It’s good to see Becky back at the helm with her Square Photo Challenges. This month we’re Moving Forward with cars at Volo Auto Museum, trains at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union and on Shanks’s pony.
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All posts by Sue (Mac's Girl)
This week, following a recommendation from my eldest daughter, I decided to visit the Titanic Exhibition at Old Orchard in Skokie. This exhibition, along with another one featuring the TV series Downton Abbey, is housed in the old Bloomingdale’s store in the shopping mall and they’ve certainly made good use of this vacated space.
Upon entry, we were given a boarding pass for the ship that sailed from Belfast on Wednesday, 10th of April 1912 at 9am. We were each assigned the name of one of the people who was aboard that fateful trip, mine being Margaret Rice, an Irish widow who was making the crossing with her five sons in 3rd class accommodations.
We began by watching a video giving a brief overview of the events leading up to the final moments of the voyage and then proceeded to the first room that dealt mainly with the building of the ship that was supposed to be unsinkable.
Although most, if not all, of the artifacts in the exhibit were taken from sister ships of the Titanic, they gave a good representation of what it was like on board this luxurious liner.
Along with numerous cases filled with items that would probably have been seen on board the Titanic, there were several re-creations of various parts of the ship including the boiler room that provided the power needed to make this much-touted record-breaking crossing.
Throughout the exhibit there were signs on the walls with descriptive passages from survivors detailing what it was like aboard the ship and there were appropriate sound effects and music from that era.
We walked down a corridor in the ship, visited a first-class suite and strolled on the deck on a starlit night. An idyllic setting for a memorable trip. Who could ever have imagined that it would end in such a disaster.
The section of the exhibition that dealt with the sinking of the Titanic brought home the sheer scale of the tragedy. Lifeboats launched holding just a few people when they should have carried at least 50. A crew, that had reportedly only had one previous emergency drill, who had to cope with evacuating more than 2,000 people. The panic and pandemonium must have been unimaginable. From the time that the Titanic struck the iceberg to the moment when it sank was a mere 2 hours.
As we approached the wall that listed the names of all those who perished and those who had survived, we looked, almost anxiously, for the name of our assigned passenger, some people calling out, “I made it!” while others groaned in sympathy for those who were lost. Margaret Rice did not survive, although her body was recovered. Her five sons, the eldest ten years old and the youngest only two years old were never found.
In one of the final rooms of the exhibition, we looked down below the plexiglass under our feet to a seabed littered with artifacts from the wreck while on a large screen a video, taken with an underwater camera, showed actual footage of the ship lying on the ocean floor.
There was a section devoted to the many film and television portrayals of the sinking of the Titanic including costumes, props and scripts. It’s phenomenal how even after all these years, this tragedy still captures people’s imaginations.
One of the main reasons why the Sanfilippo Estate is the ideal place to hold the annual Illinois Railway Museum’s Benefit is the Steam Engine and Locomotive collection. Housed inside the Carousel Building, many of these engines are from the 1800’s, including the 1881 Grant railway locomotive and tender that was, at one time, on display at the Ford Museum in Greenfield Village in Michigan. The collection also includes an 1800’s Victoria Station Caboose and a beautifully restored Pullman Palace Car.
All of these engines have been restored and are in pristine condition. Most, if not all, are in working order and are set out so that you can get an excellent view of them from all sides. A truly fantastic collection!
And now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Eden Palais. This sumptuous salon carousel, originally built in 1890, was a self-contained entertainment palace including stages, bars, booths and of course, the amazing Carousel.
So in we go! The carousel is 46ft in diameter with 36 hand-carved Hubner horses, four ornate rocking gondolas and a spinning lover’s tub, while the center is decorated with seven large Coppier paintings. Unlike the carousel at the House on the Rock, this one is actually for riding on, and guests at the benefit were eager to try it out. We even spotted the organist, Dave Calendine, enjoying a ride on one of the beautifully restored horses.
Taking another look at the incredibly ornate time-piece that stands just inside the doorway, we reluctantly see that it’s time to leave, but hopefully, in the future, I’ll have another opportunity to see all the wonderful things in the Sanfilippo Collection.
Still at the beautiful home of the Sanfilippo family in Barrington, there is almost too much to take in, in the time allowed for these benefit events. At the foot of one of the grand staircases is an elaborate Mortier 115-key dance organ built in Belgium in the 1920’s. And there are several more orchestrions situated in and around this room.
