Rockin' Rocking Horse

This litttle rocking horse wishes to travel to Santa monica California to be photographed at the carosel on Santa monica Pier! Any photograph by any type of horse on the way there would be wonderful too!

Designed and built in 1916 by Charles I.D. Looff, and faithfully restored in 1981 through 1984, The Looff Hippodrome carousel building is listed as a National Historic Landmark. Its Byzantine-Moorish California style, its setting overlooking the beautiful California coastline and the ocean attracts celebrities and tourists from all over the world, as well as children from everywhere. The present carousel has been owned since 1977 by the City of Santa Monica and is a reminder of those golden times in California. Motion picture directors, TV writers, fashion photographers, painters and the public have been bewitched by it for three generations. Paul Newman and Robert Redford perpetrated their "sting" at the carousel. Looff's original merry-go-round was replaced by one from the old Ocean Park Pier in 1939. The current merry-go-round was built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in 1922;its original home was Nashville, Tennessee. The carousel arrived on the west coast before World War II and in 1947 it was moved from Venice pier to the Santa Monica pier. The fanciful and elegant old machine with its horses, painted ponies and chariots, lights, brass poles, and mirrors turns as smoothly now as ever, as it is kept in prime condition. In 1990, each of the horses was taken apart, restored, reassembled and newly painted by The Carousel Works of Mansfield, Ohio, using a team of some of the foremost carousel craftsmen in America.