Fort Pitt Museum cleans 18th-century Pittsburgh with a Q-tip

Teghan Simonton | Thursday, January 16, 2020 9:49 a.m.

Louis B. Ruediger | Tribune-Review

Fort Pitt Museum Visitor Services and Event Cordinator Mariah Simensky, works at cleaning the fifty year old display by hand. Each piece is about 1/10th inch in size and takes roughly about one week to complete during the month of January while the museum is closed Wednesday.

Kneeling over the side of a massive diorama of 18th-century Pittsburgh, Mariah Simensky gently dabbed each tiny building, house, person and horse and buggy with a Q-tip dipped in water.

It will take the visitor services and events coordinator at the Fort Pitt Museum in Point State Park about five days to clean each minuscule part of the model.

She will lightly vacuum the landscape and shrubbery and repaint certain parts of the model, Simensky said.

The diorama dates back to when the museum was first opened in 1969. It’s incredibly fragile, Simensky said. Parts of the plaster landscape have issues with structural support, so she has to step around the diorama carefully. The tiny people were created on a scale that’s no longer used in the U.S. any more. They are each about 1/10th an inch tall.

“There has definitely been some casualties” over the years, she said.

The Fort Pitt Museum is closed for the month of January so curators can perform maintenance on the exhibitions and add new artifacts to the collection. One of the main undertakings for the month is cleaning the diorama, considered the museum’s centerpiece.

Simensky said one of the most enjoyable aspects of cleaning the display is refamiliarizing herself with all that is going on inside the tiny city. She said there are many slice-of-life moments — people doing laundry, feeding chickens, riding a horse and buggy — scattered throughout the model.

The museum also hides a new item every so often that doesn’t actually belong in the 18th century. A red sports car, a bicyclist and a dinosaur are all hidden in the diorama.

The Fort Pitt Museum is also cleaning other displays and adding new artifacts to the collection, including new powder horns and graphics.

“It’s nice to be able to prepare and reset and get everything ready for the next coming year,” Simensky said. “And I think people are excited to come back and see new things.”