Lego Love Forms a Long Line at Mayfair Mall

Any parent who's ever stepped on a Lego barefoot or picked up a few thousand of them off the floor knows how popular the little plastic building blocks are with young kids.

But all ages came out this weekend to inaugurate Wauwatosa's new Lego store at .

"I had a couple ladies over here yesterday who were in their 80s that were building, so it's kids of all ages," Lego Master Builder Dan Steininger said Saturday. "There's 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds."

Steininger was getting help in the central plaza of the mall, where tables were set with boxes of blocks and instructions on buidling modular parts of a giant Lego sculpture: an 8-foot-tall Spongebob Squarepants.

Steininger built a one-quarter scale model out of small blocks and is spending the weekend expanding into the monolithic Spongebob.

"The scale is 1 to 4, so the prototype out in front is 2 feet tall, and it's made with all the little bricks, two studs by four studs, and so those are then replicated four times larger," Steininger said. "They give those big bricks to me and I'll replace the little bricks on the model with the big ones."

Meanwhile, on the upper level, the line formed to visit the new store, located near the center of the mall. By 11 a.m. Saturday, it stretched all the way to Boston Store and back around the promenade.

David Reindel of Glendale and his kids Katie, 5, and Andrew, 7, were about halfway along the concourse and had already been waiting an hour and 25 minutes for their turn.

Dad wasn't sure they'd be able to stick it out, but Andrew was pretty adamant. Would he wait another hour? Nod. Two hours? Nod. Three? He nodded, his dad rolled his eyes a bit.

"We have a ton of Legos at home," Andrew said.

"It's pretty cool that they're opening a store here, the first one in Wisconsin," David Reindel said. "It's kind of an event.

"I was surprised, though, at how many people there are. If we'd have known, we'd probably have come a little earlier."

Once inside, the checkout line stretched around the interior of the store as well, so clearly Lego lovers were not there just to look.

Steininger works at the Lego U.S. headquarters in Connecticut and is one of a handful of master builders the company employs.

"I got lucky, a friend of mine worked at Lego in the IT department, and he told me about this opening in the model shop," Steininger said. "He said it was a bunch of nutty, creative people and he thought I'd fit right in. That was 19 years ago.

"I have a background in art and sculpting, so that helps because I'm now sculpting with Lego bricks instead of wood or clay or something like that."

Asked how many individual Legos were used to create his massive sculpture, Steininger said, "More than three. They're having a contest up in the store, so that's all I can say – more than three."

Steininger said that he would finish his Spongebob sculpture by 5 p.m. Sunday, when it would be available for family photo opps.

And then?

"At 6 o'clock, we're going to start taking it apart, breaking it down, sorting it by size and color, strap it down onto pallets, back in the boxes, they strap me down onto a pallet and they ship me off to the next spot and I go and do it again."

"It's like sidewalk art," he said, "it only lasts a little while and then it gets washed away.

"I look at it as job security."