Clifton Park, N.Y. — In the spring of 2004, truck driver Joe Macken went down to his basement with a piece of balsa wood and a single question: could he make something interesting? He started by carving a tiny version of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. He enjoyed the work so much he made another building the next day — and then another.
What began as a one-off hobby slowly grew into an obsessive, years-long project. Macken kept adding blocks until he had recreated all of Rockefeller Center, then Midtown, then the whole island of Manhattan. Over time he expanded beyond Manhattan to include every neighborhood, park and street, eventually carving models that represent the entire city. When his basement filled up, the collection moved to a storage facility; today each square in his map stands for roughly one square mile of the real city.
Nicknamed the “Little Apple,” Macken’s miniature New York is on public display for the first time. The Museum of the City of New York opens an exhibition on Feb. 12 that brings together all five boroughs, highlighting major sites and stadiums as well as bridges and countless buildings. The installation includes nearly 1 million hand-carved structures, each made from balsa wood by Macken over more than two decades.
Macken credits his wife, Trish, for tolerating and encouraging his obsession. He described her support as indispensable; when told he plans to keep building for many more years, Trish laughed, “Alright, he might not have shared those details with me.”
He never set out to produce a museum piece. “I was just going to look at it,” Macken said of his original plan. He had no blueprint for where the project would end up and never expected it would be displayed publicly.
Now that the work is being shown in the city he has spent years recreating, Macken says he isn’t finished. “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.”