He Never Planned to Finish
A truck driver spent 21 years building New York out of balsa wood and glue, mostly for himself. The museum that inspired him gave it a gallery. Today is the last day.
Joe Macken started with one building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, in 2004, in Middle Village, Queens. Balsa wood, cardboard, glue. He kept adding to it for 21 years, first in Queens and later in Clifton Park, upstate, until the city ran to more than 340 sections and 50 by 27 feet. He drives a truck for a living and had no training in architecture or model-making. "I never really thought about finishing it," he told the AP, "because I had so much fun building it."
Then his daughter talked him into posting videos of the basement. They passed 10 million views in a week, and the Museum of the City of New York got in touch. He Built This City opened in February in the museum's Dinan Miller Gallery, and according to the museum it runs through October 12, which is today. The curator, Elisabeth Sherman, said: "We rarely have anything these days that reaches everyone in that way."
He says the idea came from a school trip to the Queens Museum, where the Panorama of the City of New York has sat since 1964. That one was commissioned by Robert Moses for the World's Fair. A team of about 100 people built it over roughly three years, at one inch to 100 feet, and it now holds around 895,000 structures. It is the official version of the city. Macken's is the one nobody asked for.
The two have one thing in common, and both did it on purpose. The Panorama still shows the original Twin Towers, because the Queens Museum chose to leave the destroyed buildings up until the construction on the site is finished. Macken kept his childhood diner in Queens instead of the high-rise that replaced it, the Kosciuszko Bridge years after it came down in 2017, and the old towers standing next to One World Trade. "I kept a lot of my own parts of the city," he said. "Just for me."
He hopes to show the model somewhere else once the run ends. Nobody has said where. The gallery lends out binoculars, because the model is too big to take in any other way. The museum's shop sells a $20 wooden skyline that you assemble yourself, if you'd like to start small.