A basement-built New York, 50 feet wide, is on view through Oct. 12

A Queens native turned his basement into a miniature of the city he grew up in, a project that ran well past the two-decade mark. That creation now fills a first-floor gallery along Manhattan’s museum row near Central Park, where “He Built This City” opened in February and stays up until Oct. 12.

Joe Macken drives a truck for a living and never studied architecture, design or model making. Foam board and balsa wood from hobby shops were his materials. Once he considered the work finished, his daughter talked him into posting the basement scene on TikTok. The clips cleared 10 million views within a week, and curators at the Museum of the City of New York got in touch.

Inside the 50-foot model of New York City

More than 300 large foam boards, fitted together like puzzle pieces, carry the city: 50 feet end to end, close to 30 feet across. Every inch of that surface stands in for roughly 160 feet of the real place. The street-level detail reaches all five boroughs and keeps going into suburban Long Island and part of New Jersey.

Roughly 800,000 structures sit on those boards, nearly all of them cut from light balsa. Tall towers crowd Manhattan, while modest single-family houses fill block after block of Queens. Familiar landmarks turn up as well: a tiny Brooklyn Bridge, a tiny Yankee Stadium, a tiny Statue of Liberty.

Chief curator Elisabeth Sherman said the work pulls in social media audiences and longtime museum visitors at the same time, because “people always want to get their arms around this whole city.”

From a Queens Museum field trip to a museum exhibit

Macken traces the idea back to elementary school. A class outing took him to the Queens Museum, where he stood above the Panorama of the City of New York, the enormous miniature first assembled for the World’s Fair of 1964 and 1965. Years went by before he attempted anything like it himself. He was in his 40s when he started, having just moved his young family from Long Island up to the Albany area.

Rockefeller Center and its main tower came first. Midtown grew outward from that corner, and that stretch alone absorbed about a decade of his spare hours. The hardest piece was the Empire State Building, with its ornate Art Deco spire. “I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it,” he said.