Victorian Palace Visit

The Victorian Palace is home of the Jasper Sanfilippo collection of beautifully restored antique music machines, phonographs, arcade and gambling machines, chandeliers, art glass plus much, much more.  It also is the home of the worlds largest restored five manual Mighty Wurlitzer Theatre Pipe Organ.

The centerpiece of the Main Entry Foyer is a large Imhof and Bukle barrel organ located on the landing of the main staircase.  It was built in the late 1860s and is driven by two 500 lb. weights that must be wound up before each performance.  The pilasters, or columns applied to the walls, were scaled up from originals from the 1929 Music Box Theatre in Chicago.  Music machines in the Foyer include a Style 30A Wurlitzer Mandolin PianOrchestra originally used in a hotel ballroom in Oklahoma City.

The enormous scale of the three level Music Room and light fixtures dwarf the twelve-foot-tall German orchestrions under the balcony.  The Perlman chandelier in front of the tall window on the left is over thirteen feet from bottom to top.  The music room balcony is home to 67-key Limonaire, 65-key Gavioli  and 82-keyless North Tonawanda fairground organs, a Wurlitzer brass pipe Caliola, music boxes and phonographs. 

The lower level of the Music Room is accessible via the cage elevator, the grand staircase or the tower spiral staircase.  At the foot of the stairs is a Mortier 115-key dance organ built in Belgium in the early 1920s.

The centerpiece of the Music Room is an 80-rank, 8,000 pipe Might Wurlitzer theatre organ, mostly hidden by a large scrim.  The nucleus of the organ was built in 1927 for the Riviera Theatre in Omaha.  It has been expanded to the 80 ranks of pipes and is considered to be the most versatile orchestral theatre pipe organ ever built.  There are five chambers containing pipes, percussions, wind regulators and controls in a four-story-tall area.  The console is patterned after the original from Chicago’s Paradise Theatre.  It is mounted on the original Peter Clark lift from the Granada Theatre, which raised it from the lower level cage enclosure up to concert playing position. 

The American Orchestrion Room is right off the main entry foyer.  It features a colorful display of some of the most beautiful art glass-front orchestrions every made.  Included are several Wurlitzer orchestrions, the only known Resotone Grand, a Seeburg J with capitol building art glass and Seeburg H orchestrions from San Francisco’s famous Cliff House collection of the 1950s.

This is just a small sampling of the wonders that are part of the Sanfilippo collection.  It will be a visit to remember.