PIECE IN OUR TIME
Giant, collaborative puzzle helped bring people together while apart
While his peers gravitated to baseball fields and basketball courts growing up, David Leschinsky stayed home and fidgeted with puzzles.
He loved jigsaw puzzles so much that he left the tech industry 16 years ago to start Eureka! Puzzles, a jigsaw store in Brookline, Mass. When the novel coronavirus began consuming the world in March, Leschinsky wanted others to have access to his go-to leisure activity. He distributed parts of a 40,320-piece puzzle to nearby residents, hoping to join together the components when the health crisis subsided.
This jigsaw project was Eureka! Puzzles' way to build a small community and provide a fun activity for Massachusetts residents during the pandemic.
“Having that puzzle to work on I think is the reason I got through the shutdown in the mental form I'm in,” said Malka Benjamin, one of the participants.
The puzzle features 10 parts, each one including about 4,000 pieces. Each square features an image from the Disney movies Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan, Fantasia, The Jungle Book, Dumbo, The Little Mermaid, Bambi, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella and The Lion King.
Near the beginning of 2019, Eureka! Puzzles bought the jigsaw from Ravensburger, a German puzzlemaker, to add to its collection of more than 5,000 items.
Until March, the largest jigsaw Eureka! Puzzles owned sat on a top shelf in the small store.
Leschinsky sent an email to customers and more than 150 people replied. Leschinsky's family took on a section, and he found nine other people to whom he would send about 4,000 pieces of the puzzle.
Leschinsky created a social media hashtag, #EurekaTogetherApart, and asked contributors to share their progress on Instagram.
“There is so much animosity in the world,” said Leschinsky, 65. “Things are so polarized that it always seems that everything is misaligned. You can still have them work together and make them work and all come together to create something that is bigger than any one of us. In some ways, that's what this puzzle is; it's bigger than any of the individuals or the households that did this.”
Like Leschinsky, Benjamin has loved puzzles since she was a child.
She mostly worked on the puzzle during evenings and weekends. Some of Benjamin's friends felt antsy during lockdown.
“I never felt that way ... in the evening, I would be able to sort of lose myself in the puzzle and not worry about how I'm not doing this or I'm not doing that,” said Benjamin, 35.
Carl Nist-Lund wanted to stock up on jigsaws during the pandemic, so he stopped at Eureka! Puzzles. He bought a few 500-piece puzzles for him and his roommate, Frederick Gergits. They also joined the 40,320-piece puzzle project.
Nist-Lund and Gergits tried to complete The Jungle Book component in 24 hours while streaming themselves on YouTube. They needed an extra week to wrap up, but they finished with plenty of memories. One night, Nist-Lund and Gergits lost a green puzzle piece and turned over furniture and rugs in their Boston apartment trying to locate it. They gave up, but the next morning, Gergits spotted the piece in the middle of the living room floor.
Massachusetts reopened in June. It was perfect timing because that was when everyone finished their contributions. Eureka! Puzzles employees picked up the sections and glued them together in their basement, creating a puzzle nearly seven metres long.
The store put it on display at a gallery next door, with all of the puzzle builders in attendance for the big reveal.