Good evening. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at a New York City that has just taken up residence in New York City. We’ll also get details on a settlement with two of the three hospital systems that nurses struck nearly a month ago.
Joe Macken just moved New York City 165 miles.
Not the real city; the miniature one that he built in his basement near Albany, N.Y. It has replicas of office towers, apartment houses and brownstones, all built to scale. His Empire State Building is eight inches tall.
Last week he loaded his city — in pieces, 342 in all — into a U-Haul and drove it to Manhattan to be displayed at the Museum of the City of New York, starting on Thursday.
Even in miniature, New York is big. Macken’s mini-city is as long as a five-story building is high. It almost didn’t fit in the museum’s largest gallery.
The president and director of the museum, Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, said that she had asked if a wall could be taken down to create more space. “The team had to pull me back” from that idea, she said, and Macken managed to trim a couple of feet around the edges. “Far Rockaway is a little cut off,” he said.
The museum heard about Macken after he became a star on TikTok last summer, racking up millions of views with videos he made in his basement. Hill Wilchfort said that bringing his creation to the museum was “elevating the work of a true artist who hasn’t been shown before.” And Elisabeth Sherman, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator, said that she had anticipated the arrival of Macken’s model the way she looked forward to the arrival of any display piece.
“My favorite part of my job is like uncrating day, when the art comes out of the crates,” Sherman said. “This was not in crates. It was in Joe’s U-Haul. But I had that same exact sort of bodily emotional quality. When there’s scale like this, when there’s attention to detail like this, the physical experience of seeing it for the first time is extraordinary.”
“I got the chills,” she said, adding: “I’m not being hyperbolic.”
‘This is really like from the gut’
She said Macken’s model was different from the Panorama of New York City, the huge diorama that was built for the 1964 World’s Fair and is spread across the floor of a former roller-skating rink in the Queens Museum. The Panorama was Macken’s initial inspiration, remembered from an elementary school field trip. But Sherman called it “an institutional model” and “a distant intellectual reflection of the city” that was not built by one person, “where this is really like from the gut.”
“You can feel his hand, like the mark of the artist,” she said. “It is precise, but not perfect.”
Balsa wood, an X-acto knife and glue
Macken spent 21 years constructing everything, including bridges, brownstones, the twin towers that were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks and One World Trade Center, which replaced them. His city contains no concrete, glass or steel. He made it from balsa wood that he carved with an X-acto knife. He used Elmer’s Glue-All the way a construction crew would use cement. The 342 boards that hold the streets, buildings, bridges and rivers “seemed like a million when you’re doing it.”
Sherman said that what it “elicits in each of us is our own personal geography of the city.”
Just standing in front of it, she said during a preview on Monday, “memories are just bubbling up.” She said she could see the hospital in which she was born and the apartment her parents had lived in at the time.
Hill Wilchfort said that she, too, had picked up the binoculars and hunted for the neighborhood where she grew up and still lives — Park Slope, in Brooklyn. Her micro view showed her something about the macro view.
“The power of the model,” she said, “is that you see that the part of the city that you know is so small compared to the vastness of the rest of it.”
Weather
Expect increasing clouds, a high around 36 and a chance of afternoon snow. Tonight will be warmer than usual as temperatures settle in the mid-30s, with clouds and possible snow and rain.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended for snow removal.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“If we had a magic wand we should use it to eliminate Family Court entirely by eliminating all the problems families have. But that isn’t possible.” — Rowan Wilson, the top state judge in New York, who said that family courts are flooded by cases they can’t handle.
The latest New York news
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Gateway funding in limbo: A federal judge ruled that the flow of federal money for the $16 billion Gateway tunnel project did not have to be restarted immediately. Judge Jeannette Vargas gave the Trump administration until Thursday evening to file its appeal of her order to end its suspension of funding.
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Farkas called Epstein a “blessing”: Andrew Farkas, a New York real estate mogul, has repeatedly played down ties to Jeffrey Epstein. But the release of additional pages of the Epstein files made it clear that they had a profound friendship.
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Chaplains for the N.Y.P.D.: Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch plans to name Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of New York, and the Rev. A.R. Bernard, the founder of the Christian Cultural Center, as leaders of the department’s chaplains’ unit.
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Nadler picks a successor: Representative Jerrold Nadler, who is retiring after three decades in the House, hopes that his endorsement will distinguish Assemblyman Micah Lasher — who once worked as Nadler’s community liaison and was later Gov. Kathy Hochul’s policy director — in a crowded field.
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Would he make it to No. 973 before he got fired?: After coaching a high school basketball team in Queens for 45 years, Ron Naclerio was closing in on the record for most wins in New York State. Then he was suspended for improperly recruiting players.
Nurses reach a deal to end their strike at two hospital systems
For nearly a month, nurses had braved the cold to maintain picket lines against three major hospital systems. On Monday, their union reached a tentative agreement with two of them that calls for raises of about 12 percent over three years.
The deals with the Mount Sinai Health System and Montefiore Medical Center cover 10,500 strikers who will vote on the tentative agreements in the next few days. Nancy Hagans, the president of the nurses’ union, said the main issues — pay, minimum staffing levels on hospital floors and protections to insulate nurses against workplace violence — had been addressed.
The union said that the strike against the third hospital system, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, was continuing. NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia said that it was willing to match the wage increases in the tentative agreements with the other two systems. But an official with the union said the two sides had not come to terms on staffing.
The strike jolted the city’s medical ecosystem, with elective surgeries canceled and the struck hospitals spending more than $100 million to hire temporary nurses.
The walkout became an unexpected early test for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office not quite two weeks before the strike began — and, unlike his predecessors, took sides in the dispute, joining nurses on the picket lines twice. Many nurses felt betrayed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who signed executive orders declaring an emergency because of staffing shortages. That enabled the hospitals to hire the temporary nurses and left many strikers saying she had undercut them.
METROPOLITAN diary
Punk rock interruption
Dear Diary:
I was working in the financial district and would walk out of my way to catch the E at the World Trade Center so I wouldn’t have to transfer to get home to Queens.
Because I got on at the first stop, I could choose my preferred seat: tucked away in the corner of the second car, where the doors would line up with the staircase that led to the exit on my side of Queens Boulevard.
I had a young child, and my five-day-a-week commute into Manhattan often felt long and lonely. I had perfected my working-mom subway routine: headphones on, eyes down.
One day, I was a few stops from home and listening to a relatively sedate podcast when punk rock music began to blare through my headphones. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
Then I glanced through the window. There, in the next car, was my husband. Having just gotten on the train, his phone had automatically connected to my headphones and begun to play his music for me.
After the grinding slog of another workday, I had found my way home.
— Rachel Nobel Fields
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Look for Your Neighborhood in This Mini-New York City appeared first on New York Times.
