Playland Merry-go-Round Opens
October 17, 1998!
The Playland Merry-go-Round opening at Yerba Buena Gardens
has been accomplished through the hard work of "Zeum". Zeum is
an interdisciplinary arts center where young people
can explore and produce visual, performing and media arts
using technology as a creative tool. Zeum’s mission is to
foster the creativity of young people of all backgrounds by:
Rooftop includes a regulation-sized ice skating rink, bowling center, child care center and the historic carousel from Playland-at-the-Beach all surrounding a beautiful play and learning garden ideal for picnics and outdoor performances. The Rooftop is a $56 million dollar project of the Redevelopment Agency of San Francisco and is funded by Agency bonds repaid by lease revenues. |
Much-loved antique being dismantled
in
After spending the past quarter-century exiled in
Southern California and New Mexico, the historic
Charles Looff carousel that delighted generations of
San Franciscans at Playland at the Beach is coming
home.
By early June, the 92-year-old carousel should
once again be spinning in The City, this time as the
star attraction at the Children's Center in Yerba
Buena Gardens, which is nearly complete.
Two weeks ago, the amusement ride - considered
one of the finest crafted of the 75 full-sized
merry-go-rounds left in the United States - was up
and running. Today it lies in hundreds of pieces on
a dusty floor at a waterfront shopping
center-cum-tourist trap in Long Beach.
A three-person crew has been dismantling the
carousel by hand, readying it for a freeway voyage
north aboard two 45-foot tractor-trailer rigs.
The carousel is made up of some three dozen
mirrors, more than 100 twisted brass poles, two
dragon chariots, two gondolas the size of
Volkswagen Beetles and 64 animal figures -
horses, rams, camels, giraffes and one
ferocious-looking lion. Each figure, brightly painted
and adorned with cut glass "jewels" from Belgium,
is different.
"It's a big jigsaw puzzle," said Becky Rustuen, as
she dumped a handful of greasy bolts into an old
coffee can. "Taking it apart is one thing. We have
to make sure we know how to put it back
together."
The workers mapped and marked each piece to
make the two-month reassembly easier. It will be
spruced up after it's back together.
"This is no quick job," said 43-year-old Scott
Ringwelski, who is overseeing the project.
Wooden figures very fragile.
"You drop one of these things," he added,
struggling to lift a horse off the base with the help of
Rustuen and Paul Rosse, "and it will shatter."
The hollow wooden animals each weigh from 80 to
175 pounds. The gondolas, at least, can be
removed in sections.
The capper job comes this week, when a crane will
be brought in to move the 27-foot-high center pole
- formerly a piece of oil pipeline - that with the help
of an intricate set of thin girders suspends
everything above the floor. The hanging carousel
can carry 12 tons of people. A 12-horsepower
motor keeps it running at 8 mph.
After the carousel's last public twirl in Long Beach
following a 14-year run, Ringwelski hopped on for
a final ride there.
"As I laid my head against the horse, I could hear
the machinery running through, like a heartbeat, like
it's alive and has a soul," he said.
Every animal on the ride has a name and, the
caretakers believe, a distinct personality.
Ringwelski, who has been associated with the
carousel for 17 years, describes himself as "the
guardian of the treasure." He will leave his lifelong
home of Long Beach to move with the carousel and
care for it at Yerba Buena Gardens. He's also
talking with the Recreation and Park Department to
see about looking after The City's two other
merry-go-rounds, located at the zoo and the
Children's Playground in Golden Gate Park.
With three full-sized carousels, San Francisco will
have the second-largest collection in the nation,
following New York City which has five.
Snagging the carousel for Yerba Buena Gardens
was no easy feat - and did not come cheap. The
San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which is in
charge of the project, bought it for $1million from
Marianne Stevens, a Roswell, N.M., collector who
saved it from destruction after Playland closed in
1972. Plans called for auctioning the carousel
animals separately, drawing on a growing demand
in the art world for the finely made folk art. But
Stevens, whose father also collected carousels,
came in at the last minute and bought the carousel
for $67,000.
It wasn't the first time the ride survived against the
odds.
Built by renowned carousel-maker Charles Looff in
his Rhode Island workshop in 1906, the carousel
originally was intended for San Francisco, but lack
of interest in The City resulted in its going to a
Seattle amusement park instead, via a boat ride
around Tierra del Fuego. A year later, a fire
destroyed everything in the amusement park but the
carousel - sparking its eventual move to San
Francisco.
