Libertyland carousel in potential peril

Apparently another short sighted city is champing at the bit to break up its antique carousel horse by horse to get a little cash in the city coffers. According the the Save Libertyland blog, an auction house has already been lined up to break up the city of Memphis's historic Dentzel carousel. The market is soft right now, so the horses won't go for enough to make any difference to the city's long term financial situation. So many carousels were broken up in the collecting feeding frenzy of the 80's and 90's, there really aren't all that many antiques left. Hopefully, the Libertyland carousel will not go the way of so many other classic rides and provide expensive decor for a few collectors.

http://savelibertyland.blogspot.com/

Geez here we go again. The collecting market for individual pieces is all but dead, it pretty much killed itself with the feeding frenzy in the 80's. There are dealers out there sitting on inventory that they obtained then that they can't unload. Pieces went for attrocious amounts of money, and they can't get enough for them now to break even. The auction houses fanned the feeding frenzy, took their percentages and ran. The outright greed of them was readily apparent most recently during the Coney Island B&B machine crisis. They say they are "preserving the art" out one side of their mouths and counting their profits out of the other. Breaking up a machine is like cutting a Rembrandt. Sure you may own a piece of a masterpece, but it looses almost all of it's meaning when it's seperated from the rest of it. The builder designed them with a total visual impact in mind especially any of Wm. H. Dentzel's machines, truely they are masterpeices of grand Rococo style.

The fact that the city may even be considering this just shows how out of touch the city goverment is, listening only to the bean counters, who are gleefully believing the crap the auction house is telling them. It's criminal

From what I've seen of Memphis...I'm guessing poor carousel decisions pale in comparison to other poor mistakes their elected officials have made...just my initial reaction to seeing a few of the schools in that city!