Carousel Museum Collection
In preparation for your year end tax donations, please consider donating to the Carousel Museum's transportation fund! Our permanent collection of carousel animals continues to grow each year. Donations to the collection have come from all over the United States including, Maine, Connecticut, New York, Kansas, Las Vegas, New Jersey, California, and New York. Your support of our transportation fund will help us get these animals to the Museum and into their forever home!
The Carousel Museum
The Carousel Museum
Venetian Carousel
The Carousel Museum
UPCOMING EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS
.png)
.png)
The Carousel Museum, in collaboration with the Sessions family, is proud to present a special exhibition honoring the life and work of Glo Sessions—an artist whose creative vision was deeply connected to Bristol.
For over five decades, Sessions captured the people, places, and everyday life of this community, helping shape the city’s visual identity. Her legacy is also part of the Carousel Museum’s history, where she contributed to its early revitalization and served on its board of directors. This exhibition reflects our commitment to celebrating local artists and preserving the cultural identity of the community we serve.
We are especially grateful to the Sessions family for their generous support and donation of her work. A selection of artworks will be available for purchase, with proceeds supporting The Carousel Museum’s mission as a community-focused nonprofit.
The Carousel Museum’s Grand Project
Children’s Delight and the Story of Brooklyn’s Street Carousels
For years, a little carousel with ten metal ponies sat outdoors in a New Jersey field. It had once traveled from block to block, stopping so children could climb aboard for a ride. By 2018, when National Carousel Association member Art Curtze bought it from a private owner and donated it to The Carousel Museum in Bristol, Connecticut, its canopy and platform had rusted and much of the paint on its ponies had worn away. Curtze arranged to have the carousel trailered to Bristol. The carousel was called Children’s Delight. To understand why Bristol’s welding students, volunteers, and neighbors took on its restoration, picture a horse-drawn wagon pulling up on a New York street. A small merry-go-round sat on the wagon bed, with room up front for a piano and its player. It was the kind of ride that could come right to a child’s door.
BROOKLYN MAKERS AND THEIR LITTLE RIDES
The Carousel Museum’s Children’s Delight brings together the work of two Brooklyn makers. According to the museum’s project team, the ride pairs a George B. Marx carousel with a William F. Mangels mechanism and carries ten cast-metal figures. How and when the carousel and mechanism were paired remains unknown.
A 1922 U.S. patent granted to Robert D. Marx and assigned to George B. Marx
shows how a small, hand-cranked carousel could be mounted on a horse-drawn wagon. An undated advertisement from Brooklyn’s George B. Marx Wagon Company offers a carousel wagon under the name Children’s Delight.
Around 1920, Mangels was building hand-cranked merry-go-rounds mounted on trucks, according to the amusement trade press. The name Children’s Delight also appears on a different carousel associated with Coney Island. That ride, attributed to Mangels and dated to about 1910, has two chariots and seven wooden horses carved by M. C. Illions.
HOW A STREET CAROUSEL WORKED
A DIME AND A RIDE AROUND THE BLOCK
In the 1922 Marx design, beams running the length and width of the wagon frame supported the carousel’s circular platform. A center spindle kept the platform aligned, and a ring of rollers beneath it supported the outer edge as it turned. With the wagon parked, children climbed aboard and took their places on the little horses or in a chariot. The operator turned the platform with a hand crank at the rear of the wagon.
By the 1950s, the wagon with a piano had a motor-age counterpart. In December 1957, Billboard estimated that about 400 truck-mounted children’s rides were operating, more than half in the New York metropolitan area. The trade paper reported that a ride generally cost a dime by then and that operators played music through loudspeakers as they moved from block to block.
WHEN STREETS CHANGED
THE BRISTOL COMMUNITY TAKES IT ON
When automobiles first appeared, they shared city streets with horse-drawn wagons. As motor traffic grew, it became harder for carousel operators to stop and set up without blocking the way. Some cities restricted where the rides could operate, and over time, street carousels faded from everyday neighborhood life.That history puts Bristol’s Children’s Delight in context. Its compact platform and child-sized horses belong to a trade that adapted from horse-drawn wagons to motor trucks. In New Jersey, where the museum’s ride served a local community, a carousel could still be something that came to the children.
Welding students at Bristol Technical Education Center took on the rusted carousel. In 2023 and 2024, they repaired the structure and carousel mechanism and worked on the canopy, safety gates, and platform. A new wheeled base lets them move the ride for display. The museum’s partners also include Kaynor Technical High School, the local chapter of American Coaster Enthusiasts, the National Carousel Association, and local volunteers. Businesses and individual supporters have helped raise funds, and sponsors have adopted and named the little horses. With the structural repairs behind them, museum staff and volunteers have turned to painting the structure and figures. The canopy, the gates, and the mechanism are part of the story. Together with the ponies, they show how an operator could bring a complete ride to a neighborhood curb and be on the way again when the last child climbed down.
WHY DOES THIS CAROUSEL BELONG TO THE MUSEUM
The grand wooden carousels in the collection tell the story of amusement parks and their carvers. Children’s Delight tells a story at the scale of a city block. It recalls the thrill of seeing a ride arrive on an ordinary afternoon, close enough to run home and ask for a coin. Preserving the whole machine keeps that part of carousel history visible, along with the work of the Bristol students and neighbors who helped save it.
HELP TO BUILD A PERMANENT HOME FOR CHILDREN’S DELIGHT
The Carousel Museum plans to finish restoring the carousel and install it just outside the Children’s Studio in a glass enclosure. The enclosure will protect the restored carousel from the weather and let families see the complete ride up close. We need your help to build that enclosure. A gift for the restoration project will help give Children’s Delight a permanent home and preserve an important part of street carousel history for future generations.
