The Brooklyn Museum has a large audience of school-age visitors and their accompanying adults. Scavenger hunts have turned out to be an easy and dynamic way to engage them.

Last June, our colleagues in the Education Division invited ASK to participate in the annual “Bring the Cool” Family Festival, a day-long event organized in collaboration with local non-profit Cool Culture. The festival includes art-making activities and creative play for young children and their families, and it’s always a lot of fun, so we were happy to join in.

Since this year’s festival theme was “Color My World,” we put together a scavenger hunt with eight stops around our American Art galleries. We wrote a set of eight simple color-themed clues for eight varied works in the collection, from a Coclé gold disk embossed with a face to a nineteenth-century Brooklyn landscape painting. When users downloaded the app at the hunt’s starting point, we could guide them exclusively through our ASK exchange in either English or Spanish. We invited them to send photos of the works and to share personal answers to related questions.

The kids who tried the scavenger hunt seemed to enjoy it so much that we thought it was something we should try again. Meanwhile, as we moved into the summer and schools let out for vacation, our ASK Ambassadors reported an increasing number of museum visitors asking for “something to do with children” during their visit.  Responding quickly to this seasonal shift in attendance, the ASK team invited younger children to try the American hunt but also started compiling clues for favorite objects around the rest of the Museum.

Attendance was high in “Georgia O’Keeffe: Modern Living” during the summer and the ASK team came up with rhyming clues to interest young visitors in the show.

These family- and child-oriented chats turned out to be really popular. We chatted frequently with young museumgoers in the special exhibitions “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” and “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Woman 1965-85” as well as the permanent galleries for Ancient Egyptian Art, Decorative Arts, and more.

As the opening date for the fall exhibition “Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt” approached, we were hearing more and more conversation around the Museum about ways to engage families and children with this show. We offered to create a hunt itinerary specifically for “Soulful Creatures,” focusing even more on providing interesting educational facts as follow-ups to the clues.

Several children of staff members took time from a summer afternoon to test an early version of our “Soulful Creatures” hunt in the Egyptian galleries.

Since “Soulful Creatures” wasn’t installed yet, we decided to “beta-test” our script in the permanent Egyptian galleries, with the valuable assistance of several staff members’ children. These young volunteers did a run-through of the hunt and chatted with us afterwards. They gave extremely helpful feedback about the instructions they’d received, the difficulty level of the questions, and the choice and spacing of the objects. They also had some great questions about ASK in general, and we took notes for any future project involving younger visitors.

Each object has a clue as well as facts to share once the user locates it.

When “Soulful Creatures” opened on September 29, we were ready to go. The ASK team had selected ten objects in the show and written a script with two sets of clues, one for beginner readers (about ages 4-7) and one for more advanced learners (ages 8-11), as well as entertaining facts to share about each object once the user had located it. Our ASK Ambassadors were prepared to pitch the hunt to visitors entering the show and to provide assistance with downloads and getting started.

So far, we’ve guided young “mummy-hunters” ranging in age from four through twelve years old, and almost half the hunts have included two or more children together. Some users completed all ten clues, while others (depending on available time or attention span) were satisfied after finding four or five works. Our Visitor Services department is also offering a family packet for this exhibition, so various options are available for kids—we’ve just asked our ASK Ambassadors to pitch the ASK hunt only to families who haven’t already taken advantage of the packet.

We’re often happily surprised when our young users include themselves in their  “I found it!” photos.

Like all our work, this process of shaping and expanding ASK scavenger hunts has been a team project, and it’s turned out to be a team favorite as well as a popular option with visitors. We’ll be thinking about new hunt ideas for the new year as we continue to connect with some of our youngest museum visitors.

One of the questions we’ve had since the beginning of the project was if ASK is appropriate for a mounted kiosk of some kind. We originally thought of this in terms of accessibility—providing kiosks for those who didn’t have smartphones. Most people have smartphones nowadays, and since we now offer texting in addition the app, those that do not have smartphones can text us. We have had a few people with flip phones use the texting option. However, we still wondered if providing a kiosk would encourage ASK use; that if people had a good experience on the kiosk, they might use ASK on their own device. So we decided to test this in our Luce Visible StorageStudy Center.

