Month: September 2011

Lavishly restored 1922 Ohio carousel reopens in Brooklyn

Modern(ish), Treasures

On Friday, September 16, a carousel built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company (PTC) in 1922 for the now-defunct Idora Park in Youngstown, Ohio, will again delight ladies and gentlemen and kids of all ages, only now their view will be of the East River, Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline.

Idora Park officially closed its doors after 85 years on Labor Day 1984, after a fire in April devastated much of the park, including its famed 1929 wooden coaster, The Wild Cat. The carousel, scorched but intact, sold at auction October 20th of that year. It would have been just another sad story of how the decline of the urban manufacturing base decimated a local business until it was sold for scrap, but this merry-go-round got lucky. Each of its 48 horses and 2 chariots were sold individually, but at the end of the auction all the bids were tallied up and a single buyer was offered the opportunity to take the entire carousel for the combined sum. New York real estate developer David Walentas and his wife Jane bought Philadelphia Toboggan Company #61 for $385,000.

They were in the market because Walentas was developing a waterfront shopping complex in the Brooklyn neighborhood known as DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass). A rounded riverside spot seemed like the perfect place for an antique carousel so they went and bought them one. They hired a specialized company to dismantle PTC #61 and ship the whole shebang to Brooklyn, where Jane, who has a master’s degree in fine art, began researching carousel restoration.

Instead of outsourcing, Jane decided to take on the massive restoration herself. It’s an incredible story of obsession and dedication. First she documented like crazy, taking pictures and samples and notes on the main parts of the carousel. The original paint was unsalvageable so she sent the parts to a chemical stripper so the dozen layers of overpaint could be removed. Jane had a carpenter repair the parts, prime them and then set them aside in storage to focus on the stars of the show, the horses and chariots.

I spent years, mostly alone, scraping the many layers of park paint to reveal the original palette and beautiful carvings. I had hoped to be able to keep the horses in their factory paint, but was eventually convinced that it was not possible. Much of the paint was fragile and the surface of most of the horses was rough and needed too much repair to have been left as they were. Once again, I did precise matches of the factory colors, and traced, drew and photographed everything I uncovered. I worked scraping paint off the horses, sporadically over the course of about 16 years.

In June of 2004, the decades of work came to a head. She moved into a new studio, hired more help and set about doing all the repairs to the individual horses. Once repaired, they were repainted with painstaking fidelity to the factory original look, and then, because rich people are crazy, Jane took it a giant mommy step further and gilded all the horses’ metallic fittings and decoration, originally aluminum leaf or aluminum leaf with a gold wash, in freaking palladium and 24 carat gold. She also hired a luxury car customizer from Mercedes-Benz to do all the hand pin striping work on the horse bridles.

The two chariots, “Cherub” and “Liberty” she was able to keep in their original paint. After removing all the coats on top of it, the original paint was sturdy enough to stand on its own with just a little infilling. Although there’s a noticeable cracklure over the chariots’ surface, they still look fantastic even next to the freshly repainted ponies.

In 2006, the carousel was ready to be put back together and on display. Over the years the shopping center project had been scrapped to be replaced with a Empire Fulton Ferry Park, so the Walentas set up the carousel, now renamed “Jane’s Carousel” in honor of its obsessively loving foster mom, in another of their properties, a converted spice warehouse in the DUMBO neighborhood where people could see it among the art galleries but not ride it.

After some struggling with various committees, entities and civic groups, the Walentas got the nod to install the carousel on the waterfront in front of the Civil War-era Tobacco Warehouse. They hired French architect Jean Nouvel to design a suitable pavilion to house it and he created a $9 million transparent acrylic jewel box that would show off the beauty of the carousel during the day, show the riders a most spectacular view and that would at night be lit so that the horses cast huge shadows on the white floor-to-ceiling window shades. They also donated $3.45 million to the park for landscaping and nighttime lighting that will allow the park to stay open until 1:00 AM.

Oh, and they donated a 1922 Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel with palladium and 24 carat gold fittings.

Now the jewel box is done, the parts and horses have been moved in, and as of Friday, Jane’s Carousel will be open from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., every day except Tuesday. A ride costs $2, children under three ride for free.

Roald Dahl’s writing shed in need of rescue

Modern(ish), Museums

The pocket-sized brick and polystyrene shed at the bottom of Roald Dahl’s garden in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, is in dire need of conservation. Dahl built it in the late 50s after seeing Dylan Thomas’ writing shed and since Styrofoam was involved, obviously it was not built to last. Right now visitors can see the shed but are not allowed inside.