In 1913, Arthur Looff, whose dad built the
carousel, moved it to the seaside site that would
become Playland at the Beach. It remained there
until the park closed six decades later. After 10
years in storage in New Mexico, a period during
which Ringwelski said it became a favored haunt
for mice, rats and roaches and fell into disrepair,
Stevens found it a new life in Long Beach. In 1994,
San Francisco officials, with money in hand, came
calling and struck a deal. Now, nearly four years
later, everything's coming together.
Midge Mallen, a 61-year-old fourth-generation San
Franciscan, welcomes the return.
"It was wonderful. It felt like an adventure,"
recalled Mallen, who rode the carousel when she
was a child. "When you were on there, you just had
a feeling you were riding a real horse."
Ringwelski said igniting the imagination is what
makes the carousel - with exotic carvings
borrowing from ancient images of Arabia, Africa
and the Ottoman Empire - so magical.
"It's a 10-ton behemoth that can carry you away to
any place you want to be," he said.
Mallen regularly took her nine children to Playland
to ride the carousel, eat candied apples and laugh
and scream in the fun house. Now she's looking
forward to returning to the carousel, albeit in a new
location across town, with her grandchildren.
"I can share the history with them," she said.
It is partially for that reason that Supervisor Sue
Bierman fought so hard to bring the carousel back
to San Francisco.
A planning commissioner at the time Yerba Buena
Gardens was being planned, Bierman and some
cohorts wanted to create a place that would have
fun things to do for children and families. At first
they considered a Ferris wheel.
©1998 San Francisco Examiner
Old Playland merry-go-round is repaired
The classic 91-year-old carousel had been so neglected in recent years that some of
its horses' tails had fallen off.
Two months ago, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency announced The City had
bought it and would have it returned this month for storage in a bonded warehouse
until the children's project is ready for its installation.
But Yerba Buena Center Project Director Helen Sause says the tails have been restored
and other repairs made in Long Beach, and that The City now feels safe leaving the carousel there for the
next year or so.
Sause said she had visited the Shoreline Village mall in Long Beach several days ago and was
"extremely pleased to see the improvements. The previously deplorable conditions of the
animals and enclosure have been completely addressed by a new operator."
After the owner of Shoreline Village declared bankrupcy in September, Northwestern Mutual
Life Insurance Co. became trustee of the mall and has provided "excellent care, maintenance and operation of
the carousel," according to Sause.
Long Beach initially fought to keep the carousel there, but Sause said she has received assurance
that Long Beach would "take no action whatsoever to retain it whenever the agency wished to
remove it."
Northwestern is paying The City $5,000 a month to rent the merry-go-round, under a lease that expires next
September but could be extended on a month-to-month basis.
"We believe that this is a winning solution for the carousel until the agency might
conceivably wish to have it physically in San Francisco," Sause wrote in a report to be presented to the
Redevelopment Commission Tuesday.
Although Long Beach had bid $500,000 more for the carousel than San Francisco did, owner
Marianne Stevens of Santa Fe agreed to sell it to The City for $1 million because she was so
upset at the damage it had suffered in Southern California.
It was first installed at Luna Park in Seattle in 1903, but when the park was destroyed by fire six years
later, Looff rebuilt it in a pavilion at Playland-at-the Beach in 1913.
Before Playland was razed to make way for a condominium project in 1972, the merry-go-round
sold for $62,500 to the Long Beach shopping center operator.
Special thanks to the Examiner for permission to post photographs and articles.
Playland carousel coming back
Rachel Gordon
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Long Beach for its journey to The
City
Original S.F. location Playland Merry-go-round, Photographs by Shirley Leytem 1972
and will move to The City in '96 (It will actually arrive June of 98.)
by Gerald D. Adams/ Examiner Urban Planning Writer
The old Playland merry-go-round, which San Francisco officials arranged to aquire
from a Long Beach shopping center in September, has been repainted and refurbished
and will continue to twirl in
the Southland until the children's block of Yerba Buena Gardens
is ready to receive it in 1996.
The carousel was hand-carved in Riverside, R.I., by amusement park builder Charles I.D. Looff
in 1903.