In 1982 Gonzalez moved into a studio on Robinson Street in Binghamton, NewYork. The one car garage was formerly part of his late father's used car lot next to the family home. Gonzalez remembers this place as a neighborhood hangout and as a young boy played with old rusted car parts that once filled the garage. The boy somehow found himself caretaker of the house and yard, a role Gonzalez plays even today. Now that he lives elsewhere the rats threaten to take over the rest of the building, but one cannot imagine Gonzalez abandoning the place as an impetus for his craft "He is an American inventor who got started in a garage," [Martin Bidney, "Dark Upstate Artifacts"] Over the last three decades the Robinson studio survived the urban blight and disappearance of a once thriving east side community. In 1994, the interior along with its packed contents of sculpture and drawings was destroyed by fire and re-built that same year.

Gonzalez's studio workshop, he refers to as "the figure factory", was considered a local landmark within art circles in the upstate region. Although he never imagined himself moving from the space and working elsewhere, in 2002 the artist bought a house in Johnson City NY. with an out building that he used for sculpture storage that was eventual converted in 2015 into his current studio.