Roald Dahl’s family, including his supermodel granddaughter Sophie (the young heroine in The BFG was named after her), have launched an appeal to raise £500,000 (just short of $800,000) to restore the structure and to remove the entire inside of the hut and install it inside the Roald Dahl Museum where people can see it and it can be properly shielded from the elements. It’s a bit of a jarring thought — conserving history by peeling it out of its context — but what can you do when the context is made of Styrofoam? They moved Julia Child’s Cambridge kitchen to the Smithsonian, and that turned out pretty cool.

It is hoped the structure will be transferred to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre by March next year.

The idea came from the author’s grandson, Luke Kelly, who was inspired by the relocation of artist Francis Bacon’s studio to the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin.

Dahl’s granddaughter, Sophie, said the family wanted to share the writer’s “palpable magic and limitless imagination” with visitors.

A further £500,000 will be needed by the museum to create an interactive exhibit to set the hut in context for visitors.

The appeal has gotten some negative buzz in the press and on the Internet. The Dahl family is hardly impoverished. Roald sold a lot of books in his day, and they still sell steadily. Hearing a supermodel from a wealthy family ask for donations doesn’t sit too well with recession-struck England. According to the Roald Dahl Museum’s Amelia Foster, however, the family has already contributed a large sum and the appeal is targeted to foundations and philanthropists rather than to taking the last coins out of threadbare pockets. They’ve already raised half the £500,000 from large donors, in fact.

The legendary space in which Willy Wonka and the BFG were conceived and born has been kept exactly as Roald Dahl left it when he died in 1990. Dahl wrote all of his most famous stories in that office. He insisted it be a private space; his family were not allowed inside and even his illustrator Quentin Blake, collaborator and personal friend, only ever set foot in the shed one time.

The building was dedicated entirely to writing. There was room for a desk, a file cabinet and his beat up wingback grandpa chair which he sat it with a wooden board on this lap to write on. He had injured his back flying for the Royal Air Force in World War II (during which he also spied/slept with rich ladies for his country) so he wasn’t comfortable using a traditional office chair and desk setup.

The desk in the room was covered with gee gaws, as was pretty much every horizontal surface, including my two personal favorites: his hip bone (the yellow sphere in the center front of the desk) and a large ball made of foil wrappers from the Cadbury’s chocolates he ate over the years (the shiny grey sphere between the rock and the grasshopper, behind the geodes). The bone, the ball of the hip joint, was sawed off from the top of his femur in a hip replacement surgery. The doctor gave it to him after the operation telling him it was the biggest one he’d ever seen. Naturally it occupies pride of place on the desk of Dahl curios.

In a radio interview in 1970s, Dahl described the integral role his poky, ramshackle little shed played in his writing:

You become a different person, you are no longer an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things, you go into a completely different world. I personally draw all the curtains in the room, so that I don’t see out the window and put on a little light which shines on my board. Everything else in your life disappears and you look at your bit of paper and get completely lost in what you’re doing. You do become another person for a moment. Time disappears completely. You may start at nine in the morning and the next time you look at your watch, when you’re getting hungry, it can be lunchtime. And you’ve absolutely no idea that three or fours hours have gone by.

You can explore the hut and find out more about its contents and Roald’s work on the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre website. Protip: the virtual tour didn’t work for me in Chrome but did in Internet Explorer.

Neolithic lovers seek new home

Ancient, Museums

In February of 2007, construction workers building a warehouse in Valdaro, farm country on the outskirts of Mantua discovered a Stone Age burial site. Archaeologists excavated further and discovered a unique Neolithic double burial, a young man and woman who had died 6000 years ago and been locked in an eternal embrace ever since. The Mantua region during the Stone Age was marshland, an excellent environment for preserving skeletons, and in fact dozens of Neolithic burial sites have been found in the area. Most of them are individual burials, some mass burials, some double burials of mother and child, the occasional head buried under a dwelling, but a man and woman embracing, arms and legs interlocked, had never been found before.

The male skeleton (on the left in the picture) was found with a flint arrowhead near his neck. His lady friend had a long flint blade along her thigh, plus two flint knives under her pelvis. There was initial speculation that the weapons might have been the cause of death, like perhaps the lovers had been found mid-embrace by a jealous husband who killed them both on the spot à la Paolo and Francesca. Osteological examination found no evidence of violent death, however, no fractures, no microtrauma, so the most likely explanation is the flint tools were buried along with the people as grave goods.

After the story made the news with a myriad Stone Age Romeo and Juliet headlines, the site had to be guarded night and day to protect it from the carelessly curious and would-be looters. Plus, the landowner still wanted to build his warehouse, so archaeologists decided to remove the entire grave. To keep the couple in their entwined position, archaeologists cut away and lifted the entire section of earth in which they were entombed. The whole burial, all six and half feet cubed of it, was then taken in a box to a laboratory for further analysis.

Researchers were able to pin down their ages to between 18 and 20. Given their discovery in a necropolis, it’s unlikely that they died by accident while hugging, to keep warm during a freezing night, for instance. They were found embracing because they were positioned that way after death.

