Lou Nasti was known as the Geppetto of Brooklyn for his glasses, his bushy gray mustache and, above all, his preternatural ability to grant sentience to toys. Using his robotics expertise, he animated legions of puppets and dolls for holiday displays around the world.
His animatronics have been famous in the Dyker Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, where tourists flock to see lawns filled with extravagant Christmas decorations. Some families in the area spend thousands of dollars on their displays.
Mr. Nasti staged a Toyland display at one mansion in Dyker Heights for more than 30 years. The home, owned by Alfred Polizzotto, a lawyer, and his wife, Florence, became a regular stop for sightseers: It featured spinning carousels, toy soldiers atop mechanical horses and a singing, talking Santa two stories high. Reindeer on the house’s second level presided over the illuminated yard below.
“He was a master at what he did, and yet he was like a little kid,” said Tony Muia, the owner of A Slice of Brooklyn Bus Tours, which offers a Christmas tour of Dyker Heights. “You could see that in everything he created; there was an awe to it.”
The Toyland setup took three days of strenuous manual labor to install. For Mr. Nasti and his team, it was yet another herculean effort in a career saturated with them.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he said in a profile in The New York Times in 2017. “You know why? I wasn’t the foreman on the job.”
Mr. Nasti died on Feb. 28 at his home in Brooklyn, his daughter Margot Craven said. He was 79. He learned last year that he had colon cancer, she said.
His company, Mechanical Displays, found consistent seasonal work through stores like F.A.O. Schwarz and B. Altman, but it did not limit itself to Christmas. It constructed the Rainforest Car Wash in Lafayette, Ind., where massive robotic elephants hosed down cars and an Aztec-like stone face instructed customers to turn down their radios. For a school in Wuhan, China, the company crafted a Pinocchio figure that could help teach English.
The king of Morocco commissioned Mr. Nasti to decorate his Yuletide celebration in 2013. Mr. Nasti reminisced to The Times in 2017 about riding through fog from Casablanca to the palace’s willow-framed courtyard, adding, “I said to myself: ‘Not bad, Nasti, they took you from Brooklyn to meet the king. Little Italian kid makes it big.’”
Louis Attilio Nasti was born on Nov. 8, 1945, in the Midwood section of Brooklyn to Attilio and Marie Nasti. His father worked for a souvenir company — he later joined his son at Mechanical Displays — and his mother was a seamstress and artist. Louis was a wunderkind at 5 years old, fashioning Tinkertoys into robots and rigging a Howdy Doody doll with strings to make it dance. His flair for animating things was “just innate,” Ms. Craven said in an interview.
In high school, he apprenticed for the display team at Abraham & Straus, a Brooklyn department store chain. And when he was 19, his knack for robotics was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.
The robot that launched him into the public eye was Mr. Obos, a blue-eyed, 6-foot-5-inch fellow constructed of five-gallon oil cans. Mr. Nasti gave him a deep and sometimes boastful taped voice: “I can do 11 different things,” Mr. Obos said. “There are 100 lights outlining my body and 475 feet of running wire from the back of my leg to my controls.”
As word of the teenager’s talents spread, M.I.T. offered him a scholarship. He turned it down and chose instead to go to work helping to build Macy’s sprawling Santaland at its flagship store in Manhattan. He then left Brooklyn for a brief stint in Atlanta in the early 1960s to work with the puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft.
After returning to Brooklyn, he founded Mechanical Displays in 1969 and operated it for over four decades as it grew from a small workshop into an 80,000-square-foot space in Queens — “Staten Island with a roof on it,” as he described it. He downsized to a smaller warehouse in Flatbush, Brooklyn, after his schedule grew untenable.
Mr. Nasti transformed his work space into an “animatronic wonderland,” Mr. Muia, the bus tour operator, said. At the end of a hallway glowing with blue LED lights, the showroom housed mechanized teddy bears, singing gnomes and a puppy roasting a hot dog over an artificial fire.
Mr. Nasti was known to work from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. most days, with mechanical grease staining his fingertips and opera blaring. An article about him by City Lore, an arts organization, said he began preparing for Christmas in March. One of his most requested holiday window displays presented a “lost Santa” story line, enticing shoppers to follow Mrs. Claus and the elves as they chased Father Christmas along a series of window scenes before ending up inside the department store.
Other popular commissions included talking trees, which Mr. Nasti voiced, and “Nutcracker” figures, which he especially enjoyed crafting, according to Ms. Craven. (She believes he might have seen a bit of himself in the ballet’s story of reanimation.)
Despite the countless hours he clocked at the factory, he told The Daily News in 2019, “I have never worked a day in my life.”
In addition to Ms. Craven, Mr. Nasti is survived by his wife, Emily Nasti; another daughter, Victoria Nichols; a stepson, Vincent Vitelli; and five grandchildren.
After dedicating himself to Christmas all year long, Mr. Nasti was low-key about his own family’s celebrations. “He had a three-foot Christmas tree,” Ms. Craven said. “He had the ornaments glued on, and he had it in a plastic bag. He would unroll the plastic bag, and that was Christmas. He really was the shoemaker with holes in his shoes.”
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