A new scale model of NYC is soon going to be on display at the Museum of the City of New York

Whether you’re a street photographer, a subway performer or just the kind of person who once turned a barge into a floating edible garden, New York has always inspired obsessive creativity. But few labors of love rival what one truck driver quietly built, night after night, in his upstate home. 

In February, the Museum of the City of New York will debut "He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model," the first New York City exhibition of the monumental, TikTok-famous scale model of the five boroughs. Queens native Joe Macken, 63, crafted the 50-by-30-foot creation across 350 panels over the course of more than two decades.

Macken started the project in 2004 at his home in Clifton Park, New York, armed with an X-Acto knife, balsa wood, Styrofoam and Elmer’s glue. Since then, he’s carved nearly a million tiny buildings to scale. (Every inch of the model represents 160 feet, meaning the Empire State Building clocks in at just under 8 inches.) Macken started with Rockefeller Center before working block by block through the boroughs. One neighborhood he didn’t need a map for? His original stomping grounds of Middle Village, Queens. “I knew every block,” he told CBS New York.

After Macken’s daughter nudged him to share the model on TikTok this spring, it went overwhelmingly viral: his first clip hit more than 10 million views. This summer, he reassembled the city for the first time at Cobleskill Fairgrounds upstate, where visitors, predictably, lost their minds. Soon after, the city came calling.

According to MCNY’s new chief curator, Elisabeth Sherman, the model represents something museums don’t often get to share: a deeply personal New York. While the Queens Museum’s famous Panorama is remarkable, she says, Macken’s work is a single man’s interpretation of the city, built from childhood memories and decades of lived experience. (In his miniature skyline, for instance, the Twin Towers are still standing.)

“Joe’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,” MCNY director Stephanie Hill Wilchfort said in a statement.

Macken told Gothamist that he plans to drive the model downstate himself in a rented U-Haul, stacking outerborough panels first and Manhattan’s skyscrapers on top. He’s not too worried: only one piece, the Throgs Neck Bridge, snapped en route to its first showing and he fixed it easily.

“After 21 years of work on my New York City model, I am very excited for the opportunity to display it at the Museum of the City of New York,” Macken said in a statement. “This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, after so much hard work, dedication and enjoyment throughout the process of creating the model.”

Until opening day, he’s staying busy carving New Jersey. Of course he is.