Model city

When British tourist Luke Bradburn, 28, visited Japan last year, he stumbled upon the ghost town of Kinugawa Onsen in Tochigi Prefecture.

The former resort town’s towering hotels along a riverside cliff are unlike any other — all are abandoned and empty, New York Post (NYP) reports.

The natural hot springs destination started to lose its appeal in the 1990s when Japan suffered an economic downturn. When Bradburn checked five of the 20 buildings 30 years later, he found “overgrown paths, broken staircases and precarious drop-offs,” according to NYP.

“Each (building) felt like stepping into a time capsule,” he said, referring to some of the rooms that were still pristine after decades.

He also saw traditional Japanese onsen baths, drinks still sitting on tables, stuffed deer and falcons displayed in the lobbies, and arcade machines still filled with toys.

Like the Kinugawa Onsen hotels, the buildings in truck driver Joe Macken’s version of New York City (NYC) are also empty.

The nearly one million buildings the 63-year-old showed in a TikTok video went viral as the NYC diorama measuring 30 feet wide and 50 feet long is kept in a storage unit near his house in Clifton Park.

Macken told NYP that he started making the 3D replica of the Big Apple 21 years ago as a hobby. In his spare time and using balsa wood, X-Acto knives, sandpaper, nail files, Elmer’s glue, acrylic paint and brushes, he initially created one building a night, the first being the Rockefeller Center.

He worked faster as the years went on, completing Manhattan in 2016 and moving on to the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and finally Staten Island.

Macken has spent about $30,000 on materials for the scale model to date.