Artist Conrad Stojak puts art inside old parking meters in his swanky studio on the 67th floor of 4 World Trade Center looking out onto 1 World Trade Center.
BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC
Conrad Stojak has a different canvas than other artists: old parking meters.
He transforms the reviled relics into sculptures of tribute to the city where he was born and raised, with tiny dioramas depicting the city’s skyline and landmarks inhabiting the space where once the clock ticked down to a driver’s doom.
The first piece he completed after his initial experiments depicts a completed World Trade Center complex, featuring the four towers, the reflecting pools of the 9/11 Memorial, and construction workers toiling away.
That diorama helped him land his current studio digs — inside one of the buildings it depicts.
Larry Silverstein, the developer of the new World Trade Center complex, has invited artists to use vacant space at the site in exchange for some type of art donation. Stojak will donate his World Trade Center parking meter, which will be put on public display at some point, he said.
Having a studio is a first for Stojak, who studied film and also takes photographs.
“I never even had a space before this,” he said. “I was in a friend’s yard working on stuff. I never had a studio in my life other than that and maybe part of my living room. This is like a big, big step up.”
Quite literally — Stojak’s studio is all the way up on the 67th floor of 4 World Trade Center, where he has been since this June.
“You can’t beat it,” said Stojak of the view, which showcases 1 World Trade Center and Battery Park City.
Raised in Woodhaven, Queens, Stojak has vivid memories of visiting Lower Manhattan as a child to have lunch with his father, who worked at 90 West St. near the Twin Towers. His father would take him to Windows on the World, where Stojak would press his forehead against the glass and stare down at the miniature world below.
There are echoes of that view in the diminutive scenes under glass that Stojak now creates.
He got the idea two years ago when he was jogging in Queens and saw a bunch of old parking meters still standing sentinel but with all their insides removed.
“That’s what they did originally,” Stojak explained. “[The city] took out all the working parts first and left these shells of the meters on the street. I found one that was easy to get into and I bought a bunch of army men at this bodega and kind of just stuffed it with army men.”
Pleased with the effect, he decided to see where he could go with the idea.
“I started finding more meters, using smaller figurines,” he said. “Then I started building sets and then installing the sets inside the meters themselves.”
Those early pieces are long gone now, he said, because the city is still in the process of removing the old meters, which have to be jackhammered to get them out of the ground.
As the empty meters disappeared from the streets, Stojak began contacting city agencies to see if they would donate meters, or even if he could buy some.
“I came out of the blue,” he said. “They had no idea who I was, what was I talking about it. ‘Look, I just want some meters.’”
Eventually he got a donation of 30 defunct parking meters, which he is slowly filling with scaled-down scenes of the city. Stojak has completed eight meters so far, including a purple ode to the oft-delayed 7 train featuring a crowd of people waiting for it, and a miniature, motorized Rockefeller Center ice rink with tiny skaters spinning around.
“Anything that has a New York flavor,” he said.
Even if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth — one of his dioramas depicts the old, seedy, pre-Disneyfied Times Square, complete with a flasher, a homeless guy, and a woman beating a ruffian with an umbrella.
“’Cause that’s what I remember Times Square to be,” he said. “It was this very, very dark place.”
It takes Stojak about three weeks to complete a piece. The first challenge is lugging the 75-pound meters to his studio. Then Stojak says he has to “Swiss cheese” it — drilling through the thick steel to get the locking mechanism off so he can remove the top of the meter. His difficulties come with his medium, he admits.
“That thing was built to not be broken into, so it takes some time to kind of drill it open,” he said. “I go through drill bits like potato chips. These things are so impossible to open.”
With the hard part over with, Stojak scuffs up the surface so the spray paint can adhere to it, then picks out the colors and figures he wants to use, designs the scene, and works on the parts that make the miniatures move.
“Little by little it just starts to come together,” he said.
Stojak hopes eventually to create many more meters — anywhere from 200 to even 2,000 if he gets some help — and then “replant” them on sidewalks throughout the five boroughs.
Parking meters make for an ideal venue for public art, according to Stojak, because they’re a familiar icon at home anywhere in the city.
“Everyone recognizes it, everybody knows it, and you could put it anywhere in the city, in any neighborhood,” he said. “That’s what I like about the idea: it can truly be democratic.”
