America’s next top model is now on full display.
An upstate truck driver-turned-TikTok sensation unveiled his gargantuan wooden model of New York City at a new exhibition Monday in what serves as the replica’s museum debut.
After amassing millions of views on TikTok at the behest of his Gen Z daughter, Joe Macken’s passion project has landed its own museum show — dubbed “He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model” — running at the Museum of the City of New York from Wednesday through the summer.
“This is a hobby that got out of control,” Macken, 63, told The Post, noting the project, which he started in 2004, was inspired by a first grade trip to the Panorama miniature model of New York City at the Queens Museum.
“I said, ‘I’m going to build one of these myself.’ And when I was in my 40s, I started it … after watching a documentary about New York.”
Macken started his wild vision with a wood-carved Rockefeller Center – and the project has since expanded to a whopping 50 feet with an estimated 800,000 skyscrapers, apartment buildings, houses, boats, bridges and more.
The Clifton Park, New York resident began by carving the 30 Rock building – with art deco architecture that captured his fascination during trips to visit the famed Christmas tree from a young age – from balsa wood, and eventually expanded to the entire Big Apple, all by using his own system to scale the project.
Macken used the cheap hardwood, Elmer’s glue and Styrofoam to build out the replica, and relied on books, references and his own photography trips to Manhattan years before the advent of Google Maps imagery, he said.
The delivery worker eventually started using a home ruler to measure out a millimeter-to-10 feet scale before moving to Google references in the mid-2010s.
But some sections of the city – like Middle Village, Queens, where Macken grew up – didn’t even require a guide, he said.
“Every block I knew: building Queens was my favorite, because I know Queens like the back of my hand,” Macken explained.
“I tried to make it exactly the way the city actually looks … but it took me so long to build that I’m sure it must have just led me to use my own imagination here and there.”
Macken told The Post he plans to build on his creation well after the exhibit wraps to create a 90-foot “square” replica of the tri-state area, including Westchester and Nassau counties.
“I figure it’ll take me another 10 or 12 years,” he said, adding he spends roughly two hours a day on it. “[I’ll be] very busy … but I don’t think of it as work. After I’m done with everything at night, before I go to bed, I go down [to my basement].
“It just relaxes me.”
The installation, however, is far from architecturally – or historically – accurate, museum curators said, with handwritten notes along the waterfront edges demarcating a New York City that is distinctly Macken’s: from his grandmother’s home in Breezy Point to a misspelling of the “Verazanno” Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island.
“It wouldn’t be me if I did [correct the spelling],” Macken chuckled.
“The normal thing people do is a New Year’s resolution, and I’m the guy who stops going to the gym. But not this. I just loved it so much, seeing the progress after a while.”
“This is the story of one person’s dedication, perseverance, and persistence over 20-plus years,” said Elisabeth Sherman, Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe deputy director and chief curator of the Museum of the City of New York.
The museum had reached out to Macken last summer after TikTok videos of his replica amassed millions of views, Sherman said.
Macken, however, was untraceable via phone records, and a museum staffer ended up reaching out to an upstate New York bar he was speaking at while showing his display at the Cobbleskill Fairgrounds near Albany.
“As a curator who comes from an art background, you talk about the ‘hand of the artist:’ that you can see the brushstrokes, you can see that he made it,” Sherman said.
“It’s not so exact that it feels like a machine could have made it and I think that lets all of us in: It tells us that this is one person who is sharing his perspective.”
The piece also pays tribute to Macken’s Middle Village upbringing with nods to the downtown Manhattan skyline he viewed from his own window as a boy – including the Twin Towers.
“I wanted to make sure I kept the World Trade Centers there because those were the buildings closest to me. I used to wake up in the morning when I lived in Queens, I used to look out my bedroom window and just see the skyline,” Macken added.
“How many kids grow up looking out the window and seeing the New York City skyline? So I’m very proud of that.”
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