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Truck driver Joe Macken spent more than two decades building a massive handmade mini replica of New York City in his home
The model went viral on TikTok and is now on display at the Museum of the City of New York
The exhibit, called “He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model” will remain on display at the Museum of the City of New York through Oct. 12
Joe Macken — the truck driver whose handmade miniature replica of New York’s five boroughs went viral and is now on display in a New York City museum — said he isn’t done yet.
Macken, whose replica has been on display at the Museum of the City of New York since February, began working on the model — which measures 50 feet by 27 feet and entails nearly 1 million individual pieces — at his home in upstate New York over two decades ago, carving tiny pieces out of balsa wood.
Macken — who describes building the model as a personal “obsession” — said he now plans to expand the replica even further and is gearing up to add 50 new buildings while recreating parts of New Jersey and Long Island, per the Associated Press.
The museum learned about the model after a video shared by Macken’s daughter featuring the replica went viral, prompting staff to reach out. The exhibit has since become one of the museum’s most popular attractions.
A model of New York City, made by Joe Macken, displayed on Sept. 14, 2026
Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig
“I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it,” he told the AP.
The museum’s chief curator, Elisabeth Sherman, said Macken’s work is the rare work that attracts both museum lovers and everyday people.
“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,” Sherman said to the AP.
Joe Macken shows a section of the Upper West Side of Manhattan
Credit: Paul Grondahl/Albany Times Union via Getty
“We rarely have anything these days that reaches everyone in that way. We love that kind of energy it brings,” she added.
Macken, a Queens native who now lives in upstate New York, said he never set out to build such an elaborate model and initially planned to simply recreate Rockefeller Center all those years ago.
“That was it,” he said while speaking to ABC 7 when the exhibit first opened. “And then the next day I built another one. And then I built another one.”
He went on to build all of Midtown, and then eventually all of Manhattan and the city’s surrounding boroughs, keeping the model stacked in one-foot-by-one-foot squares in a local storage unit.
Joe Macken showing off his scale model of Minneapolis
Credit: Paul Grondahl/Albany Times Union via Getty
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“I was just gonna look at it. I don’t know what I was gonna do. I had no plans. I mean I never imagined it being in a museum,” he told ABC 7.
The exhibit, called “He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model” will remain on display at the Museum of the City of New York through Oct. 12.
Read the original article on People