Gerry Holzman, master sculptor of a New York merry-go-round, dies at the age of 90

Gerry Holzman, a master woodcarver who invented a merry-go-round and toiled for twenty years to build celebrated New York State with mounts such as a beaver, a cow and a pig, as well as portrait panels citizens such as Susan B. Anthony, Grandma Moses, and Theodore Roosevelt died on December 8 at his home in Brunswick, Maine. He was 90.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter Nancy Holzman said.

A former high school teacher, Mr. Holzman was head sculptor and fundraiser for the Empire State Carousel, a playful and educational reminder of past state fairs and carnivals. The carousel, which measures 37 feet wide and 23 feet high, was built with the help of about 1,000 volunteer sculptors, woodworkers, painters and quilters. It is a permanent and popular attraction at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, NY, where it opened in 2006.

“I’m a real history buff,” Mr. Holzman told The New York Times in 1999, when the carousel was, by his estimation, “97 to 98 percent finished.” “I’m one of those people who really love New York. This is my whole life.”

The Carousel is the signature creation of Mr.’s late-blooming woodworking career. Holzman, in which he also restored antique carousel art and carved walking sticks, moldings, signs, plaques, human and animal figures and religious works.

His clients included the Cunard cruise line, Disney World and the South Street Seaport.

There were once as many as 7,000 hand-carved carousels in the United States. But there are currently only about 225 left, according to the National Carousel Association.

“This is very much a product of my generation passing on its legacy to the next generation,” Mr. Holzman told The Times.

The handmade animals, each with a saddle, represent New York’s native wildlife. There’s Bucky Beaver, a naturally industrious woodworker who holds a sculptor’s hammer and chisel in his paws, and Reggie Raccoon, who lugs a garbage can. Percy Pig carries a bag of pennies in one foot to indicate that his sculpture was sponsored with children’s pennies, and Freddie the Frogge wears a bow tie, argyle socks and white dollars – all items Mr. Holzman wore when he was in college.

“When we design the attributes of an animal – such as the saddle and accessories – we aim for a bit of imagination and humor, working on details that are fun to discover,” Mr. Holzman told Newsday in 2003.

In addition to 21 portrait panels, the carousel features carved folkloric panels depicting state regions such as the Adirondacks, the Catskills and Long Island, as well as a pipe organ with a four-foot-tall sculpture of bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa, whose arms move in time to songs such as ‘The Sidewalks of New York’ and ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo’.

Gerald Holzman was born on June 8, 1933 in the Bronx and lived with his family in Brooklyn and Queens before moving to Amenia, NY, in Dutchess County, where he attended grade school and high school. His parents, Solomon and Hazel (Lopinsky) Holzman, owned several retail businesses, including clothing and food stores.

Gerry was still more than twenty years away from becoming a professional woodcarver when he graduated from the State University of New York at Albany (now the University at Albany) in 1954 with a bachelor’s degree in teaching. After being drafted into the army, he served for two years as a radio operator at posts in Ethiopia and Eritrea, among others. Returning to the United States, he earned a master’s degree in humanities in 1959, also from Albany.

He taught English, social sciences, and humanities in high schools on Long Island for nearly thirty years. In 1972, he was fired from Hauppauge High School, where he was chairman of the social studies department, due to complaints about several issues. (One complaint involved a seventh-grade teacher who showed a film strip about overpopulation with two frames about contraception; he said he told the teacher it was inappropriate to show the strip to students.)

From there he moved to Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, where he taught social studies but also spent a semester as an artist in residence, where he created a four-foot statue of Columbia, a female personification of the United States . He retired in 1987.

He had started carving in 1969, when his father asked him what he wanted for Christmas. He asked for an X-Acto cutting set, which he had seen in a newspaper advertisement, he told The Times in 1981.

He started out as a hobbyist and started a side business in 1978 that grew while he continued to work as a teacher. To improve his woodworking skills, he took lessons from Gino Masero, a master sculptor in Sussex, England, between 1976 and 1982.

The idea for the New York carousel came from a failed venture in Alaska. Mr. Holzman had responded to an advertisement in 1983 for sculptors to work on a carousel that would honor the state’s culture and history.

But when its financing fell through, Mr. Holzman had an epiphany. While looking at a skunk from the porch of his summer home in Middleburgh, New York, he thought about how he could make a limewood sculpture out of it; then he thought about making a carousel skunk on an English saddle, and then about carving other carousel animals.

“And then the explosion,” he wrote in his memoir “Wanderings of a Wayward Woodcarver” (2022). “I don’t know any other word to describe it. A carousel in upstate New York! I don’t need to go to Alaska – no Great Alaskan Carousel. I’m making an Empire State CAROUSEL!”

Work started in 1983 and would last a few years. But it was a grind. Funding trickled in through local businesses, government grants, individuals and children.

“He was very persistent, but sometimes he was very angry that things didn’t work out,” his wife, Arlene (Davidson) Holzman, said in a telephone interview.

When the carousel was finally completed in 2003, it found a home, but for only three weeks, at the Holtsville Ecology Center and Animal Preserve in the town of Brookhaven, Long Island. When the city closed the building that housed it because it was not up to code, Mr. Holzman sought a new home for the merry-go-round.

Garet D. Livermore, former vice president of the Farmers’ Museum, said by phone that he was asked to bring a carousel to Cooperstown, “which took me on a long, strange journey with a lot of people, but eventually I got in touch with Gerry .”

Jane Forbes Clark, whose influential family built the museum and the Baseball Hall of Fame, among other institutions in Cooperstown, agreed to build a pavilion at the Farmers’ Museum to house the carousel, which Mr. Holzman donated in 2005.

In addition to his wife and daughter Nancy, Mr. Holzman is survived by two other daughters, Jill Irving and Susan Gatti; a brother, Larry; and six grandchildren.

In 2009, Mr. Holzman was invited to speak to the wives of Baseball Hall of Famers who gathered in Cooperstown for the annual induction weekend. He talked about the connection between carousels and baseball.

“Do you remember your first ride?” he said. ‘Who brought you? Think about it for a moment. It was probably your father or mother, a brother or sister or a favorite uncle or aunt. Riding a carousel, like watching a baseball game, gives us all a chance to be young again.”