As the holidays appear at our door, once again it’s time for the Curtiss Museum Miniatures and Dollhouse Exhibition. This has been a regional favorite and a seasonal tradition for twenty years or so. For six years right in the middle I was responsible for it. So I was very pleased to see that this exhibition is the best in recent years.
First of all, you step into the exhibit right as you come through the door; the lobby is jam-packed. I was delighted to see a large somewhat whimsical model of the late lamented Keuka Maid. Also in the lobby — a 35-foot layout of a sawmill operation, circled by an LGB-scale model train. Now, here’s the thing — it all works. The train tools around, the overhead drive shafts spin, the belts power the machinery. You’ve really got to start at one end and work your way slowly down to the other in order to get the full impact.
Once you GET to the other end, you’ll enjoy the charming layout (enlarged this year) put together by Jim Sladish of Ithaca. Two lines of trains chug around and through a little Christmas village. Both of these are long-time favorites in the show — ask the folks at the desk if they can be turned on.
Other old friends include the small-scale coffee-table layouts, laden with crystals, by Will Parker. But all that’s just the trains and similar items. The bulk of the items on exhibit are dollhouses or room boxes.
Having said that, don’t get the wrong impression. Some of them are commercial products, or home-built toys made for little kids to play with. These include a 19th-century Bliss house with lithographed wallpaper, a tiny three bears house, and several large solid home-built dollhouses. There’s also a Depression-era store and a World War II-era commercially-sold house, both made of materials reflecting the shortages of their times.
Much of what’s on view, though, was never meant to be played with. It was created by adults for adults… for exhibit, for the challenge, or for the sheer joy of it.
Just for instance, there’s a room box of a motorcycle shop. A large spooky Halloween house. A colonial kitchen. A library, its selves lined with individual miniature books. High-quality, meticulously-detailed miniature soldiers. Two pasteboard cathedrals. A tank and a ship, each built from toothpicks. Two or three old-time barns and barnyards. A set of model cars from movies and TV shows — see if you can identify them.
As the working layouts anchor one end of the exhibit, the other end is anchored by several large cases of antique toys (try to find Charlie McCarthy and Donald Duck), and by the museum’s Evalena Stickler collection of antique dolls.
It seems to me that enjoying the holidays means enjoying the familiar and traditional, while also discovering and delighting in the new. Strolling through an exhibit like this is a case in point. Some of the visitors have been coming here literally all their lives, and some of the perennial exhibits have become part of their Christmas, part of Thanksgiving. But a few steps on, or in the next case — there’s always something excitingly new.
For some years now I’ve been exhibiting a small (and rickety) toy store, one of my father’s rare pleasant mementoes of a very difficult childhood during the Depression. He probably got it in December (Christmas and his birthday are eight days apart), probably around 1930. He played with it. My sister and I played with it. My two sons played with it. My father passed away in April, at the age of 87, taking memories of Depression and war with him. And Christmas comes around yet again. And here we are.