This time of year, Israel Reyes, 57, the senior handyman and longtime boiler operator at Public School 69X Journey Prep in the Soundview section of the Bronx, disappears briefly down to the basement.

“I’m a bit sentimental, so I go down to the boiler room to cry because the kids are done with school,” he said. “I lose my family for two months.”

On the plus side, the lonely summer break allows Mr. Reyes to concentrate on the colorful wall murals he has become known for painting inside the 93-year-old building.

His masterpiece is the “Children’s Rainforest,” his fantastical makeover of the large ground-floor space used as a cafeteria, among other purposes.

For years, the 15-foot walls were faded and drab, Mr. Reyes said.

“There were no colors — it was like walking into a prison,” recalled Mr. Reyes, who said that 12 years ago he grew tired of watching students entering the building each morning with their heads down.

“A lot of these kids come from broken homes, just like I did, and I’d see them walking in, all stressed out and looking down, because the school looked even worse than their homes,” he said. “I wanted to do something to make them look up.”

So he persuaded the principal to let him use leftover paint from other jobs in the building to start creating an educational wonderland. He worked for years, during his down time, his lunch hour and on his personal time, even late into the night.

“The kids come in now in the morning and they smile,” Mr. Reyes said. “They come in and ask me, ‘What’s next?’ and I show them what I worked on overnight.”

Besides painting the large wall murals, he turned the classroom doors into entrances to caves of discovery. The thick support columns changed into colored stone pedestals. The many ceiling pipes became a tangle of different colors. One electrical box was transformed into a beehive, another into a spider’s web.

On the ceilings, Mr. Reyes painted blue clouds with smiling faces. On one wall, a smiling sun beams down on the children and seems to follow them across the room, a Mona Lisa effect that Mr. Reyes said he achieved by fashioning the eyes out of gemstones and glitter.

“The parents call it witchcraft, but the kids love it,” said Mr. Reyes, a self-taught artist who uses found objects.

His makeshift space models hang from the ceiling. The Hubble Space Telescope is made from a light fixture and a coffee can, the space shuttle from spools that held plastic wrap. Those solar panels on his space station were burned-out relays from the boiler.

Mr. Reyes posted educational information about animal species and challenged students to look for his painted versions, even providing toy binoculars and safari hats.

The murals are united by a rainbow that runs throughout the entire floor and serves as the track for the education express, a monorail that leads to a pot of gold painted near the cafeteria.

At some point, school officials began buying Mr. Reyes paint when he needed it. They also bought orange cafeteria tables to match his color scheme. When Mr. Reyes renamed the cafeteria Café 69 on his mural, the school adopted the name.

“He’s our own Picasso — that’s what we call him,” Sheila Durant, the school’s principal, said. “We encourage creativity and recycling here, so what he does falls in line with our philosophy. Even though he’s a custodian he’s teaching students to think out of the box.”

His work has caught the eye of visiting principals who have adopted his ideas for their own schools, said Mr. Reyes, who has also been permitted by his principals and his union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, to do similar work at another elementary school nearby.

Mr. Reyes, whom everyone calls Carlos, said he and his five brothers were raised by his father in the Bronx and on a farm in Puerto Rico.

“We had to make our own toys from garbage, from whatever we found,” said Mr. Reyes, who as an adult has made sculptures out of trash-picked objects, especially the wooden legs off discarded furniture, to entertain his four children and 14 grandchildren.

He calls it “table leg art,” and has made a panorama representation of Manhattan that is on display in the school library, a cityscape with wooden legs as skyscrapers. He has also made a much larger, illuminated version of the entire city at his apartment building in the Bronx, where he is the super.

Until recently, said Mr. Reyes, a widower, his apartment was decorated in an over-the-top theme — a botanical garden with a pond, a lamppost and a park bench — recalling his Puerto Rican upbringing.

“When my son moved back home, I had to sleep on the bench,” he said. “I’d tell people, ‘I’m not homeless, but I sleep on a park bench.’”

Credit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/nyregion/at-a-bronx-school-the-handyman-can.html