I honestly don’t remember for how long it was installed at the Forbes Gallery on lower Fifth Avenue, but it was at least several years. I almost want to say I remember first seeing it when my father still worked at the magazine back in `80s, but I may be projecting. In any case, after my children arrived on the scene by the mid-2000’s, when they became more ambulatory, I used to periodically take them to check it out.
By “it,” I’m referring to what my littlest used to call “The Marble Thingy,” which was an art installation that hung on the north wall of the Forbes Gallery’s vestibule. We could just duck in and spend time watching it do its thing. By “its thing,” I mean an inventively complicated obstacle course for a series of metal ball bearings, finding them running down ramps, bumping off bells, whirling through shoots and triggering other mechanisms in the manner of something between a gravity-controlled pinball machine and a Rube Goldberg contraption. My kids absolutely loved it, and we could literally spend upwards of an hour in that little room.
My son Oliver was especially enamored of “The Marble Thingy,” and we were rarely able to walk down that stretch of Fifth Avenue, specifically between 12th and 13th streets, without popping in to check in on it. He’d have happily spent all day just watching it.
Unfortunately, like so many other elements of New York City, the Forbes Gallery closed abruptly in November of 2014. The building that had once housed the magazine’s editorial offices and Malcolm Forbes’ stately gallery of artifacts closed up shop for good. The magazine ended up moving to Jersey City (where I’d later fleeting interview for a position as a science & technology editor I had zero aptitude for) and its old headquarters on Fifth Avenue became yet another NYU facility (as is so often the case).
Sadly, “The Marble Thingy” vanished along with the rest of the Forbes Gallery. I would later learn that the piece in question was titled, fittingly, Wallpiece IV by a sculptor named George Rhoads, and it later sold at auction for a figure between five and seven thousand dollars. Regardless, it was priceless to my little boy, and we both still invoke it when we walk down that street.
This isn’t the exact piece in question, but it’s a good example of what it was like.
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