There’s one more part of the house to visit before we move outside to another area of the Sanfilippo Estate. Through a gorgeous set of stained glass doors, The Perfume Passage is a recreation of a Parisian Arcade, the shop windows filled with products from the ‘Golden Age of Perfume.’ On her previous visit, my daughter was lucky enough to take a tour inside one of the shops. This time we had to be content with peering throught the windows. The collection contains not only all the iconic perfumes of a bygone era but also related items such as lipsticks, compacts and purses including a cologne bottle that once belonged to the Emporor Napoleon and a 6th century Greek flask.
It’s time to go outside and across to the Carousel Room that is housed in a colossal outbuilding near the parking lot. This is where they keep the really large stuff including the fantastic carousel, calliopes and more orchestrions. I wish I’d got more information on the clock. It really was an impressive piece.
One of the music machines that we got to hear was The Superb, a Gavioli 110-key fairground organ originally built in 1906. The Sanfilippo family has assisted many different charities in their fundraising efforts and if you are interested in seeing all these amazing pieces, I recommend you check out their website at The Sanfilippo Foundation to see upcoming events and support a worthy cause.
Join me next time when we go for a ride on the carousel and also see the steam engine collection.
Continuing with my look inside the Sanfilippo Estate, I was impressed by how pristine. fresh and light it all appeared. Unlike many of the pieces at The House on the Rock which were very often made in their own workshops and which appear somewhat tawdry in comparison, all the collectibles in the Sanfilippo home are genuine. While you won’t find many descriptive notes on the things at the Rock and are obliged to walk around in semi-darkness, the pieces in this spectacular house are clearly labeled with signs that attest to their authenticity, and all the rooms are brilliantly lit.
The Place de la Musique contains the largest collection of beautifully restored automatic musical instruments in the world and includes music boxes, phonographs, violin machines, coin-operated pianos, dance organs, calliopes and orchestrions.
The collection also contains all kinds of arcade and gambling machines. As Jeffrey Sanfilippo joked with us, while most people downsize when their kids grow up and leave home, his parents added a wing or two.
The phonographs are in evidence as soon as you walk through the front door.
One of the most amazing things about this place is the fact that, although there is a small sign at the entrance that asks visitors to enjoy all these beautiful pieces with eyes and ears only, nothing is roped off or inaccessible. They even leave little piles of nickels by some of the machines so you can try them out. And someone will gladly turn on an automated machine for you so that you can hear it play. The banjo player was a particular favorite of mine.
In the Arcade Room you will find a recreation of a turn-of-the-century casino, along with more than 30 cast iron Mutoscopes, fortune telling machines, strength testers and slot machines from penny arcades.
I hope you will join me here next time when I take a look at my favorites, the calliopes, orchestrions and the magnificent carousel, all at the Sanfilippo Estate.
When I saw the subject for Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Any Type Of Light Fixture, this week, I thought ‘perfect!’ When I went to visit the Sanfilippo Estate in Barrington recently, one of the things I paid particular attention to was all the beautiful lamps, chandeliers and lighting fixtures that seemed to fill the house, even on the stained glass ceiling of the ornate elevator. Needless to say, the camera got a good workout.
In keeping with the Sanfilippo’s fabulous music collection, some of the lamps incorporate record turntables. No wonder they call it the Place de la Musique!
In the Music Room, where we were treated to a thrilling theater organ recital including an accompaniment to the silent movie A Christmas Carol produced by the Thomas Edison studios, the brilliant lighting matched the magnificent surroundings.
These splendid lamps and chandeliers made me want to run out and replace all my tatty light fixtures. Of course you need the grand rooms to carry it off, so maybe not.
It would be remiss of me not to say a big ‘Thank you” to the Sanfilippo family for graciously allowing us into their gorgeous home and making everyone feel so welcome. I hope you will join me here on Getting The Picture for part three of my visit to the Place de la Musique.
Last week, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Illinois Railway Museum’s annual fundraiser at the Sanfilippo Estate in Barrington. The house is not open to the general public unless you attend a fundraiser or are part of a group of at least 40 people who sign up to take a tour, so I was very excited to have the opportunity to see inside the Place de la Musique. Suffice it to say, this will be one of those multi part posts as I took more than 400 pictures while I was there.
