Representative image of a handcrafted miniature city with thousands of tiny buildings displayed in a museum. Image Credits: ChatGPT.
A Queens-born truck driver with no formal training in architecture or model-making, Macken began constructing his handmade version of the city in 2004. He started with the Comcast Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and then continued building neighbourhoods, landmarks and other parts of the city by hand using balsa wood, cardboard and glue, according to the Museum of the City of New York . By 2025, the project had grown into a vast model covering about 50 by 27 feet and comprising more than 340 individual sections. In 2026, what began as a private project moved into the Museum of the City of New York as the exhibition He Built This City : Joe Macken’s Model. During a school visit to the Queens Museum, he saw the Panorama of the City of New York, the enormous model created for the 1964–65 World’s Fair, according to CBS News. He Built This City opened in February 2026 and is scheduled to run until October 12, 2026.
For more than two decades, Joe Macken quietly built another New York in his spare time. From a childhood memory to a basement project Macken’s fascination with miniature New York began when he was a child. The experience stayed with him for years. After moving from Long Island to the Albany area, he eventually began making his own version of the city from memory. A city built from memory The museum eventually invited Macken to put the model on display. This is the first time the complete model has been shown publicly in New York City, the place it has been built to represent. In the Dinan Miller Gallery, visitors can look across the miniature skyline from above and then move closer to spot individual buildings and familiar landmarks.
