Trucker built a scale model of NYC over 21 years | Hacker News Reader

Trucker built a scale model of NYC over 21 years

gothamist.com

116 pointsspeckx18 comments

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...

All of NYC except for the southern part of Staten Island.

We don't talk about the southern part of Staten Island

C’mon, explain the joke.

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?

If this doesn't sell for more than the highest NFT what are we even doing

Gambling.

Reminds me of the "Atomic Trucker" https://www.vice.com/en/article/atomic-trucker-reverse-engin...

The article says there are 1 million buildings in NYC?

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

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.

One million buildings…that's residential, commercial office or retail, and other (factories, storage, etc).

yes, and somewhere there will be at least one very dry definition of what NYC considers a "building", but then again it might be contextual and turn out to be a deap dive into the mind twisting depths of beuorcratic moat's and silos, only for the very brave and commited

People forget a lot of NYC looks like this:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ch4rPVXcMoxsBLDK6

The biggest buildings tend to have a residential population of approximately zero.

what a madlad. i call this true art.

Wow so it's down to the building level? I wonder how he did those and how accurate they are. Dimensions seems right on.

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.

Good point

Love these life-long ‘slow hobbies’. Great to see the passion and dedication.

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