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Dark legends loom over Vineland, New Jersey, where locals are rebuilding
a famed folk-art castle.
By Bill Donahue
The Metropolis Observed
March 2002
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George Daynor (above), was the visionary behind Vineland, New Jersey's,
Palace of Depression (below), a miniature ad-hoc Disneyland he made out of
garbage. It was demolished in 1966, but the town is currently working to
recreate it.
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Photos: Top, courtesy Joe Profetto: bottom, courtesy Palace of Depression
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The angels appeared to him in a dream and told him to go to southern New
Jersey--to a junkyard in a reptile-laden swamp full of singing lizards.
Yes, in 1929, according to the legend he himself spun, George Daynor was
celestially called to a small town named Vineland and was instructed to
build a palace there out of mud and scraps of old metal.
Daynor, an itinerant construction worker, heeded the call, and the Palace
of Depression, named for its era, rose like a manic enchantment out of the
wet ground. Only 1,200 feet square, it was endowed with myriad archways
fashioned from car fenders, walls patterned with rubber bumpers and broken
bottles, and a gate made out of a baby crib. Its roof bore 18 white spires,
which Daynor deemed resting places for angels. There was an indoor wishing
well, a periscope, a ham radio station, a basement room designed to house
the fabled Jersey Devil, and a labyrinth of underground trenches. Daynor
created the exterior paint by mixing pulverized bricks with motor oil, and
his john doubled as the Knockout Room, in which he offered to wallop visitors
with a dangling brick to ease depression.
The whole outlandish empire epitomized the sad, fantastical tackiness of
roadside New Jersey. Between 1932 and 1957 more than 300,000 people paid
to visit the palace and hear Daynor rhapsodize (inaccurately) that he built
the place himself, with his bare hands. The Palace of Depression was featured
on Esso road maps and in magazines ranging from Practical Psychology
to the American Weekly. But it did not remain standing. The city
tore it down in 1966, two years after Daynor's death, and now all that remains
is a ruined ticket booth and a couple of piles of rubble--relics that have
a mythic hold on Vineland, a sprawling farming community of 66,000.
"The palace was our Disneyland," says Kevin Kirchner, the city's
director of building licenses and inspections. "It was like a Dr. Seuss
castle or something Santa Claus would live in, and everyone fifty or
older has a story about the place. They miss it." During the past four
years Kirchner has launched a plan to rebuild the palace out of concrete
and junk, and open it to tourists. "It will be as much like the original
as possible but we're not going to be slavish," says Kirchner, who
hopes to open the new palace in 2004. "We won't fabricate 1932 car
fenders to go over the fireplace or anything. We'll just throw in what
we have."
Kirchner has not been allotted any municipal funds. But he is a jolly and
gregarious fellow who has somehow inspired Vinelanders and their neighbors
to rally with Rockwellian virtue behind a project that has shadows of Edvard
Munch. Already he has raised $28,000 in tiny ($50 to $500) donations and
zillions of in-kind contributions and free labor. A nearby garage is full
of donated building materials--old washing machines, lampposts, license
plates--and he has enlisted Philadelphia photographer Jeff Tirante to build
a foam-core model, a sort of 3-D blueprint, of the new palace.
Native Vinelander Tirante has labored some 200 hours on the project--doing
what he calls "spirit walks" on the palace grounds and scrutinizing
old newspaper clips, movies, and photographs, groping to apprehend the weird
rhythms of a building he entered just once, at age eight. This spring D'Ag-
ostino Construction will pour the foundation for the new palace--pro bono--and
local Girl Scouts will begin embedding the concrete walls with detritus.
The Cub Scouts are expected to bring decorative seashells. Philadelphia
artist Isiah Zagar will make a mural out of crushed tiles. Signature Woodworking
and Frank Rizzo Plumbing, both of Vineland, will also volunteer time. And
all about the construction site a certain darkness will linger.
That gloom is the specter of George Daynor, who was not a psychologically
healthy individual. He arrived in Vineland claiming, somewhat incredibly,
that he had lost three fortunes in his life--in the Yukon gold rush, the
San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the stock market on Black Tuesday.
Contrary to the myths that he propagated, he came with his wife, an unfortunate
woman named Florence who worked like a mule on the palace. "There wasn't
a single stone that she didn't help lay," Tirante says, "but George
didn't want anyone but himself to get credit for the palace, so he'd lock
her up all day in the ticket booth and forbid her to talk to anybody."
In the mid-1950s Florence escaped, and Daynor turned his terror on the children
of Vineland. "The first time I visited the palace, when I was
five," Kirchner says, "he hid in the basement, in the den
of the Jersey Devil, and then burst out of the darkness to scare me."
Daynor chased after small children, cackling wildly as his bushy white beard
whipped in the breeze. Meanwhile, he made frequent demented ploys for publicity.
In 1956, for example, Daynor gave the FBI a false tip as it was pursuing
the kidnappers of a lost four-year-old boy. He said the suspects had recently
been to the palace; his bald lie garnered him a year behind bars. By his
own reckoning Daynor was 98 years old when he was sprung in 1958. Too feeble
to keep up the palace, he wandered about Vineland wearing rouge on his cheeks
and bobby pins in his hair. Even before his death in 1964 his home was slowly
disintegrating.
By the time 43-year-old Tirante reached adolescence, the Palace of Depression
was a memory and the ticket booth a ravaged oasis. "This was a bit
of J. R. R. Tolkien right in south Jersey," Tirante says. "Whenever
I felt, 'I'm an artist. I don't want to watch the Super Bowl,' that's where
I went to get high, to listen to Jethro Tull--that kind of shit. This was
my Mecca, my Jerusalem."
Of late, Tirante has turned his artistic energies to conjuring a mental
image of the old palace. "When I went there in 1966," he says,
"it looked like something that had been bombed in Dresden. The thing
was an anthill--tunnels going everywhere. All I have to work with now are
a few home movies, some postcards, and maybe thirty photographs of the inside.
The photos are of details--this fireplace, that corner--so it's a matter
of piecing things together, of saying, 'Well, there's a shaft of light there
so there must be a window nearby.'"
Tirante is also cogitating on the "vortex energy center" that
he says dominates the palace grounds. He read somewhere that the swamp is
a sacred site to the Lenni-Lenape, a Native American tribe, and that its
vibe is decidedly female. But, Tirante notes, "George tried to force
his male energy onto the place. He swam against the tide, and he was all
egotistical, just like Charles Manson, and that caused the rise and fall
of his empire." Tirante aims to correct this--to "allow the aesthetics
of the place to shape its design." The new palace, he says, will have
"the same facade and the same look, but inside it will be shaped like
a conch shell. The wheelchair ramps will form spirals. There will be a lot
of female energy."
Or maybe there won't be. As Tirante acknowledges, a palace made by people
who find junk as they go can only evolve organically. "That's
the awesome part," he says. "There will be so many different people
putting their energies into this. Young and old: Cub Scouts, local engineers,
local welders, local plumbers. And then in the background, of course, there'll
be the energy of George and Florence."
Let us pray for the Cub Scouts.
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