At one time, Charles Looff had his carving shop in East Providence and
would show this carousel to prospective customers to help put over a sale. Of almost fifty carousels that Looff built
between 1875 and 1918, this is one of the ten or twelve still remaining in
operation.
|
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
Crescent Park #12
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Thanks for sharing these pictures which bring back fond memories about a carousel I worked on back about the same time Eric was in OCS. I was working at WDW and became familiar with the 110 Horses on their classic Carousel. I don't remember the history on the unit but it was pretty old when it was restored and installed in Florida. I got to watch some of the horses get rehabbed. A fascinating and slow process each of the horses had a couple of full color pages in a notebook in the staff shop with pics from each angle and detailed drawings with notes and color part # and such. It would take weeks to clean, strip,mask and paint each of the colors and gold leaf.
Larry,
The carousel at Walt Disney World was manufactured by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in 1918 for Palace Gardens in Detroit, Michigan. It was later moved to Olympic Park in Maplewood, N.J. where it operated for many years. When it was refurbished for Disney World, all of the stationary horses were converted to “jumpers” (i.e. the kind that go up and down) much to the horror of knowledgeable carousel authorities/preservationists such as Frederick Fried. (A pre-Disney photo of one of the horses from this carousel graces the cover of Fried’s 1964 book A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE CAROUSEL.)
These decorative panels & shields
that were hung on the top sweeps
& spreaders were called "outside
scenery" & for no good reason I
can remember the names of every
component of a jenny from the
mud sills to the flag pole
Post a Comment