125 Years Ago: The Blizzard of 1888

Are you sick of winter yet?

Today marks the 125th anniversary of the famous Blizzard of 1888, which struck the east coast on March 11, moving northward rapidly. Snow began to fall in earnest in New York on March 12 and by the time it was over--three days later--over 40 inches of snow had been dumped on the city.

"A policeman rubbing snow on the frozen ears of a passer-by during the storm." (Courtesy of the NYPL.)

 

By the end of the first day, the city had been brought to a standstill and the city’s miles of telegraph and telephone wires lay in downed heaps along the sides of the roads. (Though New York had already toyed with idea of burying these wires underground, it was the 1888 blizzard that finally forced the city to act, freeing the city of above-ground wires to this day.) Because of snow drifts across the tracks, rail service was suspended in and out of the city for over a week and staples such as bread and coal were quickly in short supply. In some places (such as the Gravesend section of Brooklyn), snow drifts were as high as 52 feet.

Senator Roscoe Conkling

By far the most famous victim of the storm was New York Senator Roscoe Conkling. An important post-Civil War Republican, Conkling was part of the Stalwart branch of the party that hoped to draft Ulysses S. Grant into running for a third term. When that didn’t happen, Conkling supported Rutherford B. Hayes and was instrumental in creating the commission that ultimately handed Hayes the presidency in 1877. (The controversy of the 1876 Hayes/Tilden election will be the subject of a future post.)

Conkling’s best-known protégé was Chester A. Arthur, who benefited from Conkling’s patronage when he was New York’s Commissioner of Customs, but as president instituted civil service reforms that enraged his former mentor.

Federal Hall National Memorial  on Wall Street (then the U.S. subtreasury) in the blizzard.

On the first day of the blizzard, Conking was at his law office at 10 Wall Street. Despite the severity of the storm—which made catching a horse-drawn cab impossible—Conkling decided to walk from his office to his club on Madison Square, even though it was 6:00 PM and already dark. He made it up Broadway as far as Union Square where he (as he later put it): “got to the middle of the park and was up to my arms in a drift…. For nearly twenty minutes I was stuck there and I came as near giving right up and sinking down there to die as a man can and not do it.”

But somehow Conkling freed himself and continued up Broadway to Madison Square, where the people at the New York Club could “scarcely believe” he had walked from Wall Street.

However, while Conkling was quick to credit his three-hour walk to his strong constitution, all was not well. He soon developed an ear infection, which in turn became mastoiditis, and by April doctors were draining pus from his skull. He died on April 18, 1888, about a month after the blizzard.

Conkling is memorialized in a statue in Madison Square Park. (Apparently the city fathers balked at commemorating Conkling in Union Square amidst George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.)

[The bulk of this post originally appeared on our blog on March 2, 2009.]

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Happy Birthday, Pan Am Building

It only came across the Inside the Apple newswire late last night that yesterday was, in fact, the fiftieth birthday of the Pan Am Building (or, if you must, the Met Life Building) that stands atop Grand Central Terminal. Significant for a plethora of reasons--not least of which is that it is the only building by the Bauhaus’s Walter Gropius in the city--it has long been the building that New Yorkers love to hate. Or simply hate.

The Pan Am tower came into being in the mid 1950s. As America’s transportation needs shifted from railroads to automobiles and airplanes, the owners of Grand Central Terminal and the surrounding Terminal City needed to find ways to increase revenue. After rejecting plans for a skyscraper that would have required demolishing the station, developer Erwin Wolfson proposed a three million-square-foot tower to stand between the terminal and the railroad’s headquarters, the 1929 New York Central Building. In 1958, Emery Roth & Sons submitted designs for a slender tower for that spot in keeping with their other Park Avenue skyscrapers, such as the Uris and Colgate-Palmolive buildings. Wolfson, fearing this new tower lacked architectural panache, brought in Gropius and Pietro Belluschi to enliven the 49-story building.* Gropius and Belluschi changed the building's massing, created its unusual octagonal shape, and, most noticeably, shifted its axis so that it stood completely blocking views up or down Park Avenue.

