The Smithsonian’s Renovated Carousel Will Return to the National Mall for Another Round

The classic merry-go-round is gleaming again, but it’s more than an amusement: it’s a ride through history

To take in a museum exhibition, with all its art and historical significance, is to appreciate the meticulous planning that goes into it. Designers create galleries around relevant objects; curators spend years digging through centuries-old archives; art handlers agonize over mounting a painting just right. Yet one historic item on the National Mall landed at the Smithsonian with far less deliberation. 

Secretary S. Dillon Ripley first brought a carousel to Washington in 1967, calling it a “living extension of the museums,” although some people worried it was more silly than substantive. The New York Times even reported concerns that the Institution was becoming an “ivy-covered Disneyland.” Despite the doubts, the Smithsonian has managed to maintain Ripley’s vision, curating an artifact with a richer story than many of our grandest buildings. 

In 1947, a different gleaming carousel was installed at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, outside Baltimore, about 50 miles north of Washington, D.C. Opened in 1894, Gwynn Oak was built along streetcar lines as an invitation to neighbors from all economic strata. Yet Black residents, despite constituting about a quarter of Baltimore’s population by 1950, were not welcome.

Starting in 1955, an eight-year effort to integrate Gwynn Oak mirrored the civil rights push farther South. It began with years of picketing the park’s “All Nations” day, which excluded countries with primarily Black populations. But over time, the Gwynn Oak protesters became bolder, joining the national landscape of students braving hostile crowds to attend school in Little Rock, Arkansas; bus riders taking to the sidewalk in Montgomery, Alabama; and teenagers sitting unbowed at a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter.

On August 28, 1963, the same day Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream with crowds on the National Mall, Sharon Langley became the first African American child to ride the carousel at Gwynn Oak. 

After hurricane damage shuttered the park in 1973, the carousel went into storage. A few years later, as Ripley’s original carousel began to show its age, the Smithsonian began looking for a suitably grand replacement. Gwynn Oak’s hand-carved beauty, an emblem of the struggle for civil rights, fit the bill. For four decades, riders of all ages, especially our youngest learners at the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center, have laughed as the Washington Monument appeared and disappeared from view. This April, after a detailed renovation, the carousel will return to its rightful spot on the Mall as an unexpected witness to history.