Ocean City in the 70s: The Ocean City cottage was bought by my maternal grandparents in 1970 so that they wouldn’t have to rent a place anymore. My family and I stayed there every Summer for a weeks’ vacation. Staying at the cottage became a whole separate life of childhood experiences that I have come to cherish. The cottage sort of took on a personality as the home we lived in while on vacation. This project started for me somewhere between age twelve and sixteen when, as the sentimental sort even then, I came to realize that this vacation HOME would not be around forever and that I had to take pictures of it in order to somehow immortalize its memory. I had a roll of film (Kodak Instamatic 104) with around 12 pics left, so I took pictures from strategic positions to allow the maximum detail to be captured. It would be 20 years before I did anything with them.
In January of 2009 I decided that it was time. I went through all family photos and gathered the 12 I took and set about re-creating the cottage in as much detail as possible with 20 photos. I drew up on grid paper a scale blueprint (one inch per foot) of the property accurate down to the inch. This was possible to determine because the cottage had a suspended ceiling and every ceiling tile was 24 x 48 inches, so by counting ceiling tiles across and down the length and width of the ceiling I could determine the dimensions down to the inch. Not only the building, but each room in it and precise placement of the windows and asbestos shingles were possible. I figured this out at age 16 which explains the angle of my photos. With detailed building plans in hand I built from the table up a perfect replica of the cottage and all the furniture inside it. This included the wallpaper in the kitchen which I recreated in Photoshop to scale so that in the model it would look exactly like the wallpaper in the photo. I particularly love the bathroom because of the mirrors facing each other. The infinite image always fascinated me as a child and that too is recreated in this model.
This was completed in 9 months including the platform it must rest on and it probably cost around $ 3,000. I am proud to say that most of my family that spent time there including my grandmother got a chance to see the model finished. If you open the front and back doors you can look from one end to the other at eye level and actually be fooled into thinking you ARE in fact in the cottage again. The original was demolished in 1992, but unlike the Road Warrior…it does not exist only in my memory…but in the main bedroom.
