Musée Mécanique

At the end of Pier 45 in San Francisco, there’s a museum filled with coin-operated machines. If you drop 25 cents in a box and crank a wheel, you can watch a Marilyn Monroe silent film or footage from the Earthquake of 1906. You can have a wizard tell you your fortune (as featured in the movie BIG). Entire dioramas come to “life”; miniature circuses with moving gorillas, all for the price of a quarter. Player pianos. Puppets reenacting square dances. Skill games. Music and machinery. An entire universe of cranks and gears and levers and pulleys, all seemingly alive.

A man walks around dressed in denim with a nametag that simply says, “I WORK HERE”. Keys kept on a chain; he unlocks boxes, revealing the innards of the mechanical museum. He works quickly, stealthily, skilled. He knows where the jams are, knows what cogs to smack, gears to switch. Nobody notices him moving around from machine to machine.

I watch, intrigued, as he approaches the Photobooth. Two girls have been waiting patiently for their portrait prints to drop out of the old school black and white booth. He noticed them. They were standing there for too long, so he handed them 3 dollars and an apology. “Did the light go off?”

He opens the machine to inspect. I decide to make small talk, as a fellow Photobooth owner. I tell him how I own a color Photobooth in North Carolina, that I am in midst of a cross-country road trip, and that I’m so happy a place like his museum exists. He’s happy to meet a fellow “Boothian”. His name is Dan Zelinsky. After handshakes and shop talk he asks if we want to see what goes on behind the curtains, in the back of the Musée Mécanique.

He is the Wizard of Oz. An architect of a Newtonian universe. He shows us the tools he uses to make the spare parts from scratch. He took a class at City College a few years back and fell in love with it after the first 30 minutes. His dad started the collection a long time ago. His dad’s first penny arcade machine sat on the family kitchen table. The money he made charging family members helped start the collection. It’s grown ever since.

I tell Dan about the Photobooth archive that I helped put together in college. He tells me about the holy grail- a gigantic box of old strips tourists have left behind, test strips, randoms, etc. He gives me his business card and a black and white test strip he made.

At the end of a cross-country road trip, you’re looking for metaphors. At the end of Pier 45, it’s too easy.


Click above for my 1st SF Photobooth pic
Click Here for a test strip of Courtney and I