Jane's Carousel

The carousel you see before you was originally built in nineteen twenty-two by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company and spent decades at Idora Park in Youngstown, Ohio. In nineteen eighty-four, the amusement park went to auction, and the entire carousel faced the prospect of being dismantled and sold horse by horse to various collectors. Real estate developer David Walentas and his wife, Jane, placed the winning bid of three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars specifically to keep the machine intact as a single, historic piece. They transported the battered ride to their studio in Dumbo, where Jane Walentas spent twenty-seven years painstakingly restoring it. She used an X-acto knife to scrape away over sixty years of accumulated paint, eventually revealing the original nineteen twenty-two colors and the intricate, hand-carved details beneath.