In 2004, truck driver Joe Macken began with a tiny Rockefeller Center building; more than two decades later, his vast handmade New York model entered a city museum

In the spring of 2004, Joe Macken went into his basement in Clifton Park, New York, and started a project he could not yet imagine. He wanted to see whether he could make something from balsa wood. Two decades later, his basement project has grown into a vast collection of miniature buildings in a scale model of New York City. It's now a public attraction inside a Manhattan museum. Macken began by whittling down a small version of the GE Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, according to CBS News. He enjoyed making it so much that he started another building the next day. He kept going after that.

From one tiny building to an entire skyline

Typically, side projects run out of steam after just two or three weekends. But that wasn't the case for Macken's project. After completing the project for Rockefeller Center, he moved on to Midtown, then the entire island of Manhattan, and then to all the other boroughs in New York City. He told CBS News that he never felt he went too far, even when his model outgrew his basement, and he had to move it to storage. Rather than measuring his success by the pieces that make up his project, Macken measures it in city blocks. Each little square in his project stands for a city block of New York City streets and buildings, according to him.

The materials and measurements behind the model

The Museum of the City of New York now houses the work. Fifty-seven by twenty-seven feet in size, it is made up of more than three hundred and forty sections of balsa wood, cardboard, and glue. Macken, a native of Queens, began work on the earliest blocks in Middle Village; he soon moved to Clifton Park, where he continued for two decades. He never followed a set plan when working on the model. Macken worked one block at a time, gradually adding detail after detail.

A basement project finds a home at the Museum of the City of New York

This scale is uncommon in hobby railroads and model dioramas. However, this is true of Joe Macken's model, partly because of its scale and the detail in its various sections. In an effort to showcase the model to the public, the Museum of the City of New York launched the "He Built This City: Joe Macken's Model" on February 12, 2026, and the exhibition will run until October 12, 2026, at the Dinan Miller Gallery of the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibition includes binoculars so visitors can observe the fine detail on the model, along with a video showing Macken working on specific buildings in the model. The exhibition has also been positioned alongside two of the museum's permanent exhibitions, namely, "New York at Its Core" and "Timescapes", that tell the story of New York's growth through the centuries.

The wife who lived next to a growing city for 21 years

None of this happened in a vacuum. Macken's wife, Trish, shared the home with a project that consumed a basement and then a storage room. He called her support a miracle. Most spouses would have drawn a line at borough number three. When asked by CBS News if Joe intends to continue building for the next few decades, she laughed and revealed that he hadn't told her that he would.

A model with no finish line in sight

According to Macken, the model can never be fully complete, and he is dead serious about it. He adds that he has considered adding other parts of New York State to this project, not just the city. And he rightly emphasizes that in reality the realization of such a project could never have happened as a result of a well-planned grant, a deadline, or a five-year plan, but because of the construction of one building every day, for twenty-one years, until a truck driver had the opportunity to exhibit his collection of basement models on a museum floor in Manhattan. It is easy for anyone who has started a small project with no end in sight to understand what Macken tried to say through this building model.