Brick by Brick... a tale of two cities.

The staple of many childhood hours of creative fun for many was the imaginative ways to build things out of Lego's. First conceived as a Danish small business of tools and goods to help around the house that turned into toy production, LEGO was a combination of the Dutch words "Leg Godt" which means play well. The plastic bricks (wiki) though are synonymous with childhood play and are perhaps the most durable toy.

Wedged into a neighborhood, tucked between a river and a hill, The Toy and Plastic Brick Muselum (see left, click to enlarge) is home to the largest private LEGO based museum in the world. Located in Bellaire, Ohio (map, wiki), it would be easy to miss this museum, if not town, that is located just outside Wheeling, West Virginia about a mile or so south of I-470 right on the Ohio River. But inside this museum are virtual Lego cities that are creative, vibrant and bustling little villas from throughout time.

The museum occupies what was once the Old Gravel Hill School, (see right, click to enlarge) which is nearing 100 years of service having been a school in 1913 (reference in 9th paragraph) and allegedly apartment building in the 1950s (reference just above heading "Ohio River and Western Railroad"). It is hard to imagine the building as apartment as it is currently very school like and not configured for apartments. The museum opened in 2007 but due to economic realities all museums and historical sites face, does not always operate on a steady schedule. For winter 2010 it appears to be open only on Saturdays.

Greeting you through the front doors is a four foot Lego troll that beckons you to walk up the stairs (see left, click to enlarge), each with a backing painted a different color to give resemblance of Lego bricks. The front desk at the top of the stairs features two cash registers, one for real cash and another that is a Lego mock-up of a cash register (complete with Lego cash inside).


To walk the museum is to step back into one's childhood and see Lego creations of immense imagination. There are many life-size figures, including Star War's villain Darth Vader along with R2D2 that greet you as you walk into the main lobby. Other life size figures includes knights, Spiderman, basketball players and several trolls. The Star Wars room is a present favorite of this generation of youth, as the cartoon series and more recent prequels have spawned new interest in Lego creations. Fittingly the Statue of Liberty is on display yielding a light saber, ready to defend us all. (see above right, click to enlarge)

Each room of the museum features a theme and has Lego creations and other toys that match the characterization. There are rooms for Star Wars, Knights, Western, Aqua, Animals, and more stuffed into corners of the hallways and walkways. The third floor boasts a 10+ foot replica of the Vietnam Veteran's Bridge over the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio, completely made out of Lego bricks. (see left, click to enlarge)

Outside the water room is a miniature (but not by much) pleasure power boat, with part of the front deck missing to better see the impressive construction of the vessel (see right, click to enlarge). Inside the water room are a 5' x 2' by 3' Coast Guard cutter (see left, click to enlarge), similar sized ocean-going cargo ships, an old paddle-wheeler and several others. The boats all sit on a Lego ocean, as each room is a sort of diorama setting with the creations as part of a scene.



The medieval room has an impressive 30,000-element storming of the castle's keep (see right, click to enlarge), which took six month to create and features over 1,000 little black knight "mini-figures". The attention to detail in building these creations is fascinating and shows a patience and perseverance few have. I thought of this as I looked down into a small part of this 10' x 10' layout and saw a pit of scorpions... probably 20 little plastic Lego scorpions.

The animal room looks like a sort of plasticized zoo, with animals, some true-to-scale (see left, click to enlarge), behind chicken wire for the spectator's safety (or to keep little hands from knocking the animals over and sending the bricks into disarray). The Western room, a bit sparse on the Lego creations, has themed Simpson characters including Bart standing guard outside of a jail where one of his school mates has been locked up. (see left, click to enlarge)


The city room has another 10' x 10' diorama that shows a modern city, billed in news stories as San Francisco (but it is missing iconic San Fran buildings and hills!). Most creative here is a basketball arena filled with Lego players, spectators, cheerleaders and impressive architectural structures (see right, click to enlarge). Lining places in the room, and throughout the museum, are little creations that children have made and left behind for the museum to display. Cubbies in the hallways sport little unique designs by children of all ages who stop to visit.



Some of the most impressive displays are the mosaics created with smaller Lego pieces. A Mona Lisa replica boasts 47,000 different pieces (see left, click to enlarge). A Yoda figure stares at you in the Star Wars room, but the largest scale mosaic is a replica of Mount Rushmore than is easily 10 feet long and 5 feet high.

The museum's website boasts of several world record creations, but the former gym of the school is host to an official Guiness World Record for the largest Lego image (see right, click to enlarge) weighing in at 44 feet by 20 feet, with hosts of large Lego people and other creations as well, said to have a total of 1.2 million Lego pieces (see news story).

While finding the museum is not difficult, being a right from Ohio 7 south, then a left turn down a one-way street, trying to jump back on Ohio 7 north can be quite confusing. Bellaire is a typical river town that is not very wide, but very long. Finding that one intersecting street that goes back to the highway is a trick but leads you through a town that time has passed by, perhaps repeatedly.

Appalachia Ohio was economically depressed before the recent recession hit hard. Steel and coal were once the staples of many river towns and the remnants of the downtown area show a town that was once vibrant and bustling. Today the 2- and 3-story buildings along the main drag are vacant or housed with mom and pop businesses that may last a few months or a few years. An old iron bridge that crosses the Ohio River was closed in the early 1990s and the Ohio approached demolished.

While the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum is not going to be the tourist source to revitalize Bellaire, it is one of those off-the-beaten-path treasures that Ohio hides within her borders. It shows how Ohio can Dickens-like in that within the economic hard times of one situation there still can be beauty and joy in another.

- J.