This is the biggest snowman you'll probably ever see

The snowman on Hoover Road in Irondequoit is so big the bowl of its pipe is a soup can and its broomstick arms look like matchsticks.

"Will he come alive?" asked 3-year-old James Wegman, whose nanny drove him and his twin sister, Ruby, from Greece to see the colossal snow creation after spotting it on Facebook.

The snowman won't come alive, but its presence has breathed so much life into the sleepy suburban street over the last few days that by late Friday morning, the neighborhood had the feel of a tourist destination.

Drivers turned down Hoover Road just to get a glimpse of the thing. At one point, four men in a Town of Irondequoit pickup truck stopped in front of it so one of them could jump out and pose for a picture.

"Everybody that goes by stops to take a picture," said neighbor Jeff Hayes. "My wife and I went over to take a picture. I live right here and I still have to stop and look at it."

Standing roughly 15 feet tall with the girth of an elephant, the three-layer snowman evokes visions of a miniature and more cheerful version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that terrorized the Ghostbusters. Grown men barely rise above its lowest layer.

The giant snowman is the brainchild of Max Blaise Jr., a 53-year-old engineer who's been building gargantuan snowmen on his front lawn for decades, when the weather cooperates.

"I always built snowmen with my dad when I was a kid and I've just continued doing it with my kids," Blaise said.

He declined to share his construction methods, other than to say he saves the snow he shovels from his driveway in a pile on his lawn until he has enough. After so many years, Blaise just has a feel for when enough snow is enough snow.

Then he breaks out the ladders — not step ladders, but massive extension models that might be used to paint a house — and gets to work.

Blaise usually has help from his children, April, 23, and Max III, 21, and their friends. But this year, he said, both were out of the house and at college. So he carried on his tradition alone.

"I actually like it," Blaise said of the parade of passersby stopping to take in his work. "It's nice to have people enjoy it. I don't do it just for myself."

The tallest snowman on record was actually a "snow woman" built in Bethel, Me., in 2008, and named for Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe. According to Guinness World Records, the snow woman stood 122 feet tall and took a month to build using a crane.

But who cares about some preconceived, community-building, attention-getting effort in Maine?

Blaise erected his snowman (and it is a man) in five-and-a-half hours with his own two hands, and it's still the biggest snowman you'll probably ever see.

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