Scenes Along the Road: The Ruined Piano

During a recent bike ride I passed through Niwot, a community a dozen or so miles north of my Colorado home. I like Niwot; it’s a quaint little village with a charming Olde Towne section.

As I biked through it I passed a storefront I have noticed before, and even written about in this blog – a commercial space, once home to a newspaper. The Niwot Tribune is long gone, though; today, a photographer uses the space. 

In front of the former Trib a woman painted a baby grand piano, and tended to a bed of flowers inside it. The words “Dear Eleanor” were painted onto the piano’s side. I stopped and asked her about it. 

She explained that the piano had been a prop in a movie called Dear Eleanor. The film concerns someone who had a correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt. It is due out soon and, I was told, is a mostly local production ("local" meaning Boulder, CO).

It reminded me of the Ruined Piano. The Ruined Piano is one of those odd artsy projects you see sometimes. There are a number of ruined pianos around the world; I saw one a long time ago in Colorado Springs, on the campus of Colorado College. I have video of it somewhere (not available for this post). I found the Ruined Piano pictures here via Google, but they might as well have been the one I saw.

The Ruined Piano project is the brainchild, shall we say, of a composer named Ross Bolleter. There are various mentions of it, in the vastness of cyberspace.