Luce gives open access to some 2,000 of the many thousands of American objects held in storage. Visitors can use iPads mounted throughout the space to search works by accession number.

Luce has five iPad kiosks for visitors to search the collection online since none of the works have any information beyond an accession number. We loaded ASK on 4 of the 5 iPads (the fifth was being used for a survey) and tried it for a week. During that time we had 14 chats come into the dashboard and learned some important things in the process:

• We need to identify the kiosk function. On the iPad, the app is already open so users don’t have the benefit of seeing the prompts. We need a sign letting people know the iPad is how they can find out information about the works in Luce.
• We need to respond very quickly. Because users are stationary, it feels like a really long time before an answer comes our prompt to put down the phone and look at art doesn’t apply here. We have to make sure to send a response fast, even if it’s a partial answer just to start. This was an initial concern about kiosk-ifying ASK and we were right to be concerned.
• We need to turn off the camera feature. Because the iPads are mounted, the user can’t easily access it anyway. One iPad got stuck on the camera feature somehow and since the iPad case covers the camera button, we had to restart the kiosk.
• We need a way to refresh the conversation. The app stays open, which means that people can read the running conversation from the entire day. We watched several people do just this and it’s a behavior we’ve seen before in other iterations of Q&A kiosks. However, we need to be able to start each day with a fresh conversation, otherwise it goes on too long.
• We need to remove access to emojis. Quite a few silly incoming messaging were in the form on nonsensical emoji streams. Since we tested this right before school started, we think it was probably bored kids. The team’s dashboard can’t read or send emojis anyway, so this is a moot feature.
• We need to be able to hide selected messages from appearing on the iPads. If someone does send nonsense, we want to be able to remove this from view so others aren’t tempted to do the same and so that those who want to read the conversation thread can do so without interruption. Plus it’s simply annoying for the team.

While some visitors using the Luce iPads had genuine questions, like a regular app exchange, others were compelled to send us silly messages. The team dealt with them quite politely, but eventually started ignoring them.

We are working with HFC, our contract developers, to create a special version of the app that has the features we need to be able to install it on a stationary kiosk. We will give it another go. Fingers crossed!

We’re able to track this metric through our dashboard, and although visitors can (and do) ask about anything and everything in the Museum’s permanent collections and special exhibitions, certain trends do emerge. One is that “size matters”—simply put, many people are drawn to the largest objects in our galleries. Here are a few works that consistently make our “top ten”!

This cartonnage, which is the inner-most case for a mummified body, was for the priest Nespanetjerenpere.

Cartonnage of Nespanetjerenpere: This beautifully preserved and highly detailed cartonnage has popular appeal because it’s a mummy container, and who doesn’t want to know more about ancient Egyptian mummies? It also benefits from its placement along the main axis of the Egyptian galleries aligned with the entrance.

The Stuart portrait of Washington has greater prominence in the redesign American art galleries than the previous installation.

Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington, in our American art galleries, offers a familiar face in addition to its imposing size. Visitors are often curious to know whether this is the “real” or “original” portrait of Washington. (in fact, it’s one of about a hundred portraits by Stuart depicting the first President and several in this particular format!). The painting’s many symbolic and historical details make it an ideal subject for ASK chats.

A Little Taste of Outside Love by Mickalene Thomas attracts visitor attention by size and sparkle.

Mickalene Thomas might not be a household name like George Washington, but A Little Taste Outside of Love stops many visitors in their tracks due to its majestic size, bold patterning, and self-possessed model—not to mention the thousands of rhinestones that give sparkle to its surface. And, like Nespanetjerepere and Stuart’s portrait of Washington, it has a prominent placement that pulls visitors closer.

The Bierstadt landscape is a visitor favorite and a collection highlight. Photo by Britteny Najar.

