It's a House! It's a Museum! It's a Sanitarium!
So, Lev came to visit for a week, and before his visit I had discussed places to take him during his travels to the MidWest. Knowing he - for no apparent reason - thought of Madison as some sort of giant amusement park, I consulted with my coworkers..... "Oh, you should take him to the State Fair!" was the first answer. But I've been to many a state fair, I don't feel like smelling pigs and funnel cake in one breath, and Wisconsinites are not known for looking attractive outdoors in hot muggy weather. Then someone suggested with a wase nod, "oh, you know, you should take him to the House on the Rock." "Okay," I said, "I've heard it's fun and kitschy - we'll probably love it."



Let's start with the website: which just doesn't do it justice. At All.

Because it's only vaguely a house. It's also vaguely a rock, a midgit's 70's love cave, a collector's wet dream, a Tim Burton musical extravaganza, a subterranean Disneyland, and the paragon of existence that lonely kitsch on the back shelves of pawn shops dream about at night. If you took Death, the Phantom of the Opera, the Clan of the Cave Bear, Balzac, P.T. Barnum, Henry Ford, Herman Melville, and Sarah Winchester, gave them acid and put them on a renovation reality show, you might get this house. You might have to throw Casanova in there as well.

This Photo Site does a better job than the official website of showing the bizarre festival of insanity that is the "House." =

But nothing prepares you for the long and winding experience, so let me at least walk you through it a bit so that you understand a) why it takes more than three hours to go through and b) why you enter bemused and leave shellshocked.

Walking up to the house, it looks mostly like a fieldstone visitor's center from some midwestern highway. Except for the Giant Wizard statue that points you in the right direction. Oh, and the twenty-foot high urns covered in flowers, dragons and lizards that line the drive and the walk to the house. "Welcome to the Other Wisconsin" should be the sign. Past the wood paneled ticket booth area and complimentary photo service, you begin a descent into the world of low ceilings. Apparently, Alex Jordan Jr., a man with no architectural or engineering training, decided to build a quasi-Japanese house on and in the top of a rock peak close to Taliesin East, Mr. Lloyd Wright's Arts & Crafts masterpiece. Jordan Sr. had been fired by Wright, and Jr. was seeking architectural vengeance (this is how modern-day aesthetes stage blood feuds, apparently.... but who is Mercutio in this little drama? I think it's clearly Jr., except his thumb was huge and painted by orangutans). That said, though he was not short, he designed his house for the short people of Japan, none of whom were members of his household at the time. Into a dimly lit cave foyer lined with dusty books ranging in title from "The 1954 Tax Law Guide" to "Fanny Hill," you go, surrounded by other eager tourists. First, everything just seems odd, rocky, and very late-1960s - plush cushions on low stone couches in front of a huge fireplace, dim red and yellow lighting, cheesy carpeting. Then you realize that some sort of hideous animatronic "Bolero" is playing in the background. You notice that between the love-cave and the adjoining kitchen is a picture window containing not the outdoor world, but a mechanical music machine. Edward Scissorhands starts popping up in the corner of your head, and continues to look somewhat gleefully at you throughout the rest of your tour. Violins, marimbas, horns, synthesizers, all played by robotic arms, producing a just slightly off-key and very stilted classical themes. This, in and of itself, is a theme of the house.

From this odd point, you bemusedly meander up an outdoor covered walkway lined in carved south asian panel, past trees and a Japanese-style garden. Upon first entering, you and the as-of-yet-unthinned crowds shuffle down into the Infinity Room - a long glass and steel tunnel that extends, unsupported, out over a 200-odd foot drop. It does indeed look like it goes on forever, and I am very glad that I only learned about Jordan's lack of engineering training after I'd left its slightly swaying glass confines. Moving on, crowds starting to spread thinner, you enter the rest of the house, which consists of two stories of hidden caves of love-nest couches, mutliple fireplaces, occasional single electric burners casually mounted on a piece of stone (in case you want to scramble some eggs, say, before your nookie), and more mechanized music machines, from an Indian-inspired marimba band to an Andrew Lloyd Weber-playing piano. All of this is lit with a varied array of pimp lighting and Tiffany stained glass lamps. There are occasional statues and suits of armor, and more books. All in all, it would be a great place to play hide and seek, but you can't imagine anyone actually living there (but apparently Jordan did just that).

Okay, so that's the house, shrug, take a few pics, move on. Oh no, the next Wizard Statue informs you, the tour is only just beginning. There's more house, much much more house. Back down the walkway, past the Bolero picture window, and into..... The Land of Mad Collections. You begin with a fairly mundane hall of Americana - a few guns, some armor, another love cave, some porcelain dolls, etc..... then you go around through a short collection of Faberge and figurines and out onto a perfectly rendered Victorian-American Street. Where it's perpetually night! And there's dolls! And poisons! And taxidermified frogs playing banjos! And Esmerelda the fortune teller, a giant calliope, and wooden mermaids holding imitation gaslamps. At some point, you realize that the second stories of all these houses are also completely furnished, so that even if you can never go inside them, the houses all appear lived in. "This man was mad!" you think to yourself, and Edward Scissorhands clicks slyly at you, grinning: "oh honey, you ain't seen nothin' yet."

And he's right. Because while I won't go into further obscene detail, there are collections of EVERYTHING, from spitoons to organs to circus figurines. There's a 200 foot high toothed humpback whale (my inner geek cringed) fighting a squid. There's an automated musical Octopus's Garden. There's a musical hearse, a giant Oriental Musicatron playing The Mikado, an orchestra playing "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" whilst angels blow horns overhead, there's a maze of red carpeted bridges over, under, and around a collection of organs, whisky-still replicas, perpetual motion clocks and cannons (all lit by a giant red chandelier). There's the four horsemen of the apocalypse, a tiled car, a Rube Goldberg Machine, a wall of Burma Shave poems, a two-story doll's carousel, and last, but certainly not least, the World's Largest Carousel. Over two hundred animals, none of which are horses. Which is fine as there are hundreds of carousel horses mounted on the surrounding walls as decor. Oh and did I mention the ceiling is covered in angels? Giant winged mannequin angels wearing 1940s Doris Day-style togas? Hundreds upon hundreds of slightly Hitchcockian angels?

It's Insane, it's Obscene, it's........ mad, I tell you, MAD!!!!!!!!

And it is arguably the best $20 I've spent on a kitschy attraction in my life.

I now understand why Neil Gaiman had to write about it in American Gods, because the House is representative of the title, it's representative of the madness of one man who never left Wisconsin but collected the world, and a cultural obsession with the bizarre-as-normal. It's definitely a place to go again.

The last conversational tidbit had between Lev and I about the house pretty much sums it up.

Alexis: "They should have had a bar so people could cope with it. At the beginning of the tour, really."

Lev: "Yes, then it would've been the House on the Rocks, baby..... "



Obviously, those of you who visit me in the future are at risk of being exposed to the House. You've been warned.