Jane Merryman

The Cooper-Hewitt is a quirky little museum, an outpost of the Smithsonian Institution located on New York City’s Museum Mile. It occupies the graceful Andrew Carnegie mansion at the corner of 91st and Fifth Avenue, across the street from Central Park and a few blocks north of the Guggenheim Museum. Unlike the Guggenheim, all white and hard and cold, Cooper-Hewitt is warm, intimate, and inviting with its dark wood paneling and human-scale rooms.

Officially the National Design Museum, Cooper-Hewitt is the place writers do research when they want to imbue their novel with historical authenticity. Designers seek inspiration from the museum’s diverse collections. Students of the history of design come here to find primary resources in objects as well as in books. I visit this delightful place because long ago my interest in textiles led me into the world of the decorative arts and because I love the offbeat exhibits often mounted here.

Cooper-Hewitt celebrates the impact of design on daily life and its collections represent twenty-four centuries of human creativity. Recently, I enjoyed a display of tableware ranging from elaborate sterling silver serving pieces from the court at Versailles to flat plywood ice cream spoons and ingeniously assembled Japanese plastic picnic ensembles. Across the hall was a room full of whimsical birdcages. But my favorite, so far, has been “Made to Scale, Staircase Masterpieces,” on display from October 2006 to June 2007. A small room off to the side of the admissions desk housed this charming exhibition of more than a score of wooden models from twelve to twenty-four inches high. Who would have thought anyone would build scale models of staircases. Who’d have imagined that anyone else would amass an extensive collection of them. But Eugene and Clare Thaw, of East Hampton, Long Island, did just that and Cooper-Hewitt is the richer for it.

Staircases have been part of buildings for eight thousand years, for the greater part of that time as stone additions to exterior walls. Their purpose was both practical and military and the design guide was the average length of the human foot. As domestic architecture changed, and fortified castles gave way to more comfortable and sociable residences, graceful and impressive interior staircases evolved. Stairways became more imposing, allowing the residents to make grand entrances and dramatize metaphorical statements to remind guests of their position in the social hierarchy.

I’ve always loved staircases, probably because I have rarely lived in a two-story house. I have not experienced the frustration of trying to function efficiently in an environment where whatever I needed was invariably on the other floor. As children, my brother and sister and I yearned to live in a house with stairs, but that happened only once. We thought sliding down a banister would be great fun; however, we were told, “Don’t even think about it.”

From seventh to twelfth grade I attend a Catholic girls’ school housed in a three-story Victorian hulk. Public rooms were on the ground floor, dormitories took up the second, and classrooms occupied the top floor. Several times a day we primly uniformed students filed in silence two by two up and down those wide staircases. The steps of pale, scuffed oak bore the wear of more than fifty years of student treading; the massive curved railings of dark wood were polished by the many hands that went before mine. At Christmastime we caroled “Adeste Fideles,” “O Holy Night,” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” as we wound our way from floor to floor. That joyous sound filling the stairwell and the ordinarily noiseless halls is my most cherished Yuletide memory.

Flights of steps provide dramatic settings for all sorts of other occasions as well. Rhett Butler ogled Scarlet O’Hara as she climbed the stairs at Twelve Oaks and later at Tara carried her up the red velvet treads. A staircase separated Herbert Marshall from his heart medicine in The Little Foxes and led Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to safety in Notorious. And who can forget the mobile contraptions at Harry Potter’s school, Hogwarts.

Dancers and stairs are made for each other. Although Georges Guetary lighted up his “Stairway to Paradise” in An American in Paris and James Cagney, as George M. Cohan, tap-danced respectfully down the White House staircase, few have used the potential of up and down as skillfully as Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

Cooper-Hewitt’s miniature staircases were pièces de maîtrise, or masterworks, made as part of being accepted into a guild. These particular models were fashioned in the nineteenth century to demonstrate careful craftsmanship, a knowledge of geometric principles, and fine woodworking skills, but I didn’t have to be familiar with any of these disciplines to entranced by the exhibit. The wood was handsome in itself: pear, walnut, cherry, mahogany, oak. Some of the models depicted spiral staircases such as might climb to a pulpit. Some were arcs I imagined sweeping from an entrance hall to a portrait-lined gallery or the top tier of leather-bound books in a baronial library. Others were fanciful depictions of what might have been, but never were. All were polished to a warm, rich glow. A few of the models had metal railings or were made entirely of iron.

Wooden or metallic, curved or angular, all were disembodied—these steps were not attached to walls, floors, or landings. It might be hard to imagine a flight of stairs disconnected from the parts it’s supposed to tie together, but as a scaled-down replica a staircase becomes a charming table-size sculpture.

After viewing the exhibit, I crossed the reception hall to see a show of nineteenth-century landscape drawingson the second floor. I could have taken the elevator, but chose instead the dark and brooding staircase. Themodel of this, I thought, would look like a square Templar tower, a small fortress rising out of a tumble of toysin the middle of the nursery. Its hushed, dim atmosphere enveloped me lovingly as it executed several turns andfinally spilled me out into a sunlit hall. Leave it to Cooper-Hewitt to open my eyes to another rare aspect of beauty.