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I went to Colorado last month to visit my wife's friend who just had a baby. It was our first time taking our kid on a plane, which went remarkably well, and also which I hope continues to be the case for future family travels. As a kid I traveled a lot, and I have great respect for my parents schlepping two children around the world multiple times.
One day, we drove into the mountains outside Denver, to a cool little town called Nederland. Nederland doesn't have a lot - there's a gem shop with a dinosaur mural on the side, a coffee shop made out of old train cars, and a 100 year old wooden carousel called the Carousel of Happiness.
The carousel has a long history, being built originally in 1917 and exhibited in Salt Lake City at a public park. By 1959 the park was bankrupt, and it moved to a school nearby, where it got used for another 27 years. In 1986, the carousel was sold to a buyer who just wanted the animals, and the frame and mechanical parts were left to rot. A resident of Nederland, Scott Harrison, learned about this and decided it would be a huge waste to let it die. He bought it, and with the help of a friend took it apart and trucked it to his town.
The level of effort that's gone into restoring this is absolutely astounding. The original electric motor has been refurbished and re-tooled by General Electric. The flooring had to be remade, using wood older than the carousel itself:
A new floor was built using southern yellow pine, a material that was used in many original carousel floors. The wood used was cut down in 1890 and used as cribbing for whiskey barrels for a Seagram’s plant in Peoria, Illinois. When that plant was dismantled in the 1990s, this wood was resold and used as floor planks for the Carousel of Happiness.
The music box is an incredible old Wurlitzer organ, there's not a lot of info on that, but I'm pretty sure it's from 1913.
Scott had never carved wood before, but he taught himself and then went on to carve and paint more than 50 animals. 35 of them are currently on the carousel and rideable. He spent 26 years making these before opening the carousel to the public. There's a short documentary about his work, which I wish was free to watch but is unfortunately beholden to the incentives of capitalism.
Rides on the carousel cost only $3, and the organization is mostly run by volunteers.
What I realized while visiting the carousel is that this whole place could not possibly exist in New York City, where I live. It probably couldn't exist in most cities. It only exists now because there's one man out in the Colorado mountains working for literal decades trying to make something beautiful. He's interested in creating art and lasting beauty, not making money. The economics don't make sense. The amount of effort and attention to detail can only be sustained by someone who has a real passion and no obligation to a boss or investor. There are no stack rankings or performance reviews, and nobody he has to answer to, because he's not trying to run a business - he's just trying to create.
The whole visit was inspiring in a really unexpected way. Here, in this little mountain town an hour outside of Denver is a man creating something beautiful. He did it just because he wanted to create something that will last.
I hope it does. I bet it'll live on for another hundred years.