Reno may be “the biggest little city in the world,” but it's got some serious competition from the miniature New York City that hobbyist Joseph Macken built in his upstate New York basement over two decades. “I sat down in my basement, turned the camera on on my phone and just started talking about my first section, which was Downtown Manhattan,” the Clifton Park resident said on a recent Thursday about his viral TikToks on his roughly 50-by-30-foot scale model of the city. “It just took off.” The intricate model features what Macken says are hundreds of thousands buildings, landmarks and geographic elements across the five boroughs and their surroundings, including bridges, airports, the Hudson and East rivers, New York Harbor, Central Park, One World Trade Center and the original World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building. The work consists of 350 handmade sections that are pieced together and can be taken apart and moved. Macken’s videos, which he began posting on TikTok this spring at his children’s urging, have garnered well over 20 million views and myriad praise in recent months. In them, he discusses his creative process and takes viewers on helicopter-like tours of his hometown.
A close up of Macken's model Manhattan Joseph Macken
“We’re about maybe 2,000 feet off the ground, looking down on all the houses and all the neighborhoods,” he says in a video posted earlier this week. “This is genuinely unreal,” one commenter responded. “Don't sell it for under $10 million,” another noted. “A museum needs to display this ASAP,” YouTube’s official account commented on one of Macken’s clips in July. Macken, a 63-year-old truck driver who grew up in Middle Village and has no formal carpentry or engineering training, said he dreamed of replicating the Queens Museum’s famous “Panorama” after an elementary school trip when he was a kid. He embarked on the endeavor in 2004, armed with little more than balsa wood, Elmer’s glue and Styrofoam. His first building was “the RCA building at Rockefeller Center,” he said, referring to 30 Rock, which was formerly named for its longtime tenant, the Radio Corporation of America. Macken said it took him about 10 years to build Manhattan alone and 11 years for the rest of the boroughs. He completed his opus in April, and said he’s confident every building in the city is represented. (Gothamist could not independently verify this claim; the city has more than 1 million buildings, according to the Department of Buildings.)
A residential complex and surrounding buildings in Macken's mini NYC Joseph Macken
“ I jumped outta my chair and I cheered,” Macken said of the moment he finished the last building, a house on Staten Island. The project had outgrown Macken’s basement, but he’d built it so it could be broken down into panels and taken to a storage unit. He said it would have stayed there and collected dust if his kids had not encouraged him to get on TikTok and start sharing videos of the model. Then, in early August, someone he delivered to on his truck route suggested he set up the model at a local event they were sponsoring. So Macken’s mini New York went up at the Cobleskill Fairgrounds near Albany, and can be seen there through Friday. It’s the first public display of the completed work.
Macken with his model Manhattan laid out Joseph Macken