Not every large and asked-about work is a figurative subject. Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie is a landscape painting on a grand scale (84 feet square!), and its dramatic lighting effects and finely painted detail make it feel hyper-real. It still seems to have the same awe-inspiring effect on today’s visitors that it did on its original audience in 1866.

We could name a few other examples, especially large works or installations that have their own gallery spaces (from the Assyrian wall reliefs of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party), but you get the idea!

Of course, having said all this, there are also other reasons that a particular work of art in the galleries may catch the eyes of ASK users. We’ll continue to explore this question in future posts.

Museum sculptures are an interesting case in accessibility; they exist in a place the public can access but usually aren’t allowed to touch. Most sculpture materials aren’t too smelly or noisy so that limits the sensory experience to sight. However, not everyone has the ability to see, and although special exemptions are occasionally made to allow the visually impaired to touch some sculptures, you can only feel so much of a large object.

Sight includes the ability to expand the size or detail of what you’re looking at by moving closer or further away from the object. This isn’t possible in the two-dimensional web, so the paradigm of pairing a “thumbnail” image with a full-size counterpart became an established method for having both a high-level and up-close view of things. With similar constraints in mind, we’ve utilized 3D scanning and printing to create a “thumbnail” for large sculptures which can be used as a tactial maps of the object’s entire shape.

So how do you go from marble masterpiece to plastic replica? Like 3D printing, 3D scanning has also recently broken out of the expensive-equipment-for-expensive-professions world and into the much more afforable world of hobbyists and institutions with modest budgets. AutoCAD’s 123D Catch is a free download which was launched last year as a way to create 3D models from photos using stereophotogrammetry, which basically means taking a bunch of photos from different angles and letting software figure out how far away stuff in one photo is from stuff in the next.

The conditions those photos are taken in both in the camera and everything surrounding the subject are pretty unforgiving; out of the first eight attempts I’ve made scanning sculptures, only the double Pegasus ended up looking close to what it was supposed to. From these initial attempts and some research, I was able to narrow down the list of things to scan next by whether they met this criteria:

• Can’t be shiny
• Can’t be or be inside something transparent
• Can’t be wiggly/moving (no scanning museum visitors)
• Must fit in a photo when shot at 30 different angles in a 360 degree radius
• Must be lit under consistent lighting
• Can’t have shadows cast on it when shooting
• Can’t have too many things moving around in the shot (museum visitors indoors, leaves in a windy day outdoors)

When Rachel recommended Randolph Rogers’s The Lost Pleiad, it so perfectly matched the criteria that I saw myself rendering a perfect model from the first scan. Eleven scanning attempts later, I found out:

• Most cameras try to attempt auto-adjusting exposure when shooting towards a source of light, ruining the scan
• Bright spotlights on bright white marble create a blur between the edge of the object and the background, ruining the scan
• Turning off said spotlights without cranking up a camera’s ISO settings lead to slower shutter releases which lead to blurry images, ruining the scan
• Cameraphones and point-and-shoot cameras don’t have very high ISO settings and I don’t have perfectly steady hands

Scan #11 used a Canon SLR with a manually set white balance, exposure level, and high ISO setting (5000); only auto-focus remained in the camera’s control. Approximately 30 shots in a mostly even perimeter around the statue were taken and re-taken in case if the first take was out of focus along with around 12 overhead shots in a smaller perimeter above and around the statue. After sorting out any blurry photos, the images were uploaded into the Windows version of 123D Catch which shows the angles at which each photo was taken.

Before this is printer-ready, the object had to be cleaned up so that the object has a flat base and doesn’t include stuff in the background picked up by the scan. We used MeshMixer, a free download.

With the texture removed, the remaining mesh looked as though it was melting somewhere that didn’t have gravity with swaths of wall and floor surrounding it (alt+left mouse drag to move around, alt+right mouse drag to zoom in).

I removed floating artifacts is by using the plane cut tool (Edits -> Plane Cut). This was also useful for removing bulges on the surface and slicing a perfectly flat base for the model. The surface of the object was also bumpy and jagged where it should be smooth (arms, torso, etc). The way I solved this was by using the smoothing brush.

