Ooh, Project!
Lately, whenever we’ve done canoeing/kayaking on the river, we’ve also been collecting old bottles from the riverbank. So, when I read that the artisans restoring the Minisa Bridge, by North High (yeah, alma mater!) were excepting glass bottles before 1950 to help update the historic Carthalite Indian motifs, I thought I would have to bear to part with some of my treasures.
Carthalite, a glass, cement, aggregate mixture, unique to Wichita, was used to decorate mostly brick buildings between 1927 and 1940.
“There are the oral histories of when the Minisa Bridge first opened, kids went around the community collecting supplies for the bridge,” said William White of the Oakland Avenue Craftsman Co., which has contracted to restore the artwork. White said he hopes Wichitans would make the same effort now.
“It’s so visually striking,” said John Luke, editor of American Bungalow magazine, who recently did a 10-page spread on Wichita’s Carthalite. “It appears that Wichita is the only city in the world that we’ve been able to find so far that has this particular type of cement work, and it has been preserved, and that’s praiseworthy. It’s just very beautiful stuff.”
“More than a dozen structures in Wichita have Carthalite, including the Kansas Aviation Museum, a former Jewish synagogue now home to the First Metropolitan Community Church, the former Dockum Drug Store and the Minisa Bridge.”
Wichita’s Carthalite was also a finalist for The 8 Wonders of Kansas Architecture.
