Reviving a piece of Traverse City history, the Music House Museum launched their 2007 season this week by debuting portions of the miniature Traverse City under construction for more than a dozen years.
Inspired by the scale model of the downtown and other buildings that resided for decades at Clinch Park, a team of volunteers has been making from scratch and in excruciating detail buildings including the Hannah Lay store, the Traverse City State Bank, the City Opera House, the Masonic building, Petertyl Drugs and the Whiting Hotel.
The downtown they are recreating is based on the 1930s, reflecting the era when the original model where they will spend the season.
With the Music House Museum celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, this homage to a bygone downtown — on a 3/8ths of an inch to a foot scale — is timely. Previously, the work area with the models in progress, situated in the basement of the museum, had only been open to the public when volunteers were present.
"It's a great tie to linking the Music House Museum to the community,” said Andy Struble, curator of the museum. "Our hope is that eventually we'll have a separate place to display it but that is many years in the future.”
The original miniature city was displayed at Clinch Park through 1973, when banker Howard Stoddard bought it. After years in the weather it had sustained considerable wear and tear (Struble noted the old St. Francis Church is held together by "paint”) and Stoddard searched unsuccessfully for a permanent location. He died in the early 1990s and, surprising the recipients, willed the collection to the Music House Museum.
"We've been going through all the buildings in the Stoddard estate,” noted Struble of the past dozen years of work. "Because it was an outdoor display, most of the buildings had been replaced over the years and a lot of the significant buildings were difficult to build and hadn't been done.”
The goal has been to complete the 100 block of Front Street and volunteers have been recreating buildings one by one. Other buildings in progress or near completion included the Park Place Hotel, the Carnegie Library, the Courthouse and a church on Washington Street. These buildings are not currently display as they are situated off of Front Street.
"We'd have like to have shown some of them upstairs but we wanted to show the downtown street and we stuck to that,” said Fred Zwemer, a volunteer with the project for the past four years. "We didn't want to mix them up in places they totally didn't belong. We have some holes [in the Front Street display] but we've shoved some buildings together.”
Zwemer and a crew of three other weekly regulars plus other volunteers have completed the brunt of the work in the past four years. Expert modeler Jim Ison has been a lynchpin of the project since it began in the 1990s. Each building takes hundreds of hours of labor to complete, with no detail spared in either research or construction.
"We're learning a lot of history as we're going and it's very interesting,” said Zwemer, a model boat builder and retired engineer-by-training who worked in manufacturing and sales. "It's fun to have some of the people come through who are a little bit older and know something about it.”
The Music House Museum still retains the surviving original buildings but they are not currently displayed. Their style and mission is more "folk art” than the painstaking reproductions of the past decade. The ultimate vision is to have a space large enough to display both the newer, detailed miniature city with complete downtown blocks as well as the surviving original buildings from the outdoor collection.
"To put everything together would require 6,000-7,000 square feet in a separate building,” noted Struble.
For more information on the Music House Museum, contact 938-9300 or www.musichouse.org. Hours from now until October are Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. and on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.