Washington native creates “People Mover” ornament for holiday season
Courtesy of Toby Fraley
“For the next three weeks, I’m not going to do anything but be at my workbench.”
An observation from Santa Claus, sweating to make a Dec. 24 deadline, or one of his overworked elves? No, it actually comes from Toby Fraley, a Washington native, Bridgeville resident and artist who has brought a dose of yuletide cheer to the region over the last six years or so with Pittsburgh-centric Christmas ornaments that depict oddball events or well-known sites in quirky ways.
His first ornament, which showed a Pittsburgh city bus swallowed by a sinkhole, arrived just weeks after that notorious mishap occurred in October 2019. According to Fraley, “It took off as such a meme in Pittsburgh. I thought we could make this even more bizarre.”
Fraley was inundated with orders, and in the years since he has produced a new ornament for almost every season. His latest, the decommissioned people mover train at Pittsburgh International Airport, was recently unveiled.
The response so far? “It’s so big,” Fraley said. “It’s overwhelming.”
The people mover first went down the tracks in 1992, connecting the airside and landside terminals at the airport. The train took its final journey last month when the airport’s new terminal opened. Now, a pedestrian tunnel has replaced it. Though the people mover is outmoded – its design is unmistakably from the 1980s or 1990s – it holds sentimental value for people in the region.
“I’m sentimental about airports in general,” said Fraley, a Bridgeville resident and native of Washington. “Airports have a soft spot in my heart.”
Fraley’s ornaments are not cranked off an assembly line. He uses molds to create them in his basement and each one is finely detailed. They are hand-painted and hand-numbered. The whole process is “very laborious,” Fraley explained.
Before settling on the people mover, Fraley had considered using the WDVE sign that once graced an office building in Green Tree, and was familiar to drivers who frequently traveled on the Parkway West. However, he could not get the rights to the logo. Aside from the bus-in-the-sinkhole ornament, Fraley’s other ornaments have shown a lanternfly, a meteor and a bulldozer tearing down Century III Mall.
More information about Fraley’s latest ornament and his other art is available at tobyfraley.com.