Trucker built a scale model of NYC over 21 years

64 speckx 11 9/16/2025, 1:20:11 PM gothamist.com ↗

Comments (11)

jrmg · 2h ago
For those skimming the surface of this article as I almost did:

The pictures in the article, impressive enough, are just the Manhattan portions of his model. He has in fact modelled all of New York!

> Macken said it took him about 10 years to build Manhattan alone and 11 years for the rest of the boroughs.

The full, absolutely huge, model can be seen on his TikTok (linked at the end of the article): https://www.tiktok.com/@balsastyrofoam300/video/754180447598...

senkora · 1h ago
All of NYC except for the southern part of Staten Island.
mrits · 5m ago
If this doesn't sell for more than the highest NFT what are we even doing
cortesoft · 1h ago
Makes me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche,_New_York

Is there a miniature version of this guy in the model, with a miniature version of the miniature city?

nielsbot · 10m ago
what a madlad. i call this true art.
bombcar · 2h ago
johnny-g-tyler · 1h ago
The article says there are 1 million buildings in NYC?

That seems high ... only 10 people per building?

codyb · 58m ago
Tons of buildings aren't residential. And there's still lots of single family homes as you get out into Queens, Staten Island, up further in the Bronx and further out in Brooklyn sometimes too.

I wonder how many people are living in buildings with 100+ people as I am (estimate a couple thousand in my building from back of napkin math I think).

New York City's fairly vast when you take into account Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. Manhattan's less than a tenth of the land area.

epc · 26m ago
One million buildings…that's residential, commercial office or retail, and other (factories, storage, etc).
aklemm · 1h ago
Wow so it's down to the building level? I wonder how he did those and how accurate they are. Dimensions seems right on.
antonvs · 34m ago
If you look at the video on his tiktok, the boroughs are divided into rectangles with clear shifts between the borders. For the boroughs at least, it seems like he repeated a style for a given rectangle and then switched to a different style for the next one. The result is more impressionistic, it doesn't seem to be accurate down to the building level.

It's possible his Manhattan is more accurate, I didn't try to check.