When the building opened on March 7, 1963, it had more interior square footage than any office building in the world. Twenty-five percent of those offices were leased to the building’s name tenant, Pan American airlines, which also installed a helicopter landing pad on the roof. This allowed commuters to land at any of the area’s major airports and be whisked to the heart of Manhattan. Due to construction delays and lack of public support, the helipad did not open until 1965 and then was only used for three years. After nearly a decade, it reopened in 1977; on May 17 of that year, the landing gear on a helicopter failed just after it had touched down on the roof of the building. The resulting accident killed five people and closed the helipad for good.

The building was derided from its opening. Then New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable famously called it, "gigantically second-rate." In 1987, New York magazine conducted a poll of New York City leaders to discover what was the worst building in the city. Pan Am topped the list. In 1991, the airline--which was already on life support and occupied only a fraction of its original office space--left the building, and the skyscraper's owners, the Metropolitan Life Insurance company, replaced the iconic Pan Am logo with their own. Though that logo remains, Met Life sold the building in 2005 for a record $1.72 billion to a consortium headed by Tishman Speyer, but which also includes the New York City Employees' Retirement System and the Teachers' Retirement System.

So, if you are in midtown today, instead of raising your fist at the shadows cast on Park Avenue, raise a glass instead to this monument to modernity. 

* Pan Am stands 808 feet tall -- approximately 59 stories -- but the bottom ten stories don't exist in order for it to float over Terminal City.

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Charles Scribner's Sons at 597 Fifth Avenue

photo by epicharmus on flickr

A century ago, the architect Ernest Flagg was at the top of his game. Just five years earlier, in 1908, he'd completed the tallest building in the world, the lavish (and, sadly, now demolished) Singer Building in Lower Manhattan. Today, Flagg's name isn't remembered as well as some of his contemporaries like Stanford White and Cass Gilbert, but many of his buildings remain. In 1913, he completed what is one of his finest achievements, the Charles Scribner's Sons bookstore and offices at 597 Fifth Avenue.

The publishing company started life in 1846 as Baker & Scribner. When founder Charles Scribner took over the firm, he renamed it the Charles Scribner Company; later, when management moved to his sons, they changed the name again to reflect their new ownership. Though they published books from the start, the company was best known early on for its magazines, including St. Nicholas Magazine, The Century Magazine, and Scribner's.

photo courtesy of Princeton University library

In 1893, the firm hired the then-unknown Flagg to design a corporate headquarters for them on lower Fifth Avenue at 21st Street. (This squat Beaux-Arts building from the beginning of Flagg's career, still stands.) Less than two decades later, the publishers rehired Flagg--now an architectural star--to create a soaring space in midtown to house not only the company's headquarters but also their corporate-owned bookstore on the retail level. This move reflected not only Scribner's growing fortunes, but also the rapid development of Fifth Avenue above 42nd Street as a prime shopping district.

Flagg's soaring Beaux-Arts exterior was matched by the retail space's opulent interior, including a Carrara-marble staircase, gorgeous iron railings and balustrades,and--of course--row upon row of books.

In 1984, what was then known as the Scribner Book Companies was purchased by Macmillan, which in turn was folded into Simon & Schuster in 1994. The bookstore closed in 1988; the retail space currently houses a Sephora. Because the interior has been landmarked, much of the original fixtures remain inside and it is well worth checking out, if only to imagine what shopping for books must have been like a century ago.

photo by bjmccray on flickr

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The Armories of New York

photo of the 69th Regiment by wallyg on flickr

As we mentioned in our blog post last week, this past Sunday was the centennial of the 1913 Armory show, an important moment in the history of modern art. The exhibit--officially titled the International Exhibition of Modern Art--is known as the Armory show because it was housed in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, an imposing Beaux-Arts fortress that had been completed just seven years earlier.

Walking the streets of New York, you are liable to come upon many such military structures; some, like the 69th Regiment, are still operating as National Guard posts. Others, including the famous arsenal in Central Park, have long since been decommissioned. Why does the city have such a proliferation of these buildings?