Four years later and the “Lovers of Valdaro” are finally out of the lab and on display at the Mantua Archeological Museum. It’s a short exhibit, only lasting through Sunday, arranged by an organization that is trying to raise money to make it a permanent display.

The association “Lovers in Mantua” is campaigning for their right to have a room of their own. According to [Professor Silvia] Bagnoli, 250,000 euros will be enough for an exhibition center, and another 200,000 euros could pay for a multimedia space to tell the world the mysterious story of these prehistoric lovers.

The Encino Rembrandt plot thickens

Modern(ish), Treasures

A few weeks ago I blogged about a Rembrandt drawing that was stolen from an LA-area Ritz-Carlton hallway exhibit only to turn up two days later in the pastor’s office of an Encino church. Almost as soon as the story got traction in the press doubts cropped up as to whether the drawing was a Rembrandt at all (see Rowan’s comment on the original entry). No such drawing is listed in the accepted catalogs of Rembrandt’s work, and none of the experts contacted by reporters had ever heard of it. At least one expert thought the pen-and-ink drawing looked like it came from Rembrandt’s school instead of having been done by the master himself.

The Linearis Institute, owners of the drawing and sponsors of the Ritz-Carlton exhibit, made no rebuttal to these charges. Calls and emails from reporters asking for comment went answered, which is a little weird but not unheard of. Calls from police investigating the theft also went unanswered for a while, which is far weirder.

The weirdnesses continue to accumulate. The alleged Rembrandt is still in the possession of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department because the Linearis Institute refuses to provide proof of ownership.

[T]he institute’s attorney, William Klein, said Linearis purchased “The Judgment,” from a legitimate seller. He said the institute’s officials just don’t want to say who that was.

“Things like that really are trade secrets,” Klein told The Associated Press. “We don’t believe we need to reveal trade secrets to get back what is ours.”

He acknowledged the institute has no trail of paperwork (called provenance in art-world speak) to prove “The Judgment” really is a Rembrandt. But he added that officials at Linearis believe it is and it shouldn’t matter what authorities think.

😮

Call me psychic, but something is rotten in Denmark. Best case scenario this so-called institute purchased a so-called Rembrandt from the back of a truck. Why else hide the seller from the police? If your sources of high-end art are “trade secrets” who sell Old Master drawings without ownership history then you’re buying on the black market, period. The difference is that a legitimate seller would trouble himself to counterfeit an ownership history replete with anonymous Swiss private collectors and girlfriends from Canada so that the new owners can have plausible deniability should the cops start sniffing around.

On top of that, it Linearis also isn’t interested in pressing charges against the thieves should they be found. Mr. Klein, Esq., says the institute is really only focused on finding a “compromise” that will allow them to get the drawing back. If the police arrest the thieves, the institute’s position is they can “do anything they need to do that’s in the interests of justice.” Sounds legit to me.

First prehistoric engraved clay disks found in Alaska

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

Archaeologists documenting unusual petroglyphs in the Noatak National Preserve in Northwest Alaska have discovered four prehistoric engraved clay disks that are the first such artifacts ever found in Alaska.

Rock art of any kind is rare in Interior and Northern Alaska. The Noatak petroglyphs are engraved on the foundation stones of prehistoric house pits on the shore of Feniak Lake. Archaeologists found them 40 years ago but then left them undocumented. This summer, a multidisciplinary team of artists and archaeologists from the University of Alaska Museum of the North and the National Park Service went to Noatak to sketch and trace all the petroglyphs on site.

During small-scale excavations in the shallow depressions that mark the remains of prehistoric dwellings, Scott Shirar, a research archaeologist with the UA museum of the North, and his colleagues made an exciting discovery. They found four clay disks decorated with lines, grooves and perforations.

“The first one looks like a little stone that had some scratch marks on it,” Shirar said. “We got really excited when we found the second one with the drilled hole and the more complicated etchings on it. That’s when we realized we had something unique.”

After collaborating with experts and looking up examples in the archaeological record, Shirar said the disks appear to be a new artifact type for Alaska. “We only opened up a really small amount of ground at the site, so the fact that we found four of these artifacts indicates there are probably more and that something really significant is happening.”

The disks have yet to be dated officially. They are at the University of Alaska Museum of the North where they will be analyzed and studied further. Preliminary dating based on the features of the ancient dwellings and other observable data suggests the settlement and clay disks date to the late prehistoric era, approximately a thousand years ago. Radiocarbon dating on organic matter recovered during the excavation will provide more detail.

Feniak Lake is about 100 miles northeast of the Inupiat Eskimo community of Kotzebue. Despite the Arctic climate, the location has been populated for 11,000 years, which means people settled there in the first immigrant wave to cross the Bering land bridge between 16,000 and 10,000 B.C.