A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC

In 2004, truck driver Joe Macken created a miniature replica of New York City’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza out of balsa wood. Although he had intended to stop there, he realized he was hooked.

“Then the next day, I built another one,” he tells CBS News’ Steve Hartman. “And then I built another one.”

Macken kept building for more than two decades. He worked his way through Manhattan and began work on the other boroughs. He made 320 sections—each representing about a square mile of New York—with wooden buildings, painted parks and tiny artificial trees. When he ran out of room at home, he rented a storage unit.

Macken ended up with a 1,350-square-foot model depicting New York City in its entirety. Last summer, his work went viral on TikTok. Many commenters said the model was destined for a museum, and they were right.

In February, Macken’s model went on display at the Museum of the City of New York in an exhibition called “He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model.” Visitors can examine the model from all sides, using binoculars to get closer looks at specific neighborhoods. Elisabeth Sherman, the museum’s chief curator and deputy director, tells the Guardian’s Alaina Demopoulos about the first time the staff saw the handmade model.

“We were all standing around squealing, ‘Look, there’s our museum!’ ‘There’s the Met; there’s the Guggenheim,’” Sherman recalls. “It’s this great act of recognition, and then it’s also witnessing [Macken’s] creativity, how he made this complex architecture out of very humble materials.”

Macken makes a living driving a delivery truck in Clifton Park, New York, where he has lived with his family since 2003, according to the Times Union’s Paul Grondahl. Living more than 150 miles away, he missed New York City. “I wanted to keep it with me,” he tells the New York Times’ John Freeman Gill. “So I figured I’d better build it.”

Macken had been intrigued by models since first grade, when he went on a school field trip to the Queens Museum. There, he saw The Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335-square-foot model of the city made for the 1964 World’s Fair.

Quick fact: The making of The Panorama of the City of New York

More than 100 people spent three years constructing the model, which was made of materials including wood, plastic, paper, brass and foam.

“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 tells Artnet’s Sarah Cascone. “And I just remember just going around it and thinking, ‘Wow, this is what I want to do.’”

Macken made the model of 30 Rockefeller Plaza some three decades later. In the years that followed, he worked on his models almost every day. “I was just going to look at it,” he tells CBS News. “I don’t know what I was going to do. I had no plans. I mean, I never imagined it being in a museum.”

Macken eventually expanded the model past the five boroughs and built parts of New Jersey and Long Island’s Nassau County. The materials—including Elmer’s glue, acrylic paint and balsa wood cut with an X-Acto knife—cost about $20,000, reports the Times.

Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, the director and president of the museum, says in a statement that Macken’s model “reflects the wonder and complexity of this city through the eyes of someone who has lived it, loved it and painstakingly rebuilt it.”

Macken’s 1:2,400-scale model reportedly features nearly a million structures, including every building, stadium, street and bridge in New York City.

“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,” Sherman tells Artnet.

“He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model” is on view at the Museum of the City of New York through the summer of 2026.