A New York man spent 21 years hand-carving a perfect miniature model of New York City
The model, which measures 50 feet by 27 feet, is currently on display at the Museum of the City of New York
The man, Joe Macken of Clifton Park, said he has no plans to stop building
A New York man spent 21 years creating a perfect miniature replica of the Big Apple.
Joe Macken, a Queens-born artist and truck driver who now lives in Clifton Park, first began working on the model in 2004, per the Museum of the City of New York.
The model, built entirely by hand and made from “everyday materials” like balsa wood, cardboard and glue, measures 50 feet by 27 feet.
The “monumental” model is currently on display — in an exhibit titled “He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model» — in the Dinan Miller Gallery at the Museum of the City of New York.
Macken said that he initially just planned to make a model of Rockefeller Center.
“That was it,” he said while speaking to ABC 7. “And then the next day I built another one. And then I built another one.”
He went on to build all of Midtown, and then eventually all of Manhattan and the city’s surrounding boroughs. But he never thought anyone else would see the model, let alone put it on public display.
“I was just gonna look at it. I don’t know what I was gonna do. I had no plans. I mean I never imagined it being in a museum,” he said.
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The finished model entails almost 1 million individual structures, all hand-carved, which Macken usually keeps stacked in one-foot-by-one-foot squares in a local storage unit.