The statue in the church is a magnet. The medical charts on the wall are reduced images from a nursing handbook. The portrait of Joe Louis in the barbershop is a postage stamp. The woman in an upstairs bedroom is a Hallmark ornament. Welcome to Parker Gray in miniature, a new exhibit at the Black History Museum created by Alexandria natives Sharon Frazier and Linwood Smith.
"You just imagine a better world, and it kind of takes you away from everything," said Sharon Frazier, a retired nurse with the city’s Health Department. "There’s stuff in here from childhood, memories, old furniture."
Frazier and Smith have been working together for the last 15 years to create a series of dollhouse installations that reflect a nostalgic era of Parker Gray, the city’s historically black community northwest of Old Town where they both grew up. The exhibit features a one-room schoolhouse, a beauty parlor, a lawyer’s office, a Buffalo soldier’s cabin, a rooming house, a general store, a crab shack, a florist shop and a mechanic’s garage. One part of the exhibition features an evolution of black life from a slave cabin to the White House.
"For me, it’s a way to get away from pain," said Smith, a retired city mechanic who suffers from a chronic back injury. "Once you get your mind into doing this, it’s like everything else goes away."
<b>THE PAIR ARE BOTH</b> graduates of the old segregated Parker Gray High School and both retired city employees. Although they’ve known each other for many years, they only started working together in the early 1990s after Frazier’s husband died. Each had skills that complimented the other. She has been collecting dollhouse objects for decades; he restores old trunks and antique furniture. She furnishes the insides and creates vignettes; he builds the exteriors and wires the electricity. Together they have created a miniature world that represents an idealized version of life in Parker Gray during a bygone era.
"The popular thing to get here was a peppermint stick in a pickle," Frazier said as she gazed into a recreation of Watson’s Store, which was across the street from the high school. "But I always liked the big cookies. I would get one every day after school."
Parts of the exhibition have a universal significance, like the characters holding newspapers announcing the election of Barack Obama as president. Other aspects are personal, like the barbershop named "Shack’s" in honor of Frazier’s father. Some buildings are direct representations of actual locations, such as St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and People’s Flower Shop. Others are whimsical, like a store called "Linwood’s Treasures, Trunks and Junk" that includes miniatures representation of Frazier and Smith. It’s easy to imagine what the miniature people might be saying to each other.
"She’s asking for a little touch up," said museum curator Lillian Patterson while contemplating the beauty shop. "And she needs a trim because she’s got a lot of hair."
<b>THE LEVEL OF DETAIL</b> will take a while to take in, so come prepared to spend enough time because each dollhouse tells its own distinct story. The handmade diplomas on the wall in the schoolhouse represent colleges where relatives received degrees. A sign in the rooming house declares "No Singing, No Swearing, This is a respectable house." The general store has "all-day suckers" that were popular with Parker Gray teenagers. A miniature version of the Rev. Francis Hull presides over a Christmas service in a sanctuary that includes hand-made stained glass windows patterned after the one’s at St. Joseph. The exterior of the stone house is made from rocks that were collected in the neighborhood.
"Every time I look at them I see something that that I hadn’t noticed before," said Amy Bertsch, spokeswoman for the Office of Historic Alexandria. "The level of detail in these just kind of takes your breath away."