The smoothing brush (Smoothbrush/1) is basically digital sandpaper; For each rough area, I adjusted the size and strength of the brush to match the size and roughness of the surface until it looked more like it’s supposed to. In addition to the removal of defects, the object had to be made “watertight” and have any holes and cracks sealed before being printable.

With the  inspector tool (Analysis -> Inspector), a floating color-coded sphere pointed to a gap near the bottom of the robe, which was filled by right-clicking the sphere, choosing to smooth the boundary, then left-clicking the sphere.

With the object ready, I exported it as an STL file (File -> Export), a format which most if not all 3D printers can print with. For the printer we use at the Brooklyn Museum (3D Systems Cube v2), the STL file needed to be processed using their Cube Software, also a free download. Using that, I imported the STL file and clicked Heal to double-check the model’s watertightness. Since the model itself was fairly small, I also used the Orient & Scale tool to make it 260% bigger. In Settings, I removed the raft (the Cube uses a special glue that makes printing a platform raft unnecessary) and also removed supports since most of the statue probably wouldn’t need them. Finally, I centered it with the Center icon and hit Build. For simplicity, I built the final .cube file to a USB drive that I could just plug into the printer.

The printer’s on-screen menu has incredibly clear and simple step-by-step directions on how to print, so I won’t repeat them here. Five hours later, the print was completed and looked close enough to be a handheld tactical map of the real McCoy, with only minor amount of overhanging plastic extrusion in areas near the bottom of the robe and under the raised arm.

BONUS: We’re also releasing the STL files under a Creative Commons license for both the Double Pegasus and The Lost Pleiad which you can download and print on your own 3D printer:

Download Double Pegasus (CC-BY 3.0) on Thingiverse
Download The Lost Pleiad (CC-BY 3.0) on Thingiverse

In the new realism that typified American art of the decade, liberated modern bodies resonate with classical ideals, the teeming modern city is rendered empty and silent, and still life is pared to an essentialized clarity.

In creating an in-gallery interactive, the challenge was finding an activity that would highlight the disparity between what we’ve come to associate with decade and the idealized vision created by its artists.

What did the Jazz Age look like? Interactive asks visitors to make their own selection from an array of popular photographs to see how it compares to the imagery created by the American artists featured in Youth and Beauty.

The resulting interactive uses the Google Images API as a way to show what’s in the popular imagination of four themes related to the show. A visitor searches for imagery on a theme and is asked to select an image from Google’s results; the selected image is displayed along side a related work from the exhibition and the interactive explores how the popular imagery delivered via Google differs from the artists’ depiction.

Youth and Beauty interactive utilizes the Google Images API and runs on iPads embedded into a popular culture timeline.

Given this is a live search, the results are not always perfectly accurate to the time period, but they are pretty close.  We’ve also tweaked it a bit to help the results gain a little more accuracy; turning on Google’s “safe search” and displaying only black and white imagery. The interactive runs on four iPads in the gallery where the devices are embedded into a popular culture timeline in the exhibition. You can also play with it on the web.

Exterior view of Trinity Church, 371 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York.

At this stage, I’m researching individual objects in preparation for writing the exhibition catalogue. Summer is a great time to conduct research—libraries, historical societies, and other archival institutions are usually air-conditioned! It’s also when many of us get away for a break. This year, I was able to combine work and vacation in Buffalo, New York. Trinity Church, one of this city’s many churches, has a direct connection to a drawing featured in Fine Lines: I had to make a research visit!

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This stunning drawing by John La Farge is a preparatory study for a stained-glass window he designed for the church in 1889. The image depicts a scene from the Bible’s Book of Revelation in which an angel (at lower left) places a seal on the forehead of a woman to identify her as one of God’s chosen people, while two other faithful ascend into heaven above. Comparing the two works, you can see that the finished window follows the drawing very closely in composition. Note how, in the drawing, La Farge marked out the window’s architectural borders, including its arched shape and the triangular peak of the altar below. Given how close these works are, it’s interesting to compare how La Farge realized the same design in different media. In the monochromatic drawing, he models the figures and their drapery tonally—varying the shading of the silvery-colored graphite in order to create the illusion of three-dimensional forms. He achieves these same effects in the window through individual pieces of colored glass (with the exception of the hands and faces which are painted).

