Some Arto Monaco toys return home

AU SABLE FORKS | If you were looking for — and why wouldn't you be? — the pearl white hood of the the Volkswagen racing Beetle from the 1968 film "Herbie the Love Bug," you would travel to Au Sable Forks and make an appointment to see Town of Jay Historian Sharron Hewston in an eclectic museum that is heavy on the work of native son Arto Monaco. The hood is an artifact of Monaco's rich artistic life, which included time at Disney Studios and, most famously, as a toymaker and originator of the Land of MakeBelieve in Upper Jay. This month another cache of Monaco's toys returned home, transferred from the Adirondack History Museum in Elizabethtown to Au Sable Forks. While some still believe Monaco was born in Elizabethtown, his birth certificate says otherwise, "It's so exciting to get this," said Hewston, adding that Monaco considered both Upper Jay and Au Sable Forks to be his home. "Arto shouldn't be forgotten; he was larger than life." Monaco's talent was recognized early by American icons in the world of art and storytelling. Artist Rockwell Kent walked into the Italian restaurant operated by Monaco's father in Upper Jay and did a double take at the murals on the wall. Upon learning that it was the work of the elder Monaco's 20-year-old son, he helped Arto get into the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After a stint at the major Hollywood studios, Monaco returned home, only to be shoed back out West by novelist John Steinback and "All Quiet on the Western Front" director Lewis Milestone who shared a vacation home in Upper Jay. From there he led a mesmerising career in which, among many other things, he decorated furniture for Dorothy Parker, built a full-size German village for World War II soldiers to practice invading, and helped to design Disneyland. But his heart never left the Ausable River Valley, and he returned to make toys and, along the way, helped design local theme parks, including Santa's Workshop in Wilmington and Frontier Town in North Hudson. In 1954, he opened his own Land of MakeBelieve on an Ausable River floodplain with child-sized and meticulously designated storybook and Wild West villages, along with working kid-sized cars, trucks, trains, a steamboat and a pony-drawn stagecoach. Ten times floods ravaged the park and 10 times he rebuilt. In 1979, after Flood No. 11, Monaco decided he'd had enough. He continued to make toys and by then was among the most recognizable figures in the Adirondacks. "Arto was certainly a unique man with his unique style," Hewston said. "He had a flair for country western dress, with his neckerchief, his shirts, his vest, his cowboy boots and his cowboy hat. I found Arto's dress code to be like his personal signature. Arto had this movie star aura about him." The toys given to Au Sable Forks include some of Monaco's signature work: a castle, trucks, a horse-drawn wagon and a steam engine. They join numerous other Monaco artifacts at the museum, including hand-drawn postcards, movie posters and toys ranging from a train (complete with hobo) and circus members. "He loved circuises," Hewston said, and relished when the circus would come to Au Sable Forks, its elephants pastured down by the Jersey Bridge. Although Monaco himself had no children of his own, his Land of MakeBelieve in effect gave him more than he could ever count. "He often said he created the World of Makebelieve for everyone else's children to enjoy, Hewston said. "It was a child's world where for at least the day there was no such word as 'No'."

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Some Arto Monaco toys return home

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