big Apple stands as a testament to perseverance, and to how one building can quietly become an entire city.