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A storm in July 2023 was especially destructive as it blew through Glen Echo Park in Montgomery County, Maryland, toppling trees and knocking out the power at the park for about a week. A sprinkler failure at the historic carousel also occurred, causing significant damage to five of the animal figures on the ride.
A year and a half after the storm, crews were back inside the tent housing the carousel Tuesday to reinstall the four horses and giraffe that were damaged.
“It was a little sad,” said Emily Rogers, the chief operating officer of Glen Echo Park. “We had some missing friends that were there for a little while, so you had a little bit of a gap where the animals used to be. It’s really nice to see all of all of our carousel animals back here.”
Restoring those animals isn’t easy, because each aspect of the carousel is now more than a century old, and the goal is to keep the ride as authentic as possible. The five animal statues had to be shipped to a special workshop in Ohio. They arrived there last May.
“They had to do some minor wood repairs, and then a lot of repainting,” Rogers said. “The water damaged a lot of the decorative paint that was on the horses.
“The paint that you see here is all special to each individual animal, and the paint colors needed to be matched. The decorative elements seemed to be exactly how it was in 1921.”
Crews spent several hours Tuesday carefully lifting each animal and placing them back on the ride. Besides being over a century old, the carousel was also the scene of a notable moment in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
“We had a group of Howard University students that came here and protested the segregationist policies of the amusement park that was operating here at the time,” she said. They “were able to successfully picket all that year or all that summer in order to desegregate it.”
The park will reopen May 3 for its annual Carousel Day. It includes free performances, free art activities, and even better, free carousel rides.
“We are now a full carousel back with all of our friends again, which is really exciting,” Rogers said.
“We’ve been missing them for the past year or so, and so when folks come back in May, when we reopen for the next carousel season, they’ll be able to see the full carousel put back together.”