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Forget scrolling—this weekend, you can actually step inside TikTok’s favorite version of New York City.
Queens truck driver Joe Macken has spent the last 21 years carving a miniature version of the five boroughs (plus bits of Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey) out of balsa wood. His TikTok clips, where skyscrapers rise no taller than a ruler and bridges can be held like action figures, have racked up millions of views, turning him into an unlikely internet star. Now, Macken is finally letting the public see his hand-built metropolis in person.
The full model will be on display this Saturday, August 23 beginning at 11am at the Cobleskill Fairgrounds in Cobleskill, NY, spread across 350 sections and measuring a whopping 50 feet by 30 feet. It’s the first time Macken has ever assembled the city in its entirety, since his basement-turned-workshop could never contain it.
@balsastyrofoam300 Miniature model of New York City, carved out of balsa wood,21 years to build, almost 1 million buildings, 50ft, long,30ft. wide.
♬ original sound - minninycity04
Walking through his wooden New York, you’ll spot icons like One World Trade Center, the Chrysler Building, the Manhattan Courthouse and even a pint-sized Statue of Liberty. Entire neighborhoods—SoHo, Wall Street, Greenwich Village—have been whittled down into pocket-sized blocks, while bridges like the Verrazzano-Narrows and Bronx-Whitestone can be picked up and repositioned with ease. There are even a few creative liberties: Macken’s New York includes both the Twin Towers and One World Trade Center, because, as he told the New York Times, “They’re my favorite buildings.”
The project began in 2004, after Macken moved out of the city and started tinkering in his spare time. He says his inspiration came decades earlier, during a school field trip to the Queens Museum to see The Panorama of the City of New York, the massive model built for the 1964 World’s Fair. Unlike that institution-backed project, however, Macken’s version was made with an X-Acto knife, Elmer’s glue and about $10,000 worth of materials.
“I had no technical skills at all as far as architecture anything like that,” Macken told the Times. “I learned by doing.”
For Macken, who spends his weekdays driving a beverage truck and a charter bus, the project was always just a hobby. But thanks to TikTok, it’s become something bigger: a fan-favorite monument to obsession, nostalgia and the city that never sleeps.
Catch it while you can—after Saturday, this New York might go back into storage.