A painstakingly detailed model of New York City will go on display this week after a US truck driver spent 21 years building it in his basement as an evening hobby.<\/p>\n
The wooden model, made to scale with some 800,000 pieces, gives a bird’s-eye view of landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, as well as New York’s more distant boroughs.<\/p>\n
“It’s almost like coming in on an airplane when you’re looking out the window at 4,000 feet,” creator Joe Macken, 63, told AFP in front of the colorful 50- by 27-foot (15- by 8-meter) structure.<\/p>\n
“People walk around the city all the time, but they don’t really see it like this. They’re looking up. Now you’re looking down,” he said.<\/p>\n
The exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York opens Thursday and runs through the summer.<\/p>\n
Macken began his project in 2004, spending a couple of hours each night crafting sections of the city by carving balsa wood and sticking it to small polystyrene boards, which he then stored individually.<\/p>\n
He said his wife and three children had been “very supportive” of the hobby.<\/p>\n
The final display joins together more than 300 of the polystyrene boards to depict the entirety of New York City, including its waterways.<\/p>\n
– ‘Did I really make this?’ –<\/p>\n
It is not an exact replica of today’s New York: the Twin Towers, which were destroyed in the 9\/11 terror attack in 2001, feature alongside the new One World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
Macken, a native New Yorker now living elsewhere in the state, said even he was surprised to see the finished project after more than two decades.<\/p>\n
“I can’t believe it. I mean, I look at this and I’m just like, did I really make this?” he said.<\/p>\n
Museum staff organized the exhibit after seeing Macken sharing his work on TikTok, where he gained millions of viewers.<\/p>\n
Elisabeth Sherman, chief curator and deputy director at the Museum of the City of New York, said she hopes visitors will “find their stories in the model.”<\/p>\n
“We want people to find where they live, where their family is from, where they want to visit, whatever their relationship to the city is,” she said.<\/p>\n
The largest model of New York is the Panorama, which is also the world’s largest architectural scale model — spanning more than 9,000 square feet (836 square meters).<\/p>\n
It was built for the 1964 World’s Fair and sits in the Queens Museum in New York.<\/p>\n
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