Detail of Preparatory Study for “The Sealing of the Twelve Tribes”

As these works demonstrate, La Farge was highly talented in many different art forms. Trained as a painter, he turned to decorative work—particularly stained glass and mural painting—in the 1870s. His first major project, Trinity Church in Boston (1876), brought him widespread acclaim. La Farge revolutionized the centuries-old practice of stained glass with several important innovations, including the use of opalescent glass (milky glass with variegations of colors) and the layering of sheets of glass to achieve greater depth and subtleties of color—both evident in the Buffalo window. He developed these techniques in the late 1870s-early 1880s around the same time as Louis Comfort Tiffany, another modern master of stained glass, was making similar experiments. (La Farge received a patent for opalescent glass shortly before Tiffany did.) These two artists set new standards of artistry for the medium, although competition between them turned the former friends into rivals. The Sealing of the Twelve Tribes window helped to bring such advances to international audiences. Before it was installed in Buffalo, La Farge exhibited it at the 1889 Exposition Universale in Paris. The French government awarded him a Cross of the Legion of Honor for the window’s technical originality.

View of interior of Trinity Church; main altar at right, La Farge’s “The Sealing of the Twelve Tribes” window is left of center.

When Trinity Church completed construction on its current building in 1886, its wealthy congregants sought out the best designers to decorate its windows. As a result, it has some of the finest stained glass in America. Of the over twenty windows that bathe the interior with richly colored, luminous light, La Farge made ten and Tiffany five. Charlotte Sherman Watson, a member of a prominent Buffalo banking family, commissioned The Sealing of the Twelve Tribes in memory of her mother and aunt. You can learn more about Trinity Church and its windows at http://buffaloah.com/a/del/389/hp/hp.html.

Seeing the window in situ was a real treat—if you travel to Buffalo, I highly recommend putting this church on your itinerary! My visit also helped me to better understand our beautiful La Farge drawing through learning about its historical context. Keep an eye on the Museum’s website for more information on the Fine Lines exhibition of American drawings.

Attributed to Thomas Hudson (British, 1701-1779), Mrs. John Wendt, circa 1745. Oil on canvas, 50 1/4 x 39 7/8 in. (127.6 x 101.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Kaywin W. Smith Lehman, 79.290.

While these galleries display works of vast diversity in terms of date, medium, style, and cultural origin, the featured artists have generally always worked in the Americas. We’re making an exception to include this British painting in the gallery devoted to the colonial experience, where it will join objects made in North and South America. From an historical and aesthetic standpoint, this addition makes a lot of sense. Anglo-Americans who settled in the British colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries frequently looked to the mother country for artistic inspiration. When elite patrons commissioned a portrait, they wanted to emulate the latest styles in London as a sign of their cultural refinement. And, during the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Hudson was one of the most sought out portraitists by London’s high society. The portrait of Mrs. John Wendt is typical of Hudson’s manner in which he combines the grandeur of earlier Baroque images of royals, with the soft, pastel colors favored by the current Rococo style. Such portrait trends traveled across the Atlantic in several ways: by English-trained artists working in the colonies, by Americans traveling overseas, and by printed reproductions of works of art imported from abroad.

View of American Identities galleries with, from left to right: Robert Feke (American, ca.1707-ca.1752), Portrait of a Woman, 1748, oil on canvas, 49 3/8 x 39 9/16 in. (125.4 x 100.5 cm), Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund and Museum Purchase Fund, 43.229; and William Williams (American, 1727-1791), Deborah Hall, 1766, oil on canvas, 71 3/8 x 46 3/8 in. (181.3 x 117.8 cm), Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 42.45.

