Tinkertown Museum

Story

Ross Ward started carving tiny figures in 1962 as a hobby. By the time he opened Tinkertown Museum in Sandia Park, New Mexico in 1983, the hobby had consumed twenty years, produced thousands of hand-carved characters, and generated an entire miniature Old West town complete with a working saloon, a dentist's office, and a blacksmith who hammers away on a loop. The carvings alone would be enough. But Ward kept going — and going sideways, and upward, and outward.

The museum building itself is partly constructed from more than 50,000 glass bottles mortared into the walls, their bases facing out, filtering the New Mexico light into something amber and diffuse. Ward built much of it with his own hands, over decades, in the hours that other people spent watching television. His motto — painted and posted inside — reads: "I did all this while you were watching TV."

In February 1998, at 57, Ward was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. When it became unsafe for him to drive his Jeep Cherokee, he began covering it in pennies and bottle caps, turning the loss into one last art piece. He died in 2002 at 62. The Jeep is still here. So is the 35-foot antique sailboat Theodora R, which Fritz Damler sailed around the world between 1981 and 1991, and which now sits permanently landlocked inside a museum at 6,000 feet above sea level in the Sandia Mountains — which is either a punchline or a kind of elegy, depending on how you look at it.

Tinkertown holds over 280 wedding cake toppers, a fortune teller named Esmeralda, and a one-man band named Otto. It is the accumulated evidence of a man for whom creating was, as his wife Carla wrote, like breathing.