Randy Harris for The New York Times
EXPANSIVE Mike Fontana and his daughter, Sonia, in the 400-square-foot apartment they share, along with hundreds of Mr. Fontana's creations, including his "penny throne." More Photos »
MIKE FONTANA is proof that you can live large, in inverse proportion to the square footage of your environment, and that the heart can take wing in the tiniest of spaces.
More than a decade ago, Mr. Fontana, now 51, was stretched out in a 6,000-square-foot former bakery in Jersey City. It was a place big enough to ride a bicycle in, where he could make the monumental pieces — the 70-foot-high balloons and floats — he had become known for when he was chief sculptor for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
“I had a machine shop and all kinds of crazy foam-cutting equipment and a loft that I built a house inside of,” he said. “The thing is, here, my whole apartment is the size of my old master bedroom suite, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. This apartment changed my life.”
On a recent springlike morning, Mr. Fontana, a compact, powerfully built man who speaks in a deep basso profundo, was coiled up on a chair he had carved out of Styrofoam and covered with hundreds of iridescent glass beads.
The chair is just one of the many fun-house touches in the minute but densely appointed living room of his 400-square-foot apartment on St. Marks Place. Drawing on his skills as a carpenter and an artist, Mr. Fontana has fitted it out like a boat and employed all sorts of perspective tricks so that each of the five “rooms” feels a lot larger than its actual dimensions.
Quite a feat, given how much stuff is packed in here. In the living room, for example, there’s a drum set, 11 amplifiers, 7 guitars, 2 mandolins and a ukulele; a keyboard that swings out from the wall; a sofa that turns into a work table; a 10-foot sign from his old studio that looks as if it were carved from granite and spells out “FONTANA” in foot-and-a-half-high letters; a five-foot foam-and-epoxy replica of Horton, the elephant who kept his word (whom Mr. Fontana has taken as his mascot); a five-foot-wide, pneumatic-looking armchair tiled with 15,000 pennies, which he calls the “penny throne” (Mr. Fontana is an expert, he said, in creating “interesting furniture that’s not all that comfortable”); and a mirrored coffee table with a lid that comes off to reveal some of his daughter’s clothing. Among many other objects, books, gewgaws, pieces of furniture and sculpture, most of which is handmade.
That Sonia, Mr. Fontana’s 22-year-old daughter, has made her home here is perhaps Mr. Fontana’s neatest trick. In the tiny 18-square-foot entrance alcove, he has built her a bedroom, with a desk, a loft bed, a “closet” (hooks on the back of the front door and shoe pockets on the wall) and a “bureau” (his father’s Korean War footlocker, painted white and fitted with casters).
Mr. Fontana’s divorce more than a decade ago coincided with another life change. The market for the sort of monumental work he had been doing was drying up. To be more accurate, the methods he had grown skilled at were becoming obsolete.
At Macy’s Parade Studio, in Hoboken, N.J., where he spent 12 years making floats that were as big as buildings and robust enough to support 100 dancers, he had become a crackerjack welder, balletic Styrofoam carver and creator of complicated electromechanical animations. He had built Big Bird, Bugs Bunny and Bart Simpson — average height, 70 feet.
When he left that job 13 years ago, Mr. Fontana worked for a company that specialized in monuments and museum displays of life-size figures cast in bronze or plaster. He also made casts of life-size bathers for Carole Feuerman, who produces realistic sculptures like those of George Segal or Duane Hanson.
All in all, it was physical work, on a grand scale. But fabrication methods were changing. Sculptors practicing Mr. Fontana’s craft were working with computers, rendering with keystrokes instead of their hands. Mr. Fontana faced the prospect of re-educating himself in computer modeling, a notion he found about as “cuddly as a cobra,” he said. “But my livelihood was taking a pretty serious hit.”
House Proud: The Prince of St. Marks Place
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House Proud: The Prince of St. Marks Place
