(Roughly) Daily

Hannah Frishberg, in Gothamist, on a labor of love…

Reno may be “the biggest little city in the world,” but it’s got some serious competition from the miniature New York City that hobbyist Joseph Macken built in his upstate New York basement over two decades.

“I sat down in my basement, turned the camera on on my phone and just started talking about my first section, which was Downtown Manhattan,” the Clifton Park resident said on a recent Thursday about his viral TikToks on his roughly 50-by-30-foot scale model of the city. “It just took off.”

The intricate model features what Macken says are hundreds of thousands buildings, landmarks and geographic elements across the five boroughs and their surroundings, including bridges, airports, the Hudson and East rivers, New York Harbor, Central Park, One World Trade Center and the original World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building. The work consists of 350 handmade sections that are pieced together and can be taken apart and moved…

… Macken, a 63-year-old truck driver who grew up in Middle Village and has no formal carpentry or engineering training, said he dreamed of replicating the Queens Museum’s famous “Panorama” after an elementary school trip when he was a kid. He embarked on the endeavor in 2004, armed with little more than balsa wood, Elmer’s glue and Styrofoam. His first building was “the RCA building at Rockefeller Center,” he said, referring to 30 Rock, which was formerly named for its longtime tenant, the Radio Corporation of America.

Macken said it took him about 10 years to build Manhattan alone and 11 years for the rest of the boroughs. He completed his opus in April, and said he’s confident every building in the city is represented. (Gothamist could not independently verify this claim; the city has more than 1 million buildings, according to the Department of Buildings.)…

… Macken is now working on a mini Minneapolis: “‘Mary Tyler Moore’ was one of my favorite shows growing up,” he said, adding that he plans to eventually do Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Chicago as well.

Macken said he’s still figuring out what he’ll do next with the model, but he’s in talks with the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan about an exhibit there. A museum spokesperson confirmed this, praising his “ingenuity, creativity and skill.”

“ I don’t wanna put it back in storage,” Macken said. “That’s for damn sure.”…

More– and more photos– at: “This trucker built a scale model of NYC over 21 years. It’s drawing museums’ attention” from @gothamist.com.

* “Theme from New York, New York” composed by John Kander, with lyrics by Fred Ebb; performed in the film by Liza Minnelli and famously covered by Frank Sinatra

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As we get small, we might recall that on this date in 1776– in the early days of the military occupation of the city by British forces during the Revolutionary War– the “Great Fire of New York” raged on the West Side of what then constituted New York City at the southern end of the island of Manhattan.

The fire destroyed from 10 to 25 percent of the buildings in the city, and some unaffected parts of the city were plundered. Many believed or assumed that the fire was deliberately set; British leaders accused revolutionaries– and used the pretext to declare martial law, to confiscate surviving uninhabited homes of known Patriots and assign them to British officers; to convert chuches (other than Church of England sanctuaries), into prisons, infirmaries, or barracks; and to billet regular soldiers with civilian families… all of which continued until the British evacuated the city on November 25, 1783.