One answer is that before the Civil War, it was up to each town and city to provide for the nation's common defense. Volunteer militia companies were the backbone of the country's armed forces, and these militias required space to house munitions, drill, and fraternize. The most famous of the militias in New York was the Seventh Regiment, also known as the "Silk Stocking" regiment.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

First known as the Eleventh Regiment, it guarded New York harbor during [the War of 1812]. During the Marquis de Lafayette's farewell tour of America, the regiment acted as his honor guard and gave itself the name National Guard after Lafayette's Garde Nationale in Paris. When militia companies were reorganized later in the 19th century, this idea of having a National Guard stuck....

In 1880, the Seventh Regiment opened its new headquarters on Park Avenue. Designed by one of its own veterans, Charles Clinton, the massive structure...takes up the entire block between Park and Lexington avenues. The rear section was a drill hall--at the time, the largest interior drilling space ever created, spanned by a tremendous 300-foot barrel vault--and the front was three stories of meeting rooms for the various regimental companies.... Of particular note are the Veterans' Room and Library on the main floor, which were done by Louis Comfort Tiffany's Associated Artists, and remain today the most complete Tiffany interiors.

In 1884, recognizing the dearth of suitable drilling space for New York's military companies, an Armory Board of the City of New York was established with the purpose of building or renovating existing drill halls. Over the next forty years, armories proliferated around the city.

When the 69th Regiment opened in 1906, designed by the firm Hunt & Hunt, it was unique in its contemporary (though classically inspired) Beaux-Arts styling; most other armories tried to convey their function through the use of faux-Medieval architectural detail. Along with the Seventh Regiment (today known as the Park Avenue Armory), it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, both for its role in the 1913 Armory Show and for being home to the "Fighting 69th," New York's famous Irish regiment, one of the first to volunteer for action in the Civil War.

Other famous armories around the city from this period include 94th Street armory (parts of which were integrated into the design of Hunter College High School), the First Battery armory, which became ABC television's first studio building, and the Fort Washington Armory at 168th Street, now a track and field center.

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The Armory Show at 100

This Sunday marks the centennial of the opening of the famed International Exhibition of Modern Art held at New York's 69th Regiment Armory and now generally known simply as "The Armory Show."

We are dedicating two posts to the show -- next week, we'll look at the history of the building that gave its name to the show and to numerous medieval-looking armory buildings that are scattered around New York.

For a history of the exhibit, these articles from the New Criterion and New York Times are a good place to start. Today, rather than try to summarize the show and importance, we thought we'd simply showcase some of the remarkable art that rocked America. (When the show moved to Chicago, the press there called it “profane,” “blasphemous,” “obscene,” and “vile.”) In all, there were over 1,250 works by over 150 artists. Some works, like Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, were maligned at the time and have come to be seen as icons of American art. Other works and their artists have disappeared from public consciousness. Below, a tiny sampling of some of the works in the show:

A Centennial of Independence by Henri Rousseau (1892)
courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Trust

Georges Braque Violin and Candlestick (1910)
courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Paul Gaugin Words of the Devil (1892)
courtesy of the National Gallery of Art 

Charles Sheeler Landscape (1913)

Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Henri Matisse The Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) (1907)
courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art

Another fun artifact from the show is the list (now in the Archives of American Art) drawn up by Pablo Picasso of European artists he thought would be appropriate for the exhibit, including Duchamp (spelled wrong), Juan Gris, and -- seemingly as an afterthought -- Braque.

Courtesy of the Archives of American Art.

Picasso was in the exhibit himself, with Woman with Mustard Pot:

Pablo Picasso Woman with Mustard Pot (1910)
courtesy of the Geemente Museum

There will be two museum exhibition commemorating the Armory Show this year. One will be at the New-York Historical Society in the fall; the second opens this Sunday (on the exact centennial of the show's debut) at the Montclair Art Museum.

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The Wedding of General Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren

This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the marriage of Charles S. Stratton -- known professionally as Gen. Tom Thumb -- and Lavinia Warren at Grace Church in Greenwich Village. Stratton was the most famous, and most famously exploited, little person in the nineteenth century, working for infamous showman P.T. Barnum from the age of five.