For this British “incursion” into the American galleries, Hudson’s work will hang near American-made paintings of the same period, including the stunning portraits of an unidentified woman by native-born Robert Feke and of the Philadelphian Deborah Hall by British immigrant William Williams. Comparing these works, you can see how the American ladies had themselves portrayed in the same manner as their European counterparts—with sumptuous dresses, elegant poses, and stylish accessories (lace, jewelry, and flowers). This grouping speaks to the vibrant nature of globalization in the eighteenth century as people, ideas (such as British portrait conventions), and things (such as the Chinese silks used to clothe such wealthy and fashionable women as these) moved throughout the world. Similar kinds of international cultural exchanges can be seen throughout the American Identities galleries.

Taking up two entire city blocks in midtown Manhattan, from 7^th to 8^th Avenues and 31^st to 33^rd streets, the grand edifice boasted a 150-foot ceiling in its 277- foot long waiting room, which was inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla and the Basilica of Constantine. Comprising nine acres of granite and travertine marble shipped in from Italy, the building was lined by exterior colonnades that recalled the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome, giving it the appearance of, in McKim’s words, “a monumental gateway and entrance to one of the great Metropolitan cities of the world.”

Adolph Alexander Weinman (American, 1870-1952). Night, Clock Figure from Pennsylvania Station, 31st to 33rd Streets between 7th and 8th Avenues, NYC, ca. 1910. Pink granite, 132 x 86 x 42 in. (335.3 x 218.4 x 106.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Lipsett Demolition Co. and Youngstown Cartage, 66.250.1. Creative Commons-BY-NC

Now on display in the Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden, this 11-foot female figure once stood beside a huge clock that greeted travelers entering the station. Each of the station’s four pedestrian entryways was surmounted by one of these clocks, and each clock was flanked by two allegorical female figures representing time, carved in pink granite. Day held a sunflower while the hooded Night bore a drooping poppy. These magnificent figures, in addition to the 22 perched eagles that dotted the roofline, were all designed by the sculptor Adolf A. Weinman.

Charles Follen McKim. Partial Column, from Penn Station, 31st to 33rd Streets between 7th and 8th Avenues, NYC (demolished 1964), ca. 1910. Travertine marble, 145 x 136 in. (368.3 x 345.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Youngstown Cartage Co. and New York Improvement & Development, 66.250.2. Creative Commons-BY-NC

Installed at the lower level of the Sculpture Garden is a 14-foot partial column from the station’s interior. Carved from travertine marble, it was one of six 35-foot-high Ionic columns that flanked each of the stairways leading to the main waiting room. This photo, which shows the columns at the far end, gives you an impression of the sheer size and monumentality of this light-filled space.

Penn Station, Waiting Hall Facing 33^rd Street Entrance, 1910, photograph, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

Penn Station was sadly demolished starting in 1963, after less than 50 years of service, taken apart piece by piece over three years. The façade sculptures by Weinman were carted to a landfill in the New Jersey Meadowlands along with the rest of the rubble-sculptural elements, marble columns, and all. (The circumstances surrounding the demolition have been eloquently recorded in a number of places, including one season 3 episode of Mad Men; Lorraine Diehls’s The Late Great Penn Station; and one of my top reads from this summer, Rubble, a history of demolition written by Jeff Byles.)

But Penn Station had many fans, who, though unable to stop the demolition, were instrumental in salvaging many important elements from the building. The Museum’s Penn Station fragments in particular were rescued from the dump through the efforts of Ivan Karp and the Anonymous Arts Recovery Society. Night and Penn Station Column were two of the first and most important pieces to be installed the former Frieda Schiff Warburg Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1966.

A number of other Penn Station elements were salvaged as well. The Museum also owns two decorative plaques (currently not on view) taken from the exterior walls. Many of the eagle sculptures have been located at various metropolitan locations on the eastern seaboard.

Of the four original clock figures, one pair now forms the centerpiece of the Eagle Scout Memorial Fountain in Kansas City, Missouri. A second pair is planned for use in a renovation of a Newark, New Jersey, train station; and a Day figure (possibly the companion to the Museum’s Night) was found in 1995 by the Bronx-based Con Agg Recycling Corporation. The fourth pair is still unlocated.

