By Steve Hartman
February 6, 2026 / CBS News
Clifton Park, New York — In spring 2004, truck driver Joe Macken went down to his basement with a piece of balsa wood and a simple question: could he build something cool? He began with a miniature of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. He enjoyed the work so much he built another building the next day — and then another.
What started as a single model grew without a plan. Macken kept adding blocks until he had made all of Rockefeller Center, then Midtown, then the entire island of Manhattan, and eventually every part of New York City. His basement filled up and he moved the growing collection to a storage facility. Each square in his model represents about one square mile of the real city, and over more than two decades the pieces have accumulated into a vast miniature metropolis.
Macken’s project, nicknamed the “Little Apple,” is being shown in public for the first time. The Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan is mounting an exhibition that opens Feb. 12 and features all five boroughs, every major site and stadium, and every bridge and building he carved. The installation includes almost 1 million structures, all hand-carved by Macken from balsa wood.
Throughout the decades-long undertaking, Macken said he’s relied on the support of his wife, Trish, whom he called “a miracle” for tolerating and encouraging his obsession. When told that her husband intends to keep building for many more years, Trish joked, “Alright, he might not have shared those details with me.”
Macken never set out to create a masterpiece. He simply kept taking tiny steps — one building at a time. “I was just going to look at it,” he said of his original plan. “I don’t know what I was going to do with it. I had no plans. I mean, I never imagined it being in a museum.”
Now, with his work on display in the city he loved carving, Macken said he’ll keep going. “I’ll just keep going,” he said. “I’ll build all of New York state if I have to. It’ll never be finished, ever.”