Artistic Miniatures
A vacation back to childhood. That’s how my wife Mary and I feel each October when we visit the Florence Griswold Museum’s We Faerie Village in Old Lyme, Connecticut. We are among thousands who make the annual pilgrimage to the impressionist art mecca’s beautiful riverside grounds where we wander in wonder among gardens, on the broad lawn, and beneath trees to see a display of over two dozen expertly designed and built small scale structures whose fine detail and whimsical vision always leaves us gobsmacked. And nature is in conspiracy with art as breezes stir the constructions and sun and clouds play with shadow and light.
Each year features a somewhat eccentric theme that amps our imaginative roving. Subjects have ranged from scarecrows, to Alice in Wonderland, to superhero homes. Built of finely crafted and found objects, visitors might encounter a tiny house of sticks, wire and fabric filled with furniture and fitted into a tree-hollow or hanging from a branch. There may be fortresses or miniature landscapes complete with gates, winding stone paths, ladders and towers. Pieces of spangled glass, machine parts, feathers, acorns and shells are often among the construction materials. Sometimes we’ve seen fanciful cities of ceramic or glass structures that seem to spring from the grass like mushrooms. There are buildings with peculiar and pixyish doors, windows and gables. Their size charms, clever artistry intrigues.
“Wee Faerie Village in the Land of Oz” from back a few years ago was my favorite concept. One design depicted the Emerald City with a cluster of hollow green glass structures of varying sizes and shapes bearing a sign that read: “The Wizard is In.” Another created a little landscape of winding trails behind a copper gate set in a garden among ivy and lamb’s ear that made its way through a world of bottle-like structures and handcrafted leaves of verdigris spangled copper. Nearby, the wizard’s balloon made of glass, wires and brightly colored medallions hung from a tree.
The event not only illustrates the artists’ supercharged imaginations; it gets creative juices flowing in visitors. Children practically explode with joy and excited voices take the dourest adult on a joyride of daydreams.
Miniatures have a magical attraction. They catch the eye and enchant the heart. How else to explain the lifelong passion of many for model railroading, delight in the kitsch of miniature golf structures from lighthouses to windmills, or the fascination with old fashioned snow globes?
Forest Miniatures
While walking in the woods, I occasionally find fairy houses built of near-at-hand objects—moss, pine cones, sticks, acorns, bark, stones, mushrooms and lichen. They are a startling site among trees and boulders, at once human fabricated and yet set in nature and made of natural materials. Lacking some of the artistic intricacy of Wee Faerie Village, they are nevertheless clever and imaginative, often quite elaborate and demonstrating careful thought, manual dexterity, and a willingness to spend time.
Natural settings, often deep in a forest, gives them a haunting quality, and I sometimes feel eerily uncomfortable, as if mischievous sprites might appear at any moment. The tiny houses are nestled among tree roots, in the shadow of ledges, atop large rotting logs, or burrowed into soil. There are gable and flat roofs, stone paths, fences, stick stairways and ladders. Some of these elven structures sport chimneys, porches and out-buildings. Emitting a rustic charm that is hard to resist, they make me long for a woodland retreat, a Walden-like house where I can dwell quietly. It’s not surprising that I’ve found the most elaborate collection of these clever structures in a sprucy forest on Mohegan Island, that artistic haven off the of Maine coast.
Just one of these cute creations seems to spawn others. More than once, I’ve returned after a couple months to a spot where I’d found one or two, only to discover a whole subdivision had bloomed. Indeed, I’m charmed by these tiny fantasies, but I’m glad they are rarities. I go to the woods in retreat from a constant barrage of human intervention and inventiveness, and even these minor disturbances of natural places are an intrusion from which forests should provide respite. And I worry that with fairy house websites full of building instructions and material lists the activity may devolve into a fad of dulled creativity, a paint-by-the-numbers mentality. Still, there’s a thrill to suddenly finding these tiny worlds in the middle of nowhere. They lighten my heart and cause me to linger.
In the woods and beyond, children take easily and naturally to the lilliputian. Adults frequently drift back into childhood, to dollhouses, plastic soldiers, model airplane building, and Lego creations. Memories surface unexpectedly, return us to a time when we believed in creatures that only we could see.
Mysterious Miniatures
Not all sprites and other diminutive creatures are beneficent or endearing, and when there’s a bit of mystery about their habitations, fantastic stories of malevolence can go viral. I’d long heard of pernicious spirits roving a tiny ruin called Little People’s Village. It’s sandwiched between I-84 and powerlines, hidden among brush and trees in Waterbury, Connecticut near the Middlebury line. On a spring morning, I walked down an abandoned road of broken pavement to see for myself.
With the highway visible across a no man’s land of unkempt vegetation, I took an obscure path that led into the trees and soon encountered a derelict person-sized cabin of stone cobbles obscured by vines and brush. Just beyond was a tiny house in faded red masonry featuring pilasters and other architectural details, including steep gabled dormers. Nearby, was a chimney-like structure, a stone wall, steps, and low piles of ruined masonry and rusting pieces of steel. Built into a ledge was a series of small openings in a stone and concrete structure that looked like elven cliff dwellings. It was topped by a tiny gabled hut with a yellowish cast. Just beyond was the reddish concrete “cliff throne,” a construction with a central tower and twin dependencies to either side. Embedded in the façade were a variety of enigmatic runes—swirls, rectangles, pointed ovals. It could indeed be a large outdoor chair of sorts, but just as likely an elven temple.
