“Ah, New York,” Borges said in his Paris Review interview, recalling its steely labyrinths and vertical infinities. “I was there, and I liked it very much—I said to myself: ‘Well, I have made this; this is my work.’”
Joe Macken, a Queens-bred truck and limo-bus driver who lives in Saratoga County, could say the same. In 2004, he set out to reproduce the entirety of New York City in miniature. First came a replica of 30 Rockefeller Plaza (or the RCA Building, as he still calls it), then the rest of said plaza, and before long, imitation eclipsed reality. He consecrated nearly every free moment to his “Little Apple,” tinkering in his basement in the small hours, lugging chunks of his metropolis to beach vacations with his wife and kid. All told, Macken’s New York took twenty-one years to build and about twenty grand, a would-be case of shrunk-cost fallacy that finally paid off this year, when @minninycity04 attained TikTok stardom overnight, thanks to his daughter. This summer, the Museum of the City of New York decided to put his 50-foot-by-27-foot, 1:2,400-scale mo…
