For about as long as La Jolla resident Joe Frangiosa Jr. has operated La Jolla’s Nautical History Gallery & Museum on Pearl Street — adorned floor to ceiling with nautical replicas and artifacts — he envisioned what he could do with a larger space.
He imagined a place to showcase his meticulously crafted model ships, booths laid out to look like the captain’s quarters of warships, plus photos and more. So when the Bonita Museum & Cultural Center offered such a space in its gallery, he jumped at the chance.
The resulting exhibition, “Permission to Come Aboard: The History of Navy Ship Design,” will be on view July 3 to Sept. 18 at 4355 Bonita Road in Bonita. The exhibit includes models, artifacts, photographs, uniforms and toys detailing the history of the Navy, including the Marines, and naval aviation from the 1760s through the 1940s.
Having served as a Navy sailor and Marine, Frangiosa spent much of his off-duty life building, repairing and displaying models and collecting antiques from different naval eras.
“The whole room is a history of how the naval ship turned into what we know as the battleship,” from the American Revolutionary War to World War II, he said.
Each booth is designed to give visitors a captain’s-eye view of the war scene before them, as if they were in the captain’s office, with paintings of the decks and sea along the walls intended to give the feeling of windows.
“It’s kind of like you are on it and sailing by,” Frangiosa said. “You are on the ship and on the water and ‘look out’ at the painting and see ships sailing by or men loading guns on the deck.”
Period-accurate artifacts are arranged as they might have been on the ship.
The in-development Civil War ship booth is part of the “Permission to Come Aboard” exhibition.
(Ashley Mackin-Solomon)
Booths include a wooden hull from a 1775 ship, in the Navy’s infancy, with British influences in design and tools; an iron-hulled Civil War ship, a “big transition” from its wooden predecessor; a “more efficient” sail-less Spanish-American War ship that used bronze and oak; and a World War I dreadnought battleship, a “monster of the sea” at 600 feet long. There also is a booth focusing on naval aviation and a World War II booth with a real wheel and an image of the bow.
“It’s not about specific battles, it’s about how Navy engineering changed, from the coffee pots, uniforms, clocks, ships, etc., accented with models. It’s not about famous admirals, it’s about the crews onboard, how they lived and what they used,” Frangiosa said.
In the middle of each booth is a model ship Frangiosa created, accurate to that particular war.
During his downtime between Navy and Marine deployments over a 20-year military career, he would make models as a hobby, he said.
“I could lose myself for hours,” he said. “It would be five minutes here, a few hours there, nothing for a while. People ask me how much time I spent on it, but I don’t keep track. When I would ship out, it would all go in storage and I wouldn’t see it for years.”
Frangiosa also would seek out antiques and specialty parts to complete the model or its setting.
“A little bit at a time, over a long period of time, turned into this,” he said.
A World War I ship replica made by Joe Frangiosa Jr.
(Ashley Mackin-Solomon)
After he retired from the Marines in 2014, he expanded his model-making hobby to repairing models or custom-creating ones from a photograph or drawing. He started going to the Del Mar Antique Show to collect pieces and make contacts. He was given a booth to showcase his models and re-creations, and people often asked if he fixed models.
One of them was Mark Quint, who at the time owned a gallery on Girard Avenue.
“I lived in a studio in La Jolla at the time, so we met behind Harry’s Coffee Shop, where he had a 20-by-18 overflow storage room with a window,” Frangiosa said. “Mark left the model in the storage room and gave me a key so I could work on it when I had time. I saw that window and asked if I could put some of my models in the window. He did one better and cleared the room and subleased the space to me.”
Frangiosa opened the Nautical History Gallery & Museum in 2015 in that one-window room at its current location at 1012 Pearl St. Passers-by would poke their heads in and see what he was working on.
One of them was Bonita Museum Executive Director Wendy Wilson-Gibson, director of the Bonita Historical Society, who was walking in La Jolla and came upon his work.
“I saw this huge [model] ship of the USS Indiana, and my great-grandfather had been on that ship in the early 1900s,” she said. “I know he used to sew uniforms for the sailors, so I got to look inside the model for the room where he would have been sewing. I had never seen anything that detailed locally, so I was enthralled. At that point, I questioned what Joe could do if he had more space.”
Since he had the same thought, the two collaborated on an exhibition.
“The museum showcases art, history and culture, so exhibitions have to hit all those points,” she said. “I love the idea of walking through history … and I really like that you can feel you are in the 1740s or the Civil War environment. I love that you are surrounded by the objects.
“Joe is an artist. I’ve never seen anything like what he does. Normally at a museum, you have a whole crew building sets and environments, and he does it all himself. It’s like living sculpture, and to me, it’s the ideal way to learn about history.”
Learn more at bonitahistoricalsociety.org. ◆
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'Permission to Come Aboard': Exhibit by La Jolla-based model maker looks at naval evolution - La Jolla Light
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