Inside the Museum of the City of New York, a sprawling cityscape invites visitors to look down on the five boroughs as if from a hovering aircraft — except this New York is made of balsa wood, cardboard, and glue.
The presentation, titled “He Built This City,” spotlights a monumental 1:2400-scale model constructed by Queens native Joe Macken (b. 1970), who now lives in Clifton Park, upstate New York. Macken began the project in 2004, but the idea took root decades earlier, when he was six years old and visited the Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York, the celebrated scale model created for the 1964 World’s Fair.
“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 recalled of the Panorama. “And I just remember just going around it and thinking, ‘Wow, this is what I wanna do.’”
It would take roughly 30 years for that childhood ambition to become a daily practice. Once he started, Macken kept going. “I was just being so consistent with it. I was building it every day,” he said. “And this small project just accumulated over the years and years.”
A City Built From Craft-Store Materials Macken’s methods are resolutely modest. He has relied on an X-Acto knife and supplies purchased at Michaels — balsa wood, cardboard, and Elmer’s glue — to render building after building across New York’s dense architectural terrain. Over the decades, he estimates the materials for the full model have cost between $20,000 and $40,000.
The ambition, however, is anything but small. Macken has meticulously recreated the city across all five boroughs, extending beyond the official boundaries to include parts of Jersey City, Long Island, and Westchester. His long-term plan is to push farther into the metropolitan region, with Newark Airport and parts of Connecticut on his horizon.
The model also carries the weight of memory. Drawing on the skyline he knew as a child in Middle Village, Macken included the Twin Towers — destroyed in the September 11 attacks in 2001 — alongside One World Trade, allowing the miniature city to hold multiple eras of New York at once.
For the Museum of the City of New York, the project’s emotional logic is inseparable from its exhaustive detail. “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,” said Elisabeth Sherman, the museum’s chief curator and deputy director.
From Rockefeller Center Outward Macken’s first building was the Comcast Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, formerly known as the RCA Building. From that anchor point, he expanded outward, assembling the city as a growing patchwork of panels.
That modular approach made the work possible over time, but it also created a challenge for exhibition. The museum had room to display 340 individual sections, meaning some areas of Staten Island and the Bronx are necessarily absent from the current installation.
A Solitary Project Goes Public For years, Macken’s model remained largely private — a solitary pursuit built in pieces and stored away. As he neared completion, his daughter urged him to share the project on social media. The response surprised him: videos of the miniature city drew millions of views.
That online attention helped propel the model into physical view. Last August, Macken displayed the work in a barn at the Cobleskill Fairgrounds upstate — the first time he had ever seen the entire city assembled at once, after years of stacking panels in a storage unit.
At the same time, the Museum of the City of New York was trying to reach him with a larger proposition. With space opening in its exhibition schedule, the institution saw an obvious fit: a handmade model of New York, shown inside the museum devoted to the city itself.
“It felt like someone like Joe Macken doesn’t come around every day. And so when Joe Macken comes around, you move heaven and earth to make it happen!” Sherman said.
The museum’s first attempt was contemporary and informal: a direct message. Macken missed it. So Chris Gorman, the museum’s vice president of marketing and communications, pursued a more analog route, contacting a Cobleskill bar and grill that was hosting a talk by Macken and asking for help making a connection.
The resulting presentation places an intensely personal act of making into a civic frame. In a city often defined by scale, speed, and constant redevelopment, Macken’s model offers a slower kind of monument — one built from craft-store materials, sustained by routine, and driven by the conviction that every block matters.
