‘I took it down one little house at a time’: Trucker who spent decades building tiny replica of New York City | art

IIn 2003, Joe McCain built a scale model of a bridge out of popsicle sticks. He wanted it to look like a “hybrid” of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg Bridges. Soon after, McCain, who grew up in Middle Village, Queens, moved his family to a small town upstate, more than 160 miles from the city. McCain loaded his bridge onto the moving truck. Didn’t make the trip.

“It was destroyed, and I felt kind of upset,” said McCain, now 63. “So I thought, ‘Let me build something better.’”

Twenty-three years later, that “better thing” has survived another truck trip — this time to the Museum of the City of New York, which now houses the project that turned into McCain’s life’s work.

After the bridge was accidentally demolished, McCain focused on another New York landmark. He sculpted a small replica of 30 Rock, the Art Deco skyscraper and centerpiece of Rockefeller Center. Things were going well, so he started adding more using wood to renovate the surrounding downtown neighborhood. Its little downtown became a mini-Manhattan. He then decided to model each of New York’s five boroughs, piece by piece.

The result is a 50-by-27-foot piece made of wood and cardboard, held together by glue and the sheer determination McCain needed to pull it off. “It’s all about consistency,” McCain said. “I just started cutting one little house at a time.” It took him 10 years to cover Manhattan, and then another decade to cover the rest of New York.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, McCain watched the Twin Towers rise from his childhood bedroom window. He remembers seeing cranes lifting beams into the sky. “It was my favorite building,” McCain said. So he put it in the model, which contains replicas of One World Trade Center, which opened in 2014, and the original towers. “Whatever it is, [former] “The World Trade Center was going to be there. It was just a personal thing I wanted to do,” he said.

Before arriving at the museum, McCain kept the model in a storage unit near his home. McCain, a former truck driver, stacks the boards into piles when moving the lot. He tries to avoid another typical bridge massacre by “driving slowly.” “There are a number of casualties here and there, but there is nothing that cannot be repaired,” he said.

The museum displays the model in a large gallery on the ground floor, arranged from north to south. Manhattan, the area that used to attract all the attention, is dwarfed by the outer boroughs, reminding viewers that much of the city’s magic happens far from the tourist centers. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how much New York City can be known and unknowable to all of us, whether we’re from here or just have a mental image of this place,” said Elizabeth Sherman, MCNY’s deputy director and chief curator. “It has immediate resonance, but it’s so hard to understand. Joe did it his own way, and now we all have to participate and appreciate it ourselves.”

There are binoculars placed on the outer edges of the model, so viewers can get a closer look at specific sections. People who live near the landmarks can easily find their own buildings, as a museum employee pointed out their house on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. This reporter had more difficulty finding her street, which is located in a crowded Brooklyn neighborhood.

When museum staff first saw the model, Sherman said, “we were all standing around screaming, ‘Look, this is our museum!’” “There’s the Met, and there’s the Guggenheim.” It’s this great act of recognition, and then also of testimony. [Macken’s] Creativity, and how he made this complex architecture from very humble materials.

Sherman first heard about McCain, as did many others: Last summer, the project went viral on TikTok, when 8 million people — coincidentally, that’s the population of New York — turned to his first upbeat lo-fi video. In the clip, McCain stares directly into the camera, holding up downtown Manhattan, making sure to point out his beloved Twin Towers. This wasn’t his deal — McCain said his daughter urged him on. “I’m completely ignorant when it comes to this stuff,” he said. “It took longer to download the app than it did to create the whole thing.”