In 1842, Barnum reopened the refurbished American Museum on Broadway near St. Paul's Chapel. The museum housed a cavalcade of curiosities, natural phenomena, outright fakes, and people whose physical appearance fell outside the norm. The next year, Barnum first met Stratton, who had stopped growing at the age of six months at only twenty-five inches tall. Barnum convinced Stratton's parents to allow him to take over the boy's education, and soon Stratton was on stage in New York. Barnum invented a back story for the boy, telling people that he was eleven years old and had emigrated from Britain. He also dubbed Stratton "Tom Thumb" after a character from Grimm's fairy tales. (The name had been coopted a few years earlier for Peter Cooper's steam locomotive, and Barnum was surely hoping to hitch his performer to Cooper's successful use of the name.)

Stratton performed a song, dance, and comedy act written for him by -- and sometimes co-starring -- Barnum. Among Stratton's biggest hits were his impersonations of famous historical figures, including Napoleon Bonaparte. Soon the act went on tour, and Stratton was the toast of Europe, meeting Queen Victoria, and cementing Barnum's status as one of the greatest promoters in history.

The Strattons (at left) after their wedding.

In the early 1860s, Barnum hired another little person, Lavinia Warren (born Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump), who had been working as a performer on a Mississippi River boat. According to accounts at the time, when Stratton first laid eyes on Warren, it was love at first sight. Barnum encouraged the match, and on February 10, 1863, they were married at a ceremony at Grace Church. It was one of the biggest events of the season, and a bright spot for many New Yorkers during the depths of the Civil War.

Barnum, always on the make, managed the wedding to the smallest detail. His first choice was to have the ceremony take place at St. Paul's (due to its proximity to the American Museum), officiated by Episcopal Bishop Henry C. Potter. When Trinity parish nixed the idea, Barnum switched the venue to Grace, helping cement that church's reputation as the spot for high society's biggest functions.

Admission to the wedding was via an elaborate, multi-part (and therefore, presumably, not easily forged) ticket. A separate reception admission cost $75, a fortune for many people in 1863. According to some reports, over 15,000 people applied for tickets to attend the reception, which was held at the Metropolitan Hotel on Broadway. As the New York Times put it in their coverage of the nuptials, the burning question the next morning was "Did you or did you not see Tom Thumb married?"

The paper went on to note that

the Church was comfortably filled by an audience comprising representatives of each and every strata of New-York's respectable society. There were very many elegantly dressed ladies, and quite as many who paid but little respect either to the request of the inviter, the customary rules of etiquette, or the obvious proprieties of the occasion. It can hardly be considered the correct thing to newspaperize the presence of private individuals, however conspicuously placed or dressed, but the appearance of Maj.-Gen. BURNSIDE we may mention with propriety....

On their honeymoon, the Strattons went to the White House, where they were warmly received by Abraham Lincoln. They remained happily married for twenty years, until Charles died of a stroke in 1883. Lavinia remarried, and continued to perform into the twentieth century, appearing in early silent films.

After the wedding, pictures of the "the General and his wife" and the "Fairy Wedding" became popular collector's items. Churches began performing "Tom Thumb Weddings" as fundraisers, with children playing the roles of the wedding party. Indeed, this appears still to be happening today. Barnum, of course, found lasting fame as one of the founders of the modern circus, and his Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey production continues to this day.

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John and Yoko's Nutopia

Yesterday, it was reported that the townhouse at 1 White Street in Tribeca, which sold three years ago for $3.25 million, is back on the market--gutted--for $4.25 million. The structure's claim to fame is that it was dubbed the "Nutopian Embassy" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on April 1, 1973, when they declared themselves ambassadors of the newly formed "conceptual country" of Nutopia.

A week earlier, on March 23, Lennon had been given an order to leave the United States within 60 days. Though Yoko Ono had a green card from her earlier marriage, the American government refused to grant one to Lennon because of a marijuana conviction in the UK. Due to their "radical" politics, Lennon and Ono were also being hounded by the FBI, who followed them and tapped their phones. In an effort to bring attention to the ridiculousness of their plight, Lennon and Ono created Nutopia, declaring:

We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NUTOPIA.
Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA.
NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.
NUTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic.
All people of NUTOPIA are ambassadors of the country.
As two ambassadors of NUTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people.

