Photo: Elaine Velie.
The New York Botanical Garden’s annual Holiday Train Show features nearly 200 miniature landmarks, all made of natural materials. This miniature is the Guggenheim Museum.
Probably because gifts of toy trains have long been associated with Christmas, model train displays are big at the holiday season. When I was working at the Fed, I loved the seasonal layouts at nearby South Station. (See below.)
Now Elaine Velie is reporting at the art newspaper Hyperallergic about a particulticularly artistic setup in New York.
“Inside the New York Botanical Garden’s (NYBG) Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a miniature Guggenheim Museum sports a mushroom-cap roof, the Statue of Liberty is made of palm fronds, and the Brooklyn Bridge is supported by a dizzyingly intricate arrangement of tiny twigs. The scaled-down landmarks are just a few of the nearly 200 NYC buildings constructed using natural materials at NYBG’s annual Holiday Train Show, where around 20 doll-size conductors barrel and weave over a half-mile of track.
“The show begins outdoors, where trains circle jagged mountains and zoom above giant snowdrop flowers and rabbits in a fairytale-style enchanted forest, carting pinecones, bark, and acorn tops.
Photo: New York Botanical Garden.
“Laura Busse Dolan runs the Applied Imagination company that creates the structures in the exhibition. Dolan’s father, Paul Busse, founded Applied Imagination in 1991, and a year later, the botanical models maker displayed 15 buildings in NYBG’s first Holiday Train Show. Each year, a team of 15 artists adds new work to the show, and NYBG changes the exhibition’s layout and plantings. …
“This year’s train show is the biggest to date and stars Coney Island’s long-gone giant elephant, Manhattan’s demolished old Penn Station, Hudson Valley mansions, a miniature Central Park, and a host of museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick, and the Guggenheim, among other structures.
“ ‘I think Frank Lloyd Wright would very much approve of this,’ Dolan said of the mini-Guggenheim made of ‘cobbled together’ pieces of shell fungus. Another standout is a copy of NYBG’s Mertz Library. It’s decorated with black walnuts that an NYBG staff member collected. …
“The grand finale can be found in the conservatory pond room. City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Staten Island Ferry, the Plaza Hotel, and even the Oculus float on the stagnant water and line the stone fountain. …
“ ‘We’re in awe of the beauty,’ [visitor Mary] Trester said. ‘And the craft of the artists — the attention to detail and everything they do.’
“The Holiday Train Show is open through January 15, 2024.”
Extraordinary pictures at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall.
Photo: Suzanne’s Mom.
Model train at South Station Boston.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 