The NYC scale model that’s gone viral was built by a truck driver. Now it’s in a museum

The exhibit, ‘He Built This City,’ is at the Museum of the City of New York through October 12. 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.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.”