DOLL AND TOY MUSEUM MINIATURES TEACH HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY
Miniature period rooms on display at the Brooklyn Heights Public Library are a collaboration created and designed by The Doll and Toy Museum of NYC, with the assistance of Chris Higgins, Technical Director, at the New York City College of Technology, Sylvia Krajniak, from the Masters Program in the History of Decorative Arts at Cooper –Hewitt Museum and several other volunteers.
The period rooms are an innovative way to teach about NYC history while enjoying the delicate miniature furnishing and decorative arts. The pieces from the donated collection amassed over 75 years and present 4 New York Mayors in Authentic Period Rooms. One was the first in the city’s history; another, its most corrupt; a third warned Great Britain about the dangers of taxing American colonists; a fourth is a self-made billionaire. What the four men have in common is that they’ve all been mayors of New York City, and they’ve been recreated as miniature hand-sculpted dolls and placed in authentic period rooms, from the 1600s to the present, by the Doll and Toy Museum of New York City.
Displayed at the Brooklyn Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public Library System, the furnishings are from a collection of hundreds of miniatures amassed by Bob Milne over three quarters of a century, and donated by him to Museum. Most of the Milne miniatures, in a scale of one inch to one foot, are collectibles. The rooms depict the architecture and interior design of their periods, and contain 200 tiny reproductions representing 17th, 18th & 19th century furniture, silver, porcelain and pottery, glassware and paintings.
The mayors represented in “New York City Imagined; Leaders Past and Present,” are Thomas Willet, (1665-66),; John Cruger, Jr. (1756-65); Fernando Wood (1854-60) and Michael Bloomberg, mayor since 2002. Visitors’ written comments describe the rooms as “beautiful…lovely,” while Irving Demsky, senior librarian at the library, said viewers are delighted with the exhibit and marvel aloud, “How can anybody make something that small, that interesting, that accurate? “There’s nothing in the world like the intriguing charm of miniature rooms,” declares Marlene Hochman, founder and executive director of the Museum, which has assembled more than 5,000 dolls, toys, games, dollhouses, reference materials and photographs, in support of its mission to teach history through toys.
The Museum, which originally was based in a public school and hopes one day to have a permanent facility, now has traveling exhibitions, among current ones, “Child’s Play” at New York’s South Street Seaport.
Features of the Seaport exhibit are two completely furnished dollhouses (donated by Pam Paul in memory of her mother) and decorated in late 19th- and early 20th-century styles. Many of their miniature people, pets and furnishings are from the Milne collection, the others from Ms. Paul. One is a tri-level, ten-room, glass-front white house with stately pillars and two fireplaces. The second, less-formal house is red. Among activities enacted, tiny figures dine, children play, men socialize, a mother gives a baby a bath, and a woman operates a sewing machine. Also in the Seaport display are 19th- and early 20th century ships, trains, trolleys, early skyscrapers ,wind-up toys, puzzles, games, horse-drawn vehicles, horseless carriages and Coney Island merry-go-rounds and rides
Milne, now 84 and a resident of the SoHo section of Manhattan for some 40 years, has been collecting since he was a 10-year-old in Massachusetts. He had always hoped to display his miniatures in rooms, each with examples of American antiques and decorative arts that followed a certain theme or period in early American history.
Always interested in the theatre, Milne was impressed and inspired by the meticulously crafted Thorne miniatures, world-famous dollhouse rooms in scale created by Mrs. James Ward Thorne and displayed in tiny, box-shaped rooms, each with a little stage — and by the elaborately carved furniture of John Henry Belter, the German-born cabinetmaker and woodcarver. Belter used a unique style of laminating layers of rosewood in his furniture, and carvings of flowers, foliage, and
bunches of grapes often adorned his full-size and miniature pieces.
Milne says he collected with “a different slant” than most collectors did. His goal was to develop miniatures – “everything an American household would have” — from different periods of American history, beginning with the Pilgrims up to the present.
His collection, mainly Americana, included not only furnishings and people, but even a given period’s popular pets and modes of transportation, including an authentic 1911 carriage. Active in the miniature business until recently, Milne participated in more than a hundred shows, most of them in New York City but also in Washington, Boston and Chicago. He collaborated on some of them with “doll lady” Paula Hill, with whom he conducted a miniature business. His miniatures generally sold for between ten and one-hundred dollars, but many garnered more. One sold for $500 was a sculpted swan-shaped bed like those popular in the mid-1800’s, and believed to have been a copy of Mae West’s. The bed is among his favorite miniatures, along with a three-piece set of Victorian sofa, lady’s chair and gentleman’s chair (a Belter creation). Many of his miniatures relate to particular areas of the United States, such as the northern Midwest, which produced horn furniture made from cattle. And as a Bostonian, he’s proud his collection even included a reproduction of a ladder-back chair that came over on the Mayflower. Born in 1920 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Bob was about 10 when the Milne’s family car skidded during a trip from Florida, and he lost his right arm. It was a devastating blow, but the handicap did not keep him from a long, fulfilling career.