Wow! What a place! And setting aside, for a moment, all the fantastic things that the Sanfilippo family have collected over the years, the house itself is amazing. Who knew there was that much money to be made from nuts! The Sanfilippos also own the Fisher nut company as well as many other brands.
We were free to wander around the house for an hour or more, and take the ornate elevator to all three floors to look at the different collections
The highlight of the fundraiser was an organ recital in the grand theater that is part of the house. The Wurlitzer opus #1571 was originally built for the Riviera Theater in Omaha in 1927. With five rows of keys and 8,000 pipes, it is one of the largest and most versatile theater pipe organs ever built.
The organist, Dave Calendine, plays the organ for the Detroit Red Wings hockey team games. He has also played for nine years for the Radio City Musical Hall Christmas Spectaculars featuring the famous Rockettes. He is the Chairman of the American Theater Organ Society and has a string of other credits to his name. He certainly put on a fantastic show for us and I was just in awe of the hand, eye and foot coordination needed to play this massive instrument. The concert included Christmas carols, hymns, excerpts from Star Wars and of course, a medley of tunes related to the railway. Talk about feeling the music! The notes reverberated throughout the house.
Although the concert was the main feature of the fundraiser, there was so much more to see and enjoy. I hope you will join me here next time when we take a look at some of the pieces in the Sanfilippo Collection.
It’s been a while since I participated in the Lens Artists Photo Challenge but when I saw Anne’s choice of subject for this week, I realized I was working on something that would easily Fill The Frame.
Welcome to The Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois. It is the largest of its kind in the United States. On our most recent trip a few weeks ago, we got to walk through five display barns and took a ride on a streetcar and an electric train. Although I’m not exactly a train buff, I enjoy any opportunity to take pictures and this was one of those times. It was a lovely day, not too hot, so just right for walking around and, if you want to see everything, there is quite a bit of walking involved, outdoors as well as inside.
I was intrigued by these two stone sculptures that I took to be from some now defunct station in Chicago but I couldn’t find anyone who could tell me where they originated. If anyone from the Chicago area has any ideas I’d be interested to hear.
There are elevated walkways in between the carriages in the display barns so you can get a good view of the inside of the cars. I haven’t traveled in anything other than the Metra and CTA trains in our area, and it’s been many years since I enjoyed my favorite mode of transport in the UK, so I can’t speak for rail travel in general, but these interiors certainly looked quite luxurious.
The streetcar ride took us on a loop around the museum and although it wasn’t what you’d call a scenic tour, it gave us a look behind the scenes at some of the old stock that wasn’t on display and other odd items like the London Transport bus.
The display barns are full of carriages, locomotives and all kinds of rolling stock, some dating back to the late 1890’s. There are over 500 pieces of equipment at the museum which covers 100 acres of land.
Our ride on the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin electric train took us on a 40-minute round trip on the several miles of track that the museum owns in the surrounding countryside. Nearly all the people who work at the museum are volunteers and are very knowledgeable about the railway and its history. They were a cheerful group who answered all our questions and shared their love of trains with us. The Museum was founded in 1953 and moved to Union in 1964.
My eldest daughter and her husband are real railway enthusiasts and last year attended the IRM’s annual fundraiser at the Sanfillipo Estate in Barrington, where they won a prize in the raffle. My son-in-law got to ride in the engineer’s cab in one of these beauties.
It’s not hard to see why IRM relies in large part on fundraising events. Restoration work on pieces like this costs thousands of dollars. In 2016 IRM purchased a 130ft turntable for $10,000 that will be used to store their steam locomotives.
Our family does have a history with the railways in the UK. My 2nd great-grandfather started out as a plate-layer for the railway in 1853. He went on to become a railway guard, then stationmaster and at the time of his retirement was a railway inspector. When I researched his history I found that at the time of his marriage in 1853, he was unable to write his name in the registry, so I thought his rise through the ranks from plate-layer to railway inspector quite impressive. I couldn’t help wondering what he would have made of some of these displays.
It’s not always easy to give an indication of just how enormous some of these locomotives are. The wheels on some of them were taller than my 5ft 3in height.
Before we left, we stopped in at the hobby shop where they had a grand layout of model trains and shelves full of items for sale.
