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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.
“I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it,” he said on a recent visit to the exhibit.
The museum’s chief curator, Elisabeth Sherman, said the model is a rare piece that appeals to both social media followers and traditional museum-goers.
“I think people always want to get their arms around this whole city, this city that is impossible to know, impossible to grasp, and this is a way to see it from a bird’s-eye view,” she said. “We rarely have anything these days that reaches everyone in that way. We love that kind of energy it brings.”
All five boroughs and parts of New Jersey and suburban Long Island are laid out in street-level detail across more than 300 large foam boards, interconnected like puzzle pieces. The entire model is 50 feet long (15 meters) and nearly 30 feet (9 meters) wide, with each inch on the model representing about 160 feet (49 meters).
Macken says the inspiration for the model goes back to an elementary school trip to the Queens Museum to see the Panorama of the City of New York, the famed scale model built for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair, complete with an overhead, helicopter-style gondola ride.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.