Art: Gingerbread House

Dean George Harold Edgell of the Harvard Faculty of Architecture used to say that one good result of the persistence of U. S. architects in imitating traditional styles was that an art student could find an excellent example of every style of architecture known to man within 50 miles of New York. Until last week, however, the questing art student could not have found a proper Hans Andersen Gingerbread House. This omission has been rectified through a union of the talents of Joseph Urban, globular Viennese Architect and stage setter, and the enthusiasm of Fred H. Bennett, whole-wheat flour man (“Wheatsworth” crackers).

Just 50 miles from New York in Hamburg, N. J., the gates of the Wheatsworth factory grounds were thrown open and hundreds of wide-eyed children clambered excitedly through one of the strangest houses ever built. It is a poured-stone structure on the foundations of an old cement kiln. Its sparkling roof, white as sugar icing, is decorated by a frieze of pink and blue imitation candy hearts. Huge cookies (of cork) are set in the giddily striped and curlicued walls. A six-foot painted knight in gaudy armor on a painted horse spins from a turret as a weather vane. A gigantic black cat arches his cast stone back on the top of a sugar-stick minaret. A trained seal on a barber’s pole is balancing a whirling ball on the tip of his nose. Up the balustrade of the exterior staircase stalks a procession of pink elephants, rhinoceroses. The interior is even stranger, with carved witches and fairies, gnomes and children, a giant metal plum pudding, glass-eyed electric spiders that slither up and down on copper webs. To curdle young blood one room has a reproduction of the cauldron in which Jack’s giant made pot-av-feu of his victims before Jack slew him. The walls are studded with bones.

Pleased as any child with the Gingerbread House was Miller Bennett last week. He has long been certain that if people would only come to see his mill and his factory, his sales problems would solve themselves.

“I went to see the opera Hansel & Gretel when this problem was still unsettled in my mind.” he snapped excitedly last week. “My eye was taken by the quaint fantastic fairyland gingerbread house on the stage. The thought struck me, ‘just the thing!’ Something like that for the children on the old cement kiln across the courtyard from the mill. I went to see the decorator Joseph Urban who designs the stage settings for the Metropolitan Opera, and he’s been hard at work on this Gingerbread House of mine for two years. It cost $50,000, but if it brings the children and their mothers, it’s well worth it.”