Welcome back to the final part of my piece on The House On The Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin. With all the weird and amazing things that we’ve seen so far, these next two rooms are even more astounding. At 80ft in diameter and 35ft in height, The Carousel is claimed to be the largest in the world. There are 269 creatures and more than 20,000 lights, while hovering overhead, hundreds of mannequins that look like winged rejects from Victoria’s Secret look down on the scene below.
It’s a case of look but don’t touch. The Carousel is not for riding on. It’s interesting to note that there are no horses on this bizarre roundabout. That was an omission deliberately planned by Alex Jordan. Some of the creatures may have originally been horses but he saw to it that they underwent a remarkable transformation in the workshops of The House.
The whirling movement of the Carousel is accompanied by the cacophonous sound of a pneumatic organ accompanied by huge automated drums playing fairground favorites. The sights and sound in this room are almost overwhelming. And here again, we see Jordan’s penchant for including unclothed, well-endowed female figures in his displays, leading us to suppose that he was a bit of a lad for the ladies.
Alex Jordan eventually sold The House to a friend in 1988 but not before he had completed what has to be the most spectacular creation of his fertile imagination, The Organ Room. As the old guide book states, ‘It might well have been designed for a staging of a Jules Verne epic.’ The consoles shown below are purported to be the largest in the world.
Ramps and catwalks allow us to view from all angles the massive hydraulic machinery, enormous pipes, drums, timepieces and brewery tanks that fill this room. You get the impression that Jordan bought up everything he could lay his hands on to make this bizarre and baffling array which suggests an amalgamation of Heath Robinson and Barnum and Bailey. What a show! And as always, it is accompanied by that blaring automated organ music, on this occasion playing The Skater’s Waltz. Phantasmagorical!
One final, parting shot. The House On The Rock may not be for everyone, but as a phenomenal piece of showmanship it is definitely worth a look.
Welcome back to the glitzy, kitschy and somewhat disturbing world of The House On The Rock. It’s a place of smoke and mirrors that some might call magical. But the word ‘magical’ conjures up images of Disney World and this, my friends, is anything but. At every tortuous turn you are confronted with the astounding, the astonishing and the bizarre.
Everything is on a grand scale as you will soon find out when you enter the Magnificent Music of Yesterday. From the giant Gladiator calliope to the automated music machines in The Blue Room and The Red Room, all are designed to amaze you. My favorite, The Mikado music machine, which is large enough to fill an entire room by itself, was created from designs by Alex Jordan. The organ, accompanied by flutes temple bells, kettle drums and cymbals crashes out music like Dance Macabre and the Ritual Dance of Fire. Here again, not everything is as it seems. Many of the instruments that make up these music machines are not actually playing. The music is already recorded. But you are so mezmerised by what you are seeing that it doesn’t seem to matter.
Possibly still reeling from what you’ve already seen, you enter the Heritage of the Sea exhibit. Wow! It’s just about impossible to get the entire scene into one single shot. This monstrous diorama shows a 200ft whale-like creature battling a giant octopus while being chased by an old-time whaling expedition. As you climb the ramps and steps leading to the top of the creature’s head, you pass walls lined with display cases containing model ships and other seafaring artifacts many of which, I suspect, are the products of the House’s workshops.
From sea monsters we move on to something slightly less threatening. Dolls. There are probably hundreds of dolls at the House On The Rock and most of these are displayed on two carousels in The Doll Room, one of them a 6-tiered creation, the other with 3 tiers. At first glance you might think, how cute! But as your eye travels to the uppermost tier you are met with the sight of naked ladies (which seem to be a recurring theme throughout the House) and satyrs. Not exactly something for the kiddies.
Even the doll houses have a sinister look to them. Although they are lit from within, the room itself is in near-darkness. There are more than 250 doll houses in the collection, some set against a backdrop of large stained glass windows.
The Circus Building houses over one million pieces that comprise the collection of miniature circus dioramas. And just when you have become accustomed to looking at things in miniature, you enter a room with life-sized elephants and a colossal band wagon. You begin to think you’ve seen it all, and then there’s the The Circus Band with 80 life-sized mannequins playing various instruments. It took 14 people three years to create this automated 120 piece ensemble which includes 37 miles of wiring and 2300 pneumatic motors.
And that’s not all. I hope you will join me next time when we will explore two of the most fantastic rooms at the House On The Rock. Prepare to be amazed!
Getting the Picture 