

At first he was certain he was being punked. Soon, messages came from musicians, athletes and comedians - people he had heard of - wanting to buy his models. I wanted that high again, I kept chasing that.”Ī nine-inch replica of the street pole at the corner of DeKalb and Knickerbocker Avenues in Brooklyn was the first Cortes original to go viral.

“It was an escape - like I’m meditating, literally floating. “I loved that when I worked on a piece, I didn’t think about my problems - my divorce, the pandemic,” said Mr. And that tiny icebox - three inches tall and covered in reproductions of stickers by local graffiti crews - turned his life around. Using poster board from a 99-cent store, he built what was familiar, an urban fixture that most New Yorkers walk past without a glance: a bodega icebox. A longtime collector of action figures with time on his hands and not much else to do, he started tinkering. He was drawn to the remarkably robust community of miniature makers.
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Idly scrolling his feed, he noticed a diorama of a World War II scene, then a model railroad set, then intricate, hyper-realistic models of movie sets. He found himself isolated and devoting an unhealthy amount of time to Instagram. In March 2020, Danny Cortes was already facing a crisis - he was out of work, in the middle of a divorce and serving a four-year probation sentence for selling drugs - when Covid hit.