Nutopian Embassy
One White Street
New York, New York 10012
April 1, 1973

Why, exactly, they chose 1 White Street as the fictional Nutopian Embassy is unclear. They had no personal connection to the building. At the time, they were still living on Bank Street in Greenwich Village (they would soon move to the Dakota), about a twenty-five minute from White Street. Perhaps it was just a building they'd walked by. Or maybe they liked the symbolism of the street's name. The flag of Nutopia (pictured above) was simply a white handkerchief, which symbolized surrender.

As Lennon would write in the title track to Mind Games a few months later: "Love is surrender -- you got to let it go." Mind Games would also include the "Nutopian International Anthem" (a few seconds of silence at the end of side one) and the printed "Declaration of Nutopia" in the liner notes.

Yoko Ono noted on last year's anniversary of the birth of Nutopia:

Nutopia is a country that exists in all of us.
John and I created this imaginary world.
We called a press conference and produced a white handkerchief from our pockets
and said "This is a flag to Surrender to Peace."
Not Fight for Peace, but "Surrender" to Peace was the important bit.
All of us represent Nutopia.
On this day of the birth of Nutopia,
Let’s all wave the white flag or handkerchief in our minds
And say "I love all of me" and have lots of fun.
Because we deserve it.
Each one of us.

For many years, the former residents of 1 White Street received mail for Lennon and Ono, though it waned after Lennon's murder in 1980.

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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

The Bowery as it looked in 1896, three years after the publication of Maggie.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-56731)

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the publication of Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a boldly realistic look at the life of young girl from the Bowery who is ultimately forced into a life of prostitution.

Crane was born in 1871 in Newark, NJ, the youngest of fourteen children. His father, a Methodist Episcopal minister, died when he was just eight years old. Young Stephen bounced between the homes of various relatives before ending up with his brother Townley in Asbury Park. (That house still stands and is open for various literary events.)

After two semesters at two different colleges, Crane dropped out to try his luck as a writer. He continued to live in New Jersey, but spent much of his time on the Bowery, gathering material for freelance articles while also writing about Asbury Park for the New York Tribune. In 1892, Crane relocated to Manhattan and finished work on Maggie. He attempted to sell the work to the Century Magazine for serialization, but they rejected it as "too cruel."

On January 16, 1893, Crane submitted a copyright application for the work--at this point simply called A Girl of the Streets--and sometime in late February he had 1,100 copies privately printed under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. According to Richard Weatherford's Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage, Crane paid 79 cents a copy for the books but attached a cover price of only 50 cents. Crane had little luck getting New York bookstores to carry the title; only twenty-three original copies remain, probably all sent to friends and relatives. What happened to the rest is unknown, but there's a chance Crane burned them to stay warm. After Red Badge of Courage made Crane a literary star two years later, he had only one copy of Maggie left from which to work on revisions for republication.

Though Red Badge of Courage made Crane famous, it didn't make him rich, and he struggled financially the rest of his life. He left New York after an incident where he testified on behalf of a prostitute named Dora Clark in her criminal and civil trials. Clark was exonerated, but it ruined Crane's reputation. He worked as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War and eventually settled in England. In his late twenties, he contracted tuberculosis and he died at a health spa in Germany at age 29.

Crane made significant changes between his 1893 private printing and the edition published in 1896 after the success of Red Badge of Courage. The most significant change was making the end of the novel--and thus Maggie's fate--more ambiguous. Though the 1893 edition can be found in various facsimile editions, if you're a real Stephen Crane fan and want to own a piece of literary history, there's an original on the market right now for $8500.

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The Fate of Beth Hamedrash Hagadol

images courtesy of The Lo-Down

If you don't regularly follow the news on the Lower East Side, you might not have seen that Congregation Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, who own the synagogue on Norfolk Street that we visit on tours and talk about in Inside the Apple, has formally requested that its landmark designation be revoked so that it can be torn down and replaced by a 45,000-square foot condo tower that would also include a small shul for the congregation.

