For more than two decades, Joe Macken quietly built another New York in his spare time. 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. According to the Museum of the City of New York , 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. 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.
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