The Acquisitions Dept came home from the flea market this morning with this "Lincoln Tunnel" lithographed tin wind-up toy and the Curator was overjoyed. It's perfect for GJ and perfect for the Lugzsonian. Cars, trucks, busses, a local, world-famous tunnel, and it tickles the grandpop bone - as well as our metaphysical fancy! < More on that below!
Ours is all there and it works. They are apparently not unicorn rare. A quick googling reveals several for sale on fleaBay ($75-$350, depending on completeness and condition), several others for sale or sold by antique toy stores over the years, and
this example in the Henry Ford museum, oddly dated as "1925 to 1940." Since the Lincoln Tunnel, connecting Weehawken, NJ to Manhattan, was under construction from 1934 to 1959, opened for traffic in 1937, and this toy is usually dated to the 1940's and 50's, we find that peculiar. Maybe the curators at the Henry Ford know something that everybody else got wrong, but we find it odd. Its popularity as a toy and as a collectible is attributed to the experience of traveling through it and its omnipresence as a landmark and NYC metropolitan area fixture.
But not as odd as the toy, which can be thought of, with a little imagination, as a depiction of inverse space. Inversive geometry is the study of inversion, which flips the Euclidean plane inside out, uniformly. Circles can become spheres, spheres hyperboloids, with lines and angles not contravening each other.
The toy is not depicting the Lincoln Tunnel itself. It is depicting the concept of the Lincoln Tunnel, the idea of any tunnel, but, oddly, inverted.
Let's start with the moving parts. When it's wound up and turned on, the visible cars, trucks, and busses - travelling, directionally, on the wrong side of a US toy, as
@Outlawmws noted on the GS thread, are
not traveling inside the tunnel. They are actually travelling in a very weird geographic space, outside the tunnel, but occupied by New York and New Jerey,
at the same time! There is a sort of no man's land in the very middle, ostensibly neither New York or New Jersey, where the traffic cop is situated, between those nonsensical NEW YORK and NEW JERSEY border markers (the actual border between those two states is the middle of the Hudson river, above the tunnel), but it represents no actual traffic cop and no actual place on earth.
It gets worse.
The openings that the vehicles disappear into and loop right back out of are tunnel entrances (
and exits), but they, too, are inverted.
What that "NEW JERSEY ENTRANCE" side of the toy is representing is the entrance (and exit) of the Lincoln Tunnel on the New Jersey side of the Hudson river, in Weehawken, NJ.
That's what you see when you are going into the Lincoln tunnel from New Jersey, and the cars you would see coming out of those openings as you enter are coming from New York.
Likewise, but conversely, what the NEW YORK ENTRANCE side of the toy is representing is the entrance (and exit) of the Lincoln Tunnel on the New York side of the Hudson river, in Manhattan.
That's what you see when go into the tunnel from Manhattan and what you see coming out of the tubes are cars coming out of the tunnel from New Jersey.
But there is nothing in between the two ends (entrances/exists), obviously (except the imaginary, implied tunnel), and the tin section connecting the two ends doesn't exist. There is no tunnel. The tunnel itself is actually not part of the toy, except for those two small housings where the vehicles briefly disappear and make sharp right turns. But even that implication of the invisible tunnel is not linear, like a tunnel. It would have to loop around like an ouroboros. And yet, it doesn't do that, mechanically, either.
When a vehicle goes into the tunnel from New Jersey it loops around and comes right back out.... into New Jersey again, and into no man's land heading back into the New York entrance to the tunnel on the opposite side of the toy where it emerges, incongruously... in New York!
All vehicles are essentially trapped in New York or NJ - and hardly ever in a "tunnel."
This toy must have been an awful lot of fun for kids from New York and New Jersey to play with. But it must've been a major source of confusion for every young overthinking Poindexter.
. Wrong thread.
