Faces of Southeast Missouri: Scott Raines

Walk into Scott Raines’ basement, and all along an entire wall, you’ll see a picture of New York City. Look closer, and you’ll see the image is actually a 32,000-piece puzzle, Ravensburger’s “New York City Window.” The puzzle is comprised of 65 photographs taken of New York City out of the 61st floor of the Rockefeller Center as part of the Manhattan Gigapixel Project. It took Raines approximately two and a half years to put the puzzle together.

At six feet tall and 18 feet long, the puzzle was one of the largest in the world when it came out in 2014 — Ravensburger had previously published “Keith Haring: Double Retrospect” with 32,000 pieces, setting the record for the largest puzzle in 2010. Now, the largest commercially-available puzzle is “What a Wonderful World,” a 60,000-piece, 232-square-foot map of the world by Dowdle.

Raines’ wife, Kathy Hotop-Raines, gave Raines the New York City puzzle for Christmas around six years ago. The puzzle has been displayed on his basement wall now for approximately a year. Raines says he enjoys seeing people’s reaction to the puzzle when they go into their basement.

Raines estimates he had help on approximately 5% of the puzzle and did the other 95% on his own. While putting it together, he worked on it two to three hours a day and sometimes took a break from it for two to three weeks at a time.

He had previously seen the puzzle put together on a wall at a puzzle shop in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., which he says gave him hope he could finish it.

“At times, I thought about [giving up on the puzzle], yeah,” Raines says. “But you know, wife gives you a challenge, you have to try to get it done.”

The puzzle came in eight bags with 4,000 pieces in each bag. His strategy: He treated the puzzle like eight different 4,000 piece puzzles, working on only one of the bags at a time. While struggling to put together the sixth section because the blue and green colors blended together, he realized the pieces were cut in a pattern that repeated itself; if he looked at the shapes of the pieces rather than at their design, he could find pieces to repeat the shape pattern in smaller sections of the puzzle. This discovery was key to finishing it.

Raines says from the beginning, however, he always planned to complete the puzzle.

“Once I get started on something, I've got to pretty well see it to the end,” Raines says. “But I didn’t think it would take me two and a half years.”

Raines first began loving puzzles as a child, and putting puzzles together runs in his family: He and his mother who is 90 years old sometimes do puzzles together, and she also helped put together part of the 32,000-piece puzzle. His brothers also enjoy doing puzzles, and Raines bonded with his late father-in-law through time they spent doing puzzles together.

Raines recommends puzzles to people looking to stimulate their mind. Next up, Raines plans to make frames for two puzzles he’s already put together: Springbok’s “Coca-Cola Country General Store” puzzle and a vintage world map. Then, his next project is a mountain scene puzzle.

“It’s a nice, relaxing way to keep your brain sharp,” Raines says. “They’re a challenge.”