The first of 14 works of art were installed on the rounding boards of Greenport’s carousel this afternoon.
Rounding boards are the decorative boards at the top of a carousel, just below its canopy. Until today, the rounding boards on the Greenport carousel were unadorned. But this afternoon, Bill von Eiff and his son Toby applied the adhesive-backed vinyl prints on four of the rounding boards.
The prints are reproductions of paintings commissioned by Friends of Mitchell Park and created by four artists: Marla Milne of Greenport, Cindy Pease Roe of Greenport, Keith Mantell of Aquebogue and Enid Hatton of Fairfield, Connecticut. The paintings depict scenes of the area as it would have looked around the turn of the last century.
A group of about a dozen people gathered around the carousel to watch von Eiff and his son work. They burst into applause when the first print was in place — “Early Morning Fishing” by Milne, who was on hand to watch the installation.
Many of the people watching the art installation today were among the band of village residents who moved the carousel from the former Grumman site in Calverton to the Greenport waterfront.
It was 1995, before the village even owned the land that would become Mitchell Park, former village mayor Dave Kappell said. About 50 people went to Calverton to dismantle the carousel that had stood in the Grumman picnic grounds for 40 years. They packed it up and hauled it out to Greenport, where they reassembled and erected it the following day, he said.
“We borrowed all those moving blankets from Jernick,” said Village Trustee Julia Robins.
Kappell, who had fond memories of riding the carousel in Central Park as a child, said he knew the carousel would be a fabulous family attraction that would draw people to the village and help make Greenport a destination.
“If you could appeal to the imagination of children, the parents have no choice but to come,” he said.
So he asked the village board for a resolution of support and wrote a letter to Northrop Grumman asking for the carousel. The company was preparing to move its operation off Long Island and readying to turn over the Calverton plant to its owner, the U.S. Navy. Though the site was in the Town of Riverhead, officials there were so concerned about what was going to happen with the site they weren’t thinking about the carousel, Kappell said.
His letter was accompanied by dozens of letters written by Greenport schoolchildren asking for the carousel. “I think that’s what did the trick,” Kappell said.
Northrop Grumman donated the carousel to the village. It became the centerpiece of Mitchell Park, which in turn became the focal point of the village.
“It’s hard to imagine the park without it,” he said.
The carousel was built in 1920 by Herschell Spillman in North Tonawanda, New York. It was built as a portable amusement and likely traveled with a circus before finding its home at the Grumman plant in Calverton in the 1950s. It has 36 horses, 18 of them hand-carved Herschell wooden horses that may be original to the ride.
The glass and steel carousel house was designed by SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasqurelli Architects of New York City.
Gail Horton, who was a village trustee when the carousel was moved to Greenport, is a member of the carousel committee and headed up the rounding boards project.
She led the applause as von Eiff finished applying the first print.
“That’s just beautiful,” she said, smiling.
SoutholdLOCAL photos by Denise Civiletti