Bizarre ruins in scraggly woods echoing with sounds of traffic had a certain creep factor. I felt uneasy, and hurried out.
What intrigued me most was not what I saw, but the weird stories that I’d heard, and the seeming bottomless attraction for a place that, frankly, has nothing much to see. Perhaps miniature ruins captivate because their function and purpose are not readily apparent. One tale tells of a woman driven mad by fairies, so her husband built them a place to live hoping they would leave her alone. Another, is that of a man tricked by voices in his head to build a community for the tiny folk. Some have thought the site an adjunct to nearby Quassy Amusement and Waterpark, or one of those peculiar roadside attractions designed to draw trade.
In fact, Little People’s Village was the site of a gas station on a busy road to Waterbury that was bypassed in the late 1920s, according to the Middlebury Historical Society. With business declining, the owner started planting shrubs and flowers. He built little houses, a lighthouse and churches, some lit with electricity, and hoped to start a nursery. But the garden center was abandoned before it ever got started. Over decades, the land grew up in weeds and trees, and finally vandalism turned a charming toy village into an unsightly wreck.
I most value truth, but find fantasies just as interesting. Despite its sad state, the place has a weird, chilling quality. A man’s dream slowly faded and crumbled in the woods, but others have dreamed up myths to make the site live much longer than its creator ever imagined. It seems odd, but the stranger the scenario, the more likely people are inclined to believe it. On some level, we desperately want to live in a world of enchantment and magic.
Spiritual Miniatures
Miniature places are not all about whimsy, drawing trade for business, art, or play. City planners and architects build models of buildings and communities, even entire cities as is the case with the over 9,000 square foot Panorama of the City of New York displayed at the Queens Museum. But sometimes, small-scale construction can be motivated by deeper philosophical, even spiritual causes.
Holy Land U.S.A., a miniature re-creation of various places mentioned in the Bible, consists of eighteen acres sitting on a Waterbury, Connecticut hilltop overlooking the city. Constructed of stone. concrete, wire, pipe, cinderblock, wood and even old bathtubs and other recycled materials, it rises up the hill like a tiny terraced city. Today, it’s a partial ruin ever on the cusp of revival, but in its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s it was a tourist attraction that drew in excess of 40,000 people a year.
The brainchild of the late John Baptist Greco, a local lawyer and devout Catholic, construction began in 1955. It’s said that he wanted to create a place where people could be peaceful and contemplate biblical lessons. Winding paths, some with handrails, passed statues and mini replicas of Solomon’s Temple, the Garden of Gethsemane, Tower of Babel, Herod’s Palace, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, catacombs, the Tomb of John the Baptist, and many other sacred sites. Greco closed Holy Land U.S.A. in 1984 with a plan to improve and expand, but died in 1986 leaving the work unfinished. Since that time, weather and vandalism have taken their toll, but the amateur folk-art charm of the place still enchants, regardless of religious affiliation.
On a windy, sun-washed day with clouds racing over the hill and casting flickering shadows, I walked through one of the twin stone and concrete entrance arches and made my way up the hill along overgrown paths, on steps and ramps, past metal fences and stone walls where derelict structures were often leaning, broken, rickety or collapsed. Everything was painted white and sparkled in the daylight The buildings were cleverly constructed with towers, domes, crenelations, turrets, and arches. There were windows and entryways of different sizes and configurations. The scene was dizzying. Its sheer expanse, detail, and audacity of conception were surprisingly impressive. I felt as if I were walking into the designer’s everlasting imagination, and wanted to linger.
The view of Waterbury far below with its houses, church spires, office towers and old factories was magnificent. From this distance, the city seemed almost at the same scale as this biblical fantasy, and the comparison seemed to amplify the power and size of the miniature world in which I wandered.
Even dilapidated, Holy Land U.S.A. is a powerful presence, perhaps because of its distinctive originality. Although some have called the place ominous, almost post-apocalyptic (and the current reputation for danger is not completely undeserved), I felt something reverential in a way that has nothing to do with religion. Handcrafted and quirky, it stands out in a world of prefabricated and perfectly manufactured, practically identical buildings and objects. Some might call it junky or worse, but pieced together with odds and ends woven with imagination, it exudes the triumph and joy of the human spirit.
Small Wonders
We have a natural affinity for miniatures. No doubt there’s a cuteness factor that makes them endearing. Size matters, and not in the supersized fashion in which fast food restaurants and celebrities have trained us to think. Some objects may be physically diminutive, yet loom large in our lives and imaginations.
Perhaps we’re attracted to miniatures because they help make our ginormous, fast-paced world manageable, comprehensible, and logical. Miniaturization is an art form in which we find comfort. Sometimes, what we need after all, is just a small world.