Hugo Haase (German, 1857-1933). Lion, from the El Dorado Carousel, Coney Island, Brooklyn, ca. 1902. Zinc sheeting, Mounted: 82 x 36 x 69 in. (208.3 x 91.4 x 175.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Frederick Fried, 66.251.1. Creative Commons-BY-NC

One of the earliest art works to enter the Museum’s Sculpture Garden collection, and perhaps one of the most popular, is the roaring lion, installed over the rear staff entrance to the Museum, ready to pounce on those who enter. The lion had a long history before coming to the Museum in 1966. He was originally designed as one of a trio that pulled a chariot atop the entrance pavilion to the ornate El Dorado Carousel, a popular attraction at Coney Island for over 50 years.

Image from Carol A. Grissom, Zinc Sculpture in America 1850-1950 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), p. 427.

This elaborately gaudy gateway was decorated with life-size female figures playing harps or floating through the clouds and with painted curtains depicting women warriors on horses. The central gateway was surmounted by the chariot, and life-size figures of St George slaying the dragon topped the niches at either end. Like the lion, the rest of the façade was made of formed sheet zinc and painted in bright colors. Research has determined that the lion may have originally been painted a gold color with bronze metallic paint and illuminated with electric lightbulbs in its eye sockets and emitted sparks from its mouth.

The elaborate and ornate carousel itself was composed of three separate platforms, each rotating at different speeds. The innermost was a throne room surrounded by life-size angels with trumpets; the outer and inner tiers had beautifully carved chariots. The platforms were adorned with a menagerie of creatures—horses, pigs, ducks, eagles, dolphins, and cupids–all made of hand-carved wood and surrounded by Art Nouveau paintings, mirrored posts, and 6000 flashing lights. Inside was a four-ton band organ manufactured by A. Ruth und Sohn in Waldkirch, Germany.

The carousel was built in 1902 by Hugo Haase of Leipzig, a successful German amusement park ride manufacturer and bridge builder. In 1910, it was purchased by John Jurgens for the exorbitant price of $150,000 (plus $30,000 custom fees) and installed near Dreamland Park on Surf Avenue. It was only one of several independent carousels in Coney Island, but according to carousel expert Frederick Fried, it was “the most spectacular carousel America had ever seen.”

On May 27, 1911, Dreamland Park was destroyed by a huge fire and was never rebuilt (the New York Aquarium, founded in 1896 at Castle Garden in Battery Park, has occupied that site since 1957). The fire also damaged the carousel but not much. It was purchased and repaired by Steeplechase Park’s owner George C. Tilyou, who moved it indoors to his fireproof building the Pavilion of Fun. The carousel’s sheet zinc sculptural façade was then relocated as the corner entrance to Steeplechase on Surf Avenue for the next decade. When the façade was demolished in 1923, the three lions were removed and reused elsewhere in the park.

In 1965, Tilyou’s descendants sold the park to developer Fred Trump (Donald’s father), who demolished the park before it could gain landmark status. In 1968, unable to build his apartment complexes because of zoning regulations, Trump sold the land to the city. Since 2001 it has been the site of MCU Park (formerly Keyspan Park), the home of the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball team.

What happened to the carousel and lions? When the park was demolished, most of the amusement rides were put in storage and eventually sold. The El Dorado carousel was purchased for the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, and is currently in use at the Toshimaen Amusement Park in Tokyo. The El Dorado lions were purchased by private collectors, including Frederick Fried, who donated this lion to the Brooklyn Museum in 1966.

Brooklyn Iron Foundry. Lamp Post, one of two, from Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, Brooklyn, ca. 1900. Cast iron, 140 in. (355.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 66.254.2. Creative Commons-BY-NC

The museum also purchased a pair of lampposts from Steeplechase Park, which are now installed in the Sculpture Garden. These two street lights, manufactured by the Brooklyn Iron Foundry around 1900, are designed with a central globe encircled by four hanging globes. In 1984 the city used the museum’s historic lampposts to cast reproduction street lights (models BB12 and BB14) for use in a renovation of Union Square.