“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 model on long-term display.
Macken’s dream to build his own New York hatched during a seventh-grade field trip to the Panorama of the City of New York (1964) at the Queens Museum. Hewed from balsa wood and Foamcore, his city now serves as a friendly foil to Robert Moses’s high-tech, crew-assembled marvel, where the planes at LaGuardia actually take off. (I’ve heard the legroom is tight.) Uptown, in Macken’s New York, hydronyms are scrawled in marker, the Twin Towers stand beside One World Trade, and viewers may use binoculars to appraise the delicate wirework of the Verazano Bridge [sic]. Whereas Moses’s commission bespeaks the administrative omniscience and systematic sheen of the “master builder,” Macken’s replica crackles with dog-eared memories and felicitous errors, the result of one man’s quixotic wish to freeze time and space into something he can possess.
Or not. We like to shrink the miniaturist, to assign their need to downsize the world to some childhood lack or compensatory desire for control. To consider them genuine artists is less common, which is why Macken’s parvum opus didn’t make its museum debut in, say, the Greater New York survey at MoMA PS1 or the Whitney Biennial. That said, there’s always next time—or the time after that. As he approaches his mid-60s, Macken is already planning models of Minneapolis and Las Vegas. And Los Angeles. And Chicago.