After Joslyn, I went to the Lauritzen Gardens to see, for the first time, the recently opened Model Railroad Garden. Kenefick Park, up a steep hill south of the Visitors Center, overlooks Interstate 80 and its Missouri River bridge from the top of the river bluff and has two of Union Pacific's largest, most historic, most awesome locomotives. "On grand display are Centennial No. 6900 - the largest and most powerful diesel-electric locomotive ever built - and Big Boy No. 4023 - the world's largest steam locomotive." The Centennial drive wheels are nine feet high, as I recall, and both engines dwarf visitors, of course. These giants sit nose to nose at a right angle and are dramatically spotlit at night, UP's Welcome to Omaha. The staircase and park are designed to present Union Pacific's role in Omaha and Western history. The area is free, sharing the parking lot of Lauritzen Gardens, which is not free. (Though Burlington House at the east end of the downtown mall is the restored headquarters building of that railroad, now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe headquartered in Fort Worth, it gets left out for General Dodge, whose Victorian mansion sits on a high bluff overlooking downtown Council Bluffs and whose name is on our main east-west street, and his Union Pacific, one of the city's biggest employers, now North America's largest railroad company, covering 23 states, with a brand-new glass skyscraper headquarters here.
So Lauritzen Gardens already had railroad ties, and it's no surprise the four trains running in the new display are all yellow gold with red trim, Union Pacific, nor that one of the locomotives is a model of Big Boy. One of my favorite parts of the gardens is the long green tunnel with its brook gurgling along the walkway, Garden in the Glen, the lowest part, beyond the brick-walled Victorian Gardens, leading to the Arboretum/Bird Sanctuary. The Rose Garden is up a steep bank, and the Model Railroad Garden is terraced into that bank between the Rose Garden and the end of the glen, beginning of the sanctuary. Wow! I thought the Kenefick with its giant locomotives was an ideal spot for little boys. Shaded by thick trees, with big cedar trunk sections used to signify the ecological theme and to support the many bridges over pedestrians' heads, the layout winds up and down that hillside among large, scattered models of Omaha's most famous, mostly historical buildings. I mistook them for exceptionally detailed ceramic models because they're heavily protected by epoxy resins, polyurethane of some sort. Not only did the docent pointedly mention the remarkable use of natural materials, but the brochure explains what materials are used for each model. The same goes for the many bridges, made of twigs and small limbs by a Tennessee mechanical engineer-model railroader in various styles.
Since I mentioned it in the last entry, I'll take the Omaha Building at 17th and Farnam: "Built in 1888 and originally called the New York Life building, this was Omaha's first skyscraper and now houses the law firm of Kutak Rock. Its Italian Renaissance architecture is interpreted on the lower floors' stonework through elm bark, tops of columns are cinnamon sticks, trim is made of burning bush, the cornerstone is white cedar with red twig dogwood, and the eagle ornamentation above the entrance is made of pine cones and tree fern stem." How's that for keeping to a garden theme? The new Union Pacific Center with its glass exterior: "Exterior tiles on this replica are made of buckeye bark, window trim is forsythia and reed, edge trim is bamboo, the roof framework is comprised of contorta and grapevine, the flags at the entrance are linden leaves, and the 'Union Pacific Railroad' lettering is grapevine." Again, wow!
I talked to the volunteer docent in his trainman's uniform and cap. He and other model railroaders happily volunteer and hope to add three more trains next year. He explained that the biggest problem under the trees was keeping the tracks clean. Rainstorms and Omaha's frequent windiness mean twigs and other debris; bird droppings and spiders (I spotted a huge funnel web of a wolf spider near a bridge) are also problems, as is the resident flock of wild turkeys. The landscaping has to be watered by hand. He explained that all the tunnels but one, the longest, are no longer than a man's arm, to facilitate cleaning. We were standing by the longest tunnel, and he said he'd just had to remove a raccoon from that earlier in the week. When I said it was paradise for little boys, he said, rightly, "For big boys too." I was right back in my childhood when every Christmas I wished for a Lionel model train and never got it. The only model trains I ever had and which I remember were (1) a cheap little wind-up tin one when I was 3 or so and we lived in the station, which Uncles Larry and Earl wrecked, according to Mom; later, one summer when she was going to Wayne State to keep up her teaching certificate, during World War II, she brought me (2) a miniature train of heavy metal, cast lead or something with fine detailing, no track needed, that is on my all-time list of Favorite Toys. Wes Eisbenbeiss wrecked that one, according to Mom.
A note about the Omaha Building: I mentioned in the previous entry that it was our Stanford White building. That famous Victorian architect of McKim, Mead and White had several love nests in New York City, equipped with mirrors and a red velvet swing for his sexual pleasures. He designed the second Madison Square Garden, Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square Arch, several other notable New York buildings, and several Long Island mansions. When 13-year-old Evelyn Nesbit and her mother showed up from Pennsylvania, because of the young girl's beauty, she became a model and then a Floradora girl and allegedly was the original for Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girl. Stanford White, 47, took her virginity at 16 and was her lover for a couple of years. Later, after other men and other affairs, she married a hot-tempered, possessive Pittsburgh millionaire, the arrogant Harry Thaw, who liked to whip women. In 1906, a year after he married the then-20-year-old Nesbit, they ran into White at a restaurant and later at Madison Square Garden's roof theater, where, in a jealous rage, Thaw shot White three times in the face. Thaw's trials were two of the most famous murder trials of the period--first a hung jury, then an insanity conviction. The story became The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), one of Joan Collins' better roles in a ho-hum movie, and Elizabeth McGovern played Nesbit in Ragtime (1981).
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