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.
