NEW YORK (AP) — For more than two decades, truck driver Joe Macken spent his free time building a massive scale model of his native New York City out of balsa wood and foam board.
When he finished, his daughter convinced him to show off the sprawling basement creation — encompassing over 800,000 structures — on TikTok. The video clips almost immediately went viral.
Now Macken’s model is on display at the Museum of the City of New York, which reached out to him after seeing his TikTok videos gain more than 10 million views in one week. “He Built This City,” as the exhibit is called, opened in February along Manhattan’s museum row near Central Park. It runs through Oct. 12.
“I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it,” he said on a recent visit to the exhibit.
Crazy, just visited it this week. It’s insane. There are binoculars for viewers so you can dig into details.
From a practical point, how do you work on something like this for a living city? Do you build it as the city was on the day you started? Or does The Bronx look like 20 years ago and Manhattan has the Chase Tower?