It isn’t every day that a TikTok star winds up on New York’s Museum Mile, but that’s what’s happening at the Museum of the City of New York, which sourced its latest exhibition straight from social media. The show, “He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model,” features a 50-by-27-foot model of New York City built over the last 21 years by truck driver Joe Macken, and unveiled last summer in a short video.
Installation view “He Built This City” at the Museum of the City of New York, 2026. Photo: Filip Wolak.
Macken started building the massive 1:2400-scale miniature in 2004, but he first had the idea decades earlier, during a class trip as a six-year-old to see the Panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum, a monumental scale model of the Big Apple built for the 1964 World’s Fair. (A team of 100 led by architectural model makers from Raymond Lester and Associates built it over three years.)
“Now, you walk around it and get an aerial view. Back then, you sat on a train or a tram, and you went around it,” Macken recalled. “And I just remember just going around it and thinking, ‘Wow, this is what I wanna do.’”
Joe Macken, New York City Model (detail), 2004–2025. Photo by David Lurvey for MCNY
It was some 30 years before he actually got started, but once he began working, Macken never stopped: “I was just being so consistent with it. I was building it every day. And this small project just accumulated over the years and years.”
New York in Miniature
A Queens native who now lives upstate in Clifton Park, Macken works with humble materials, crafting his cityscape from balsa wood, cardboard, and Elmer’s glue using a trusty X-Acto knife, all purchased at Michaels craft store. (Nevertheless, Macken estimated the materials for the full model have totaled between $20,000 and $40,000 over the decades.)
Installation view “He Built This City” at the Museum of the City of New York, 2026. Photo: Filip Wolak.
He meticulously rendered each and every building across the five boroughs—even drawing from his childhood memories of seeing the skyline from his home in Middle Village to include the Twin Towers, destroyed during the 9/11 attacks in 2001, alongside One World Trade.
Joe Macken, New York City Model (detail), 2004–2025. Photo by David Lurvey for MCNY
“One of the reasons Joe is so insistent that every single building is here is because he would never want someone to come and see it and not be able to find where they live and see their story,” MCNY chief curator and deputy director Elisabeth Sherman said.
Beginning with the Comcast Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza (formerly the RCA Building), Macken slowly but surely built the entirety of the five boroughs—as well as parts of Jersey City, Long Island, and Westchester. The long-term plan is to continue building out more of the metropolitan area, including Newark Airport and parts of Connecticut. But even in its current scope, the project is not easy to display. MCNY had just enough room for 340 individual sections, leaving some areas of Staten Island and the Bronx cut off.
Joe Macken, New York City Model (detail), 2004–2025. Photo by David Lurvey for MCNY
A Solitary Pursuit Finds the Spotlight
It was Macken’s daughter who suggested he show off the project on social media as he was nearing completion. To his surprise, it became a hit, racking up millions of views. That led to an opportunity to display the piece inside a barn at the Cobleskill Fairgrounds upstate last August. It was the first time Macken had ever seen the whole thing in one piece, after years of stacking the panels in a storage unit.
Artist Joe Macken, 2026.
The MCNY, meanwhile, was trying to track down Macken for an even bigger opportunity. There was space in the exhibition schedule, and what could be more fitting than a model of the city in the museum dedicated to it?
“It felt like someone like Joe Macken doesn’t come around every day. And so when Joe Macken comes around, you move heaven and earth to make it happen!” Sherman said.
First, they tried sliding into Macken’s DMs, but he didn’t notice the message. So Chris Gorman, the museum’s vice president of marketing and communications, got creative, reaching out to a bar and grill in Cobleskill that was hosting a talk by Macken to see if it could put him in touch.
Installation view “He Built This City” at the Museum of the City of New York, 2026. Photo: Filip Wolak.
“They were very persistent, trying to find out where I was!” Macken said. He was surprised but thrilled to learn of the museum’s interest. “I never would have thought that it would be in a museum in New York City, especially on Museum Mile, Fifth Avenue!”
The show opened in February, after an arduous 14-hour installation of the model.
“What really struck me, being in front of the full model, was understanding the full scope of the city,” Sherman said. “It’s something that we know about, we talk about, we see when we fly into New York, but we so rarely can really wrap our heads around it. We’re really reminded that we live in the greatest city in the world!”
Joe Macken, New York City Model (detail), 2004–2025. Photo by David Lurvey for MCNY
“He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model” is on view at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at East 103rd Street, New York, New York, through summer 2026.