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“Stone Face” Could Become Glass Face

April 27, 2008

May 2 is the fifth anniversary of the collapse of “Old Man of the Mountain,” New Hampshire’s official state symbol, also known as the “Great Stone Face.” The Franconia Notch rock formation self-destructed during a foggy night in 2003, and no one noticed that it was gone until the next day.

As if that memory weren’t bad enough, the Concord Monitor reports that an effort to recreate the Face using rock slabs has failed for a lack of money. But the same editorial, as an aside, mentions that a New Jersey artist wants to re-build the Old Man out of glass. Tourists would be able to “walk into his hollow head and peer over Franconia Notch to the mountains beyond as if through his eyes.”

Sounds good to us, after factoring in the risks of combining glass with natural beauty. But the editorial dismisses the big Glass Face as “a testament to what man, not nature, can do.”

The Concord Monitor wants the Old Man’s cliff to stay just the way that it is now — as a pile of rocks that no one would drive out of their way to see. Perhaps the artist should propose building his Glass Face with a giant set of glass spectacles, thereby correcting the shortsightedness of some of the opinion-makers of New Hampshire.

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