At the time of the accident, he was already collecting miniatures and, by time he entered Dartmouth College, where he majored in psychology and English, had already developed a vast collection. About 1950, he moved to New York, where he sold dolls and dollhouses before concentrating on miniatures exclusively.
Emphasizing that miniatures are enjoyed by persons of all ages, Milne recalled when a child touching a miniature had his hand slapped away by his mother, as she declared, “They’re for adults!” Some people, upon hearing Bob’s surname, say, “Oh, like ‘Winnie the Pooh’,” and then ask whether he’s related to A.A. Milne, Winnie’s creator. His father was a cousin of A.A.’s, but Bob never met him. Yet there are other Pooh connections. “My middle name is Sheperd” [spelled with just one letter different from the Winnie book’s illustrator, Ernest Shepard] and, in a deliberate Pooh reference, “To distinguish me from Robert, my dad, I was called Robin (as in Christopher Robin).”
THE ROOMS
Room #1
New York City’s first mayor, Thomas Willet, with a book at his side, is shown in a 17th century American kitchen, featuring a wide hearth and an elaborately decorated court cupboard. Kettles and caldrons for heating and boiling water hang from the iron arm-bracket or crane that swung from the fireplace brickwork. High-backed benches, called settles, are at right angles to the hearth to protect occupants from winter drafts and enable them to get more heat. Other objects displayed include porringers and church vessels, which were popular among the well-to-do. Willet was appointed mayor after the governor confirmed the right of city residents to govern themselves. Willet, who spoke Dutch, was the first to inform Peter Stuyvesant of the approach of the hostile English fleet in 1664.
Room #2
Mayor John Cruger, Jr., whose father had also been a New York mayor, is presented in a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled mid-18th-century parlor, so detailed it includes a miniature book of Shakespeare’s works.
Furnishings include both Queen Anne and Chippendale objects. Queen Anne style, a return to simplicity, was characterized by lightness and elegance. The delicate and refined “S” scroll and the cabriole legs were hallmarks of the period.. The wing chair and couch, which had all-wooden structures, except for the legs, hidden under upholstery, came into general use in the middle of the eighteenth century.
As a leading member of the committee on correspondence, Cruger was associated with the drafting of memorials to the king of England and parliament about the danger that threatened the colonies, was they to be taxed by laws passed in Great Britain.
Room #3
Mayor Fernando Wood’s imagined library has been furnished and decorated in Gothic Revival style, characterized by such architectural motifs borrowed from the structural elements of the Middle Ages as pointed arches. Books were symbols of prosperity and learning, and a powerful indication of status. Only well-to-do families could afford to dedicate an entire room to the display of their book collections.
Infamous as the most corrupt mayor in the city’s history, Wood was reelected mayor in 1857,when The Dead Rabbits gang combed the city’s cemeteries for names to add as voters. Room #4 — This display represents the “Dignitaries Room” of Brooklyn Borough Hall, whose eclectic style evokes the grandiose style of previous centuries. A Renaissance revival fireplace is featured. In the room used for receiving diplomats and public figures, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, w ho describes himself as “Brooklyn’s chief advocate, biggest promoter, and greatest defender. and most enthusiastic cheerleader,” greets New York’s Mayor Bloomberg. Now a billionaire, Bloomberg parked cars and took out loans to finance his education at Johns Hopkins University. With an MBA from Harvard, he got a job at Salomon Brothers, where he became a partner. After the company was acquired and he was let go, he started his own financial data business, which today bears his name and now has more than 100 bureaus around the world, involved with radio, TV, internet and publishing.
Creating he mayors’ rooms with Mrs. Hochman, a team of crafters, including Sylvia Krajniak, a student in the Masters of Arts Program at the Cooper-Hewitt; NYC College of Technology, Chris Higgins; muralist Joyce Szuflita; miniature enthusiast Barbara Vivian, and Los Angeles doll artist Linda Mountain, who hand-sculpted the miniature mayors.
