He Built This City, Literally; Massive Model of Gotham on Display at City of NY Museum
Queens-born truck driver Joe Macken spent 21 years building a mini replica of New York City in his basement–virtually every skyscraper, landmark, bridge, neighborhood and body of water. Now it’s in a museum.
| 21 Feb 2026 | 03:06
A slice of Manhattan, with Greenwich Village, Hudson Yards and Midtown skyscrapers. Macken started the project with the RCA Building (30 Rockefeller Plaza) “and it just ballooned.” (
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A birds-eye view of Lower Manhattan, with Macken’s handmade renderings of both the Twin Towers and One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower). Downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge can be seen in the distance. (
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Macken’s take on Coney Island in his model of New York City. After Manhattan, he made Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island, in that order. (
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Joe Macken said his favorite part of the five borough project was building his former Queens neighborhood in Middle Village. (
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Call it a side hustle or, more precisely, a “side hustle on steroids” to quote Queens-born Joe Macken, who spent 21 years hand-crafting a miniature model of New York City while working as a truck driver on weekdays and a bus driver on weekends.
The 50 ft. x 28 ft. scale model he built of virtually every skyscraper, landmark, bridge, neighborhood and body of water across the five boroughs (he bought the Statue of Liberty) is now on exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York in an ongoing show, “He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model.”
A passion project started in 2004 in the basement of his home in Clifton Park, N.Y., near Albany, this model city started small with a replica of the RCA Building (30 Rockefeller Plaza), which Macken could see from the park across the street from his childhood home in Middle Village, Queens.
It eventually grew to include all of Rockefeller Center, Midtown, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Central Park, Lower Manhattan and every inch of the rest of the borough.
“I just started to build out. And I just started to build outwards from [Rockefeller Center], and I just kept building more and more. And after 10 years I finished building Manhattan. And then when I was done building Manhattan, I figured the only thing I have left to do is the outer boroughs, and I thought ‘Let’s do it,’ so I started building the outer boroughs,” Macken told Straus News in an interview.
When we surveyed the south end of his model of Manhattan, we noted the original Twin Towers rising majestically alongside One World Trade Center. The towers were his favorite buildings growing up in Middle Village because he could see them from his bedroom window.
Waxing nostalgic, he said: “You could especially see the World Trade Center if you looked straight out my window. And I used to look at it every single day in the morning. And especially in the winter, when the leaves were off the trees, you could see right through the trees and see the World Trade Center. And I could see them actually building it [beginning in the late ‘60s]...I used to see the cranes on top of the buildings, and they were hoisting up all these beams and girders to put the last ones into place. I love those buildings because of that.”
Macken’s endless devotion to the city is the driving force behind this extraordinary project. He’s had no formal training in art or architecture. No experience in construction. He just headed down to the table in his basement one night and started building and never stopped. It’s a classic case of learning by doing.
“I figured out how to build blocks one at a time, instead of just individual houses, and I got faster at it and more skilled at it, and it was like a craft. Anyone who has a craft, the more they do it, the better they get at it, the faster they get at it, with more experience. And that’s what happened to me. It just became a skill,” Macken said.
The tools of his trade were simple, arts and crafts materials like balsa wood, Elmer’s glue, sandpaper, and X-Acto knives and saws. He chalks up his success replicating the entire urban sprawl to consistency. He worked on it every single day for more than two decades, conceding that it took on a life of its own.
“It was totally out of control,” he said. His favorite neighborhood is undoubtedly his childhood neighborhood of Middle Village, Queens. “Juniper Valley Park, that’s the park I used to look at every single day, and when I got to that [part], it was fun making that, and then the block and the whole neighborhood. I loved it.”
There’s apparently no end in sight to Macken’s ambitions. He plans to enlarge his model city by adding on Westchester County up to the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge (the former Tappan Zee Bridge); building out the slice of New Jersey to the Meadowlands and maybe Newark Airport; “and then maybe do a little more of Nassau County, Long Island,” he said.
“I’m going to have a little bit of Connecticut in there, too, [such as] Stamford, the western part of Connecticut. I will have three different states, almost like a tri-state area. It will be 90 feet long when I’m done.”
He built it in sections, on styrofoam boards measuring 30 in. x 20 in., around 350 in all. We asked: Could a non-native New Yorker pull this off?
“I don’t know if a non-native New Yorker would have the passion I had. The reason I had the passion was because it was my town. I think it has to be your town in order to do it, I really do...only because it’s such a large project,” he said. “It’s something that you really need to have experienced in order to really, really keep going and to be consistent with that. I don’t think I would have done it if it wasn’t my town.”
“He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model” at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street; ongoing. https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/he-built-city