Change: Collecting Coins at the Getty Museum & The Met
Change: Collecting Coins
From Wishing Fountains
West Coast Change: Collecting Coins at the Getty Museum
Change: Collecting Coins at the Getty Museum
Click to viewLast year, some $1,649.03 worth of coins was collected from the Azalea Pool in the Central Garden at the Getty Center, contributed by wishful Museum visitors. But what happens after the coins settle to the bottom? How are they collected? What happens to them afterward? Michael Dehart, supervisor for the Getty's Grounds and Gardens department, explains. Coins collected are given to nonprofit organizations around Southern California--after some excavation work on our end.
East Coast: Many Wishes, Many Splashes, & the Fountains at the Met Fill Up
Dionysos, standing there in his sandals with his arm over that woman, knows. He spends his days watching everyone in the room and everything they do.
Mr. Mendez wears protective garb to clean the fountains. “We don’t know what’s in the water,” he says.
He knows it cannot be Aphrodite, on his right. She has no arms.
He knows it cannot be Hercules, also on his right. No arms on him, either.
So who is dropping all the coins in the fountain in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Greek and Roman galleries?
Not David Mendez, though he knows more about coins in fountains than anyone else at the Met. That is because he takes the coins out, once a week, every week, using an old wiper blade and napkin-size pieces of thin white cloth.
Since the waist-high fountain was switched on in April, it has become the latest of the Met’s coin catchers. The others include the pool known around the Met as “the Nile” that runs by the Temple of Dendur, and the stream in a corner of the Astor Court where the koi swim. Another, now closed, was a pool in the American Wing that had at its center a statue of Pan the museum had to give back to its lender - anonymous, of course.
In all these babbling places, the story is the same: Coins pile up, Mr. Mendez removes them and people’s fascination with tossing pocket change into water continues, unexplained. Their motivation? Their wishes? Mr. Mendez has no more of an answer than Frank Sinatra did when he recorded the title song for the 1954 Clifton Webb-Dorothy McGuire comedy “Three Coins in the Fountain.”
That film began with a shot that Mr. Mendez would love: the Trevi Fountain in Rome being cleaned. But there were a lot more than three coins in the Greek and Roman fountain when Mr. Mendez went to work the other day in his blue plastic poncho, black rubber gloves and flip-down visor - heavier and more industrial than a dental hygienist’s, but lighter than a deep-sea diver’s.
“We don’t want splashes,” he explained. “You don’t know what’s in those coins. You know that workmen’s compensation doesn’t pay much for eyeballs. You know that, don’t you?”
The Met says that the fountain, in the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, was not planned as a receptacle for discarded dimes, pennies and quarters, not to mention euros, Mexican pesos and Taiwanese dollars. “The fountain was designed to recreate the ambience of a Roman court,” said Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Met, “but you know, it’s inevitable. From Trevi to Dendur, water attracts coins.”
Mr. Mendez’s haul on Thursday included a handful of dollars from Taiwan and Canada, an old token from the Boston transit system and a nearly new $1 coin depicting George Washington.
The Met says he collected $3,000 a year in coins from the museum’s various watery spots before the new fountain opened. He sends the coins to the Met’s cashier, ready to be counted.
“We wash them and dry them” first, he said. “We don’t know what’s in the water, and we don’t want other employees to handle them and get sick.”
Mr. Mendez’s main tool is a recycled wiper blade that came off the museum’s tractor, now 35 years old and still going strong, thanks to him. “Maybe I should get a regular squeegee, huh?” Mr. Mendez said. “But with this, I can tell if there’s anything in the water. The metal starts to rust right away.”
On the marble floor of the fountain were circles where the coins had been. “They leave their shadow because they interact with the water,” he said.
That is different from what he finds when he retrieves the coins from the koi pond. “From the fish waste, the coins look like they’ve been through a meteor shower,” he said.
In the hour before the museum opened the other day, he filled about a third of a large white bucket. As he worked he talked about everything from the 40th president (a hero of Mr. Mendez’s whom he calls “Mr. Reagan”) to the museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello (“I love the way he talks. He just knows how to say whatever he’s saying.”).
He talked about V.I.P.’s who have visited the Met in the 19 years he has worked there, including Queen Sofía of Spain.
“Mrs. Juan Carlos,” he called her, referring to the king. “She had super-thick ankles. He was so tall and handsome, and she was so petite. I guess it was an arranged marriage. You know how those things are.”
The why question remained unanswered. Why do people throw coins in fountains?
Joan Mertens, the Met’s curator of Greek and Roman art, came up with a story, appropriately enough, from ancient Greece. Amasis, the king of Egypt in the sixth century B.C., predicted trouble for his ally Polykrates unless Polykrates showed some humility. Amasis, Ms. Mertens said, told Polykrates he should throw into the sea his most valued possession: an emerald ring.
“Sort of as proof or a sign, someone in Polykrates’s household came in with a big fish who had the ring in his stomach,” she said, “so it came back to him.”
From that, she said, came the notion of “casting away something that is meaningful to you, and if you’re lucky, you will be reunited with it.”
Mr. Mendez was not thinking about Polykrates. He was talking about his mother, and why cleaning fountains matters.
“I remember when I was a child, I’d tell my mom, ‘Why must you clean the living room?’ ” he said. “She’d say, ‘I want the people who come here to feel relaxed.’ Well, here at the Metropolitan, we want the people who come here to feel relaxed.”
Source: NY Times
Three Coins in the Fountain
From the 1954 movie "Three Coins In The Fountain." The song won the Academy Award that year.
Three Coins in the Fountain" is a popular song which received the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1954. It was written for the romance film, Three Coins in the Fountain and refers to the act of throwing a coin into the Trevi Fountain in Rome while making a wish. Each of the film's three stars performs this act.
Three coins in a fountain
Each one seeking happiness
Thrown by three hopeful lovers
Which one will the fountain bless
Three hearts in a fountain
Each heart longing for its home
There they lie in the fountain
Somewhere in the heart of Rome
Which one will the fountain bless
Which one will the fountain bless
Three coins in a fountain
Through the ripples how they shine
Just one wish will be granted
One heart will wear a Valentine
Make it mine, make it mine, make it mine
Do YOU Toss A Coin Into A Fountain In The Hope That Your Wish Is Granted?
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