The complete story is available at The Lo-Down (your best source for ongoing Lower East Side news), but it doesn't really talk about the factors that made this synagogue so important in the first place. Built in 1850, as the Norfolk Street Baptist Church, a plain-front Gothic Revival structure, this was one of the last vestiges of the area as an upper-middle-class, mostly Protestant neighborhood.

After the American Revolution, most of this land--which had been owned by the Delancey family, who were Tories--was seized by the government and sold off in lots. Because the Delanceys had already improved the area, it was ripe to become a suburban (when the city really stopped at Chambers Street) enclave. A few houses from this period still linger in the area, especially along East Broadway and Henry Street.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

Within ten years, the middle-class Baptists had moved uptown (eventually becoming the basis for Riverside Church), and the building became a Methodist Episcopal parish before being sold to Beth Hamedrash in 1885. The new owners added a Jewish star to the roof and reconfigured the altar area to become a bima, but otherwise left the plain Gothic church intact.

The congregation’s controversial rabbi, Abraham Ash, died a couple of years after the move, prompting the search not only for a replacement, but for a man who might serve as Chief Rabbi for the Orthodox in New York. A Union of Congregations was formed to search for someone who could oversee kosher supervision, help enforce stricter observation of the Sabbath, and—perhaps most importantly—help organize a more permanent beth din (a rabbinical court) to adjudicate on religious matters. In 1888, the congregation hired Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Vilnius, Lithuania—apparently the only candidate who was interested in the job. Thousands showed up for his first sermon at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, only to be disappointed when it was preached in Lithuanian, which many of them could not understand. Things only grew worse when the Union of Congregations agreed to a one-cent tax on kosher meat. (It turns out this was because the Union had promised to pay off the rabbi’s outstanding debts in Vilnius.) Within two years, Joseph had so thoroughly disappointed people that a handful of congregations independently selected a competing Chief Rabbi. Soon after, Rabbi Joseph had a stroke and while he was still able to perform his duties at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, he withdrew from public view.

However, when Rabbi Joseph died in July 1902, thousands of mourners poured into the streets to lament his passing and a heated argument broke out as to which congregation would have the honor of burying him. Ultimately, Beth Hamedrash Hagadol prevailed, and his funeral procession was followed by as many as 30,000 mourners. (Finding so many Eastern European Jews in one place was too tempting for some hotheaded Irish New Yorkers, causing riots to break out along the route.)

As The Lo-Down notes, there have only been 18 hardship applications to the Landmarks Preservation Commission since 1965, but thirteen of those have resulted in demolitions, most recently St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. Could Beth Hamedrash be next? If you are interested in it and its history, you'd best check it out while you can. The building has been vacant for years and you can't get inside, but it is well worth seeing the exterior if you are in the area.

UPDATE: You can also read more about the fate of the synagogue--and efforts to prevent its demolition--in Allison Siegel's excellent post at Bowery Boogie.

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Circus and the City at the Bard Graduate Center

All images courtesy of the Bard Graduate Center

You only have a few more weeks to catch the excellent show "Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010" at the Bard Graduate Center.

Using over 200 objects, the exhibition tells the story of the evolution of the modern circus from John Bill Ricketts's equestrian theater on Greenwich Street to the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey spectaculars of today. Because so much of that evolution took place in New York, the show is filled with wonderful posters, paintings, and photographs of New York through the ages. Of particular interest are the sections dealing with P.T. Barnum. Today, Barnum's name is best known through the circus, but he was an impresario long before the modern circus was born and his American Museum near City Hall was one of the city's top attractions.

As the show's press release also notes, the "exhibition also features a series of thematic displays about parades, music, toys, elephants, posters, and other aspects of the circus business. These displays include wonderful prints and photographs of circuses parading through the city in different eras, as well as impressive wooden carvings by Samuel A. Robb, New York’s preeminent manufacturer of show and shop figures."

The exhibition runs through February 3, 2013, Tuesday-Sunday. Thursday nights the gallery stays open late and is free after 5pm.

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