News Roundup

Antique Carousel Reopens After 2-year Katrina Shutdown

Journal Gazette
By Janet Mcconnaughey
Associated Press

The first riders on the spirited wooden horses might have been boys in sailor suits and girls in wide-collared dresses, accompanied by mothers attired in sweeping, feathered hats and Gibson girl dresses.

The antique carousel in City Park, built in 1906 and closed since Hurricane Katrina left its painted horses standing in water for three weeks, reopened Tuesday with a belated 100th birthday party.

Champagne and cake were laid on for about 200 guests — major donors who helped restore City Park and one of the most popular rides in its amusement park — but no balloons, no crepe paper, no band.

“The star of the show is the carousel. The carousel speaks for itself,” said John Hopper, chief development officer for City Park.

Its lion, camel, giraffe and 51 spirited horses with real horsehair tails are in an elite company: only about 55 other working carousels around the country are as old.

“It’s not easy to get them to a hundred. A lot of them ended up in people’s living rooms,” Bette Largent of Spokane, Wash., president of the National Carousel Association, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

She said about 5,000 wooden carousels were built in the first half of the last century. Now, only 142 carry children while a band organ translates holes on a heavy paper roll into hooted, tooted tunes.

“A lot were lost to fire and flood. Then collectors discovered them and went to auction,” Largent said.

On top of that, New Orleans’ carousel has its original band organ, is in its original setting and even its original building, with “etched glass that would reflect light through the stained glass of the building — a light show without electronic equipment.”

Even as late as 1988, when New Orleans’ was restored, about 500 original wooden carousels were operating. A year later, the National Register of Historic Places added City Park’s carousel and its building.

The carousel restoration cost about a half-million dollars — a drop in the lagoon, considering that current totals for the 1,300-acre park are about $43 million, but still a lot of work.

That included replacing all of the flooring, thousands of panes of glass and the public address system; adding 54 new structural piers beneath the building; repairing the band organ, and repainting everything. In addition, all but the 30 flying horses had to be sent to a Connecticut carousel repair shop.

“The water wicked up in their hooves,” Hopper said.