The holiday season is full of family traditions, and the Holiday Train Show is one of the most eagerly anticipated. The amazing display of New York landmark replicas created out of plant materials and enlivened by model trains returns to the New York Botanical Garden on Saturday, November 21, with familiar favorites from seasons past and spectacular additions to enchant audiences anew. Beloved by people of all ages, the popular exhibition will be on display in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory through January 10, 2010.
Using a multitude of diverse natural materials such as leaves, twigs, bark, berries, seeds, pine cones, nuts, and pods, Holiday Train Show designer Paul Busse and his team at Applied Imagination in Alexandria, Kentucky, have handcrafted dozens of replicas of historic NY landmarks since the show’s inception at the Botanical Garden 18 years ago. More than 100 of those landmarks, from museums and mansions to ballparks and bridges, will be displayed.
The original Pennsylvania Station (1910 – 1964), this year’s blockbuster addition to the Holiday Train Show, “could be our most exciting building yet” according to Paul Busse. The reincarnation of this major railroad hub is certainly one of the most appropriate ever for the show, which is acclaimed not only for the model trains, but also for the historic and architectural significance of the New York buildings and structures represented.
Six artists on Mr. Busse’s team have constructed his meticulously detailed replica of the building, which when it was built at West 34th Street and Eighth Avenue nearly a century ago, was lauded for its Beaux Arts architecture. In his design of the replica, Busse scaled down the original Penn Station’s approximate eight-acre span to be about 20 square feet—and to fit into the Conservatory, which itself houses an acre of plants under glass. The elaborate botanical interpretation even features Penn Station’s “Grand Concourse”, set two feet above the replica’s street level, and a cutaway view to the train tracks beneath the station with a shuttling passenger train.
In the Holiday Train Show version of Penn Station, botanical building materials visitors will spy include columns made of honeysuckle, façade trim of sea grape leaves, peppercorns, viburnum, willow, and oak bark, and railings of screw pod, burning bush, willow, and acorn caps. The roof is magnolia and pine cone scales and the sky lights are burning bush and basket reed. The adorning eagles have white pine cone bodies, hemlock clove feet, magnolia bud feathers and acorn cap wings. The clocks are birch bark and wheat seeds and the statues have pistachio bodies and cedrela wings. New to this year’s Holiday Train Show will be a rendition of the Brooks Brothers flagship located at 346 Madison Avenue at 44th Street in Manhattan. Founded in 1818 by Henry Sands Brooks as the first ready-to-wear fashion emporium in America, Brooks Brothers is the country’s oldest clothing retailer, and its flagship store is a New York icon.
The Pennsylvania Station and Brooks Brothers building replicas will be placed among re-creations of other only-in-New York sights such as: the original Yankee Stadium, Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Radio City Music Hall—all made of plant parts.
