For more than 20 years, Joe Macken, a truck driver from Queens, New York, dedicated his spare time to constructing a detailed scale model of New York City. Crafted from balsa wood and foam board, the model features over 800,000 structures spanning all five boroughs, as well as parts of New Jersey and suburban Long Island. After videos of the model gained more than 10 million views on TikTok, the Museum of the City of New York invited Macken to display the work, which opened in February and will remain on exhibit through October 12.

Measuring roughly 50 feet long and 30 feet wide, the model is arranged across more than 300 interconnected foam boards and offers a bird’s-eye view of the metropolitan area. Each inch corresponds to approximately 160 feet in real life. Notable landmarks are intricately recreated—from Manhattan’s skyscrapers, including Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building, to the Brooklyn Bridge, Yankee Stadium, and the Statue of Liberty.

Macken’s interest in building the model dates back to an elementary school visit to the Queens Museum, where he saw the Panorama of the City of New York, a famous scale model created for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. However, it was not until moving with his family to upstate New York that he began the project in earnest. Using materials available at hobby shops, he started with Midtown Manhattan and gradually expanded the model over a decade.

“I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it,” Macken said during a recent visit to the exhibit. Despite lacking formal training in architecture or model building, he developed his own methods and speed over the years. Much of his free time, including weekends driving a bus and family trips to the New Jersey shore, was devoted to assembling the miniature cityscape.

The model is not an exact replica of present-day New York. Macken incorporated personal touches such as his childhood diner in Queens and retained the former Kosciuszko Bridge, which was replaced in 2017. Additionally, the old World Trade Center twin towers remain alongside the newer structures in Lower Manhattan. “I kept a lot of my own parts of the city,” he said.

The exhibit has drawn visitors eager to explore the familiar neighborhoods and landmarks laid out before them. Some use binoculars to examine details, while others relive personal memories. One visitor traced his family’s history across the model, recalling addresses and sites from memory.

Elisabeth Sherman, chief curator at the Museum of the City of New York, described the model as a rare attraction that appeals both to social media audiences and traditional museum patrons. “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.

Following the conclusion of the exhibit on Columbus Day, Macken hopes to showcase the model in other venues. He also plans to add more than 50 new buildings and expand the scale further into New Jersey and Long Island.