Helping the Boardwalk Hall Pipe Organ thunder back to life

Atlantic City's history is a stupendous symphony of superlatives, a tale of how "America's Queen of Resorts" wowed the masses with the most, the best, the greatest.

There's also . . . the Boardwalk Hall Pipe Organ.

"It's the world's largest musical instrument," organ scholar, builder, and showman Steven Ball declares.

"The sonic Mount Rushmore," says Ball, whose official title is organist and director of outreach for the Historic Organ Restoration Committee Inc. "It was designed to be a library of all sound."

Having enjoyed two of Ball's noontime Boardwalk Hall concerts - he performs in three-piece suit, tie, and pocket watch at a console in a shrinelike enclosure onstage - I'm tempted to offer a few superlatives of my own.

Especially considering that what I heard was only about 20 percent of what the organ once could produce. Completed in 1932, the instrument was flooded by a hurricane in 1944, after which its sound was compromised and would be heard only occasionally until it fell silent in the 1980s.

This operatic backstory also includes the Depression, World War II, political feuds, accidental destruction of blueprints in a house fire, and damage due to Boardwalk Hall renovations in the 1990s.

Fittingly enough, the organ's long silence was broken at the Miss America Pageant in 2013. And now, this national musical treasure is being brought back to life by Ball, curator Nathan Bryson, assistant Scott Banks, the restoration committee, and about 30 volunteers.

The goal is to raise $16 million to fully restore the one-of-a-kind instrument by 2023. About $1.8 million in private and public funding has been obtained so far. "We're on track," says Ball, 36, an accomplished musician, academic, and museum professional hired by the restoration committee's board in 2013.

With the sort of passionate commitment that's not unusual in the organ world, Ball left his native Michigan - as well as a tenure-track university teaching position - for the Boardwalk Hall job. He now lives in Atlantic City.

"For an organ builder like me to work on the world's largest pipe organ is a dream job," says Bryson, 33, who moved to Atlantic City from North Carolina to join the project at the beginning of September. "The challenges are immense."

I'll say.

"We're making what was sounding like a very large noisy whistle into a musical instrument again," board member and organ technician Dennis Cook says.

"Nobody was playing it," adds Cook, 64, of Atlantic City. "Nobody was hearing it. They literally were going to wall it up."

With eight chambers, 33,112 pipes (including a 64-footer touted as the world's longest), and 1,235 stops, the Boardwalk Hall behemoth cost $358,000 and was built by the Midmer-Losh Organ Co. of Merrick, N.Y., beginning in 1929.

It took 65 people four years to finish the job; the technology was state-of-the-art.

"We don't even know how some of it works," Ball says, adding that "some of the best minds in the industry" figured out how to fill the 5.5 million cubic feet of space inside Boardwalk Hall with a "palette of sound" without electronic amplification.

Despite its artistic refinement and the grandeur of its setting, the organ "never got its due," observes board chairman Lloyd Curt Mangel, the curator of the Wanamaker organ at Macy's in Center City.

Mangel, 65, of Philadelphia, says the Boardwalk Hall instrument is "the absolute pinnacle" of the art and science of organ-building. "We have not built its equal since."

Rebuilding an enormous, antiquated piece of sound equipment is no small task, either. Work began about 10 years ago but has accelerated since Ball's hiring, Cook says.

Ball's noontime concerts and guided tours - weekdays through Oct. 2 and only Wednesdays after that - aim to educate the public and attract support for the project.

Several hundred people have become members of a "Friends of the Pipe Organs of Boardwalk Hall" (a second, smaller organ is in the ballroom) in the last year alone, he says. "This organ is one of the great achievements of our civilization," Ball says. "The purpose was to generate emotion that can be created no other way than by the sound it makes . . . to move [thousands] of people simultaneously in a musical experience."

Listening to the organ, says volunteer James Widerman, of Brigantine, "you get teary. . . . It's overwhelming."

I felt that way, too.

Even as a work in progress, the Boardwalk Hall Pipe Organ is mighty.

Majestic.

And magnificent.

kriordan@phillynews.com

856-779-3845 @inqkriordan

www.philly.com/blinq

More information on organ recitals and tours at boardwalkhall.com.