Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Cleveland and The Henry Ford

Devotees of the Drew Carey Show will recognize this edifice:



If you didn't know, it's the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. There's lots of cool stuff there, like Jimi Hendrix's guitar, Elvis's purple Cadillac, John Lennon's doodles, and Hank Williams's boots. There are also plenty of multi-media shows about the history of rock music. However, you get museum fatigue after a while and can't properly appreciate the outfit Roger Daltrey wore in the film version of "Tommy."

Next stop: Dearborn, Michigan, home of The Henry Ford. (It seems like the word "museum" should be included there, but it's actually called just The Henry Ford.) It's a complex of attractions including an indoor history museum and a place called Greenfield Village. You can tour Greenfield Village on foot, or take a steam train, a 1920s bus, or a model T Ford!



The village is a bizarre but actually captivating assemblage of historical buildings collected by Henry Ford and physically moved to this location from different parts of the US and even from other countries. For example, we saw Robert Frost's house...



...and Thomas Edison's laboratory.



We also toured Ford's Rouge plant, where they make F-150 trucks. Ford is trying to make it a (relatively) environmentally sound plant. Notice the "living roof" with greenery growing on it.



Back at The Henry Ford, we saw lots and lots of cars, motorcycles and trains...



...as well as the Dymaxion house, a circular house designed by Buckminster Fuller.



The museum is not just about cars, but includes a lot of artifacts from American history, such as the chair Lincoln sat in when he was assassinated and the bus in which Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back. But really, the cars exhibited were pretty great. Most were in pristine condition. The way this one is displayed, one can almost understand how it is assembled:

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