Riverdale Park has a hospital, but it’s for dolls.

When Emily Fanning’s parents couldn’t afford to buy her an old-fashioned doll she spotted on a tour of Mount Vernon, the eight-year-old went home and made it herself.

In the half -century since then, she’s been making, selling and repairing dolls, including for the last 20 years at a tiny shop in a historic building from 1935 at 6220 Rhode Island Ave. in Riverdale Park’s town center.

These days, Aunt Emily’s Doll Hospital is such an institution within the world of historic doll repair that she has a waiting list of repairs from across the U.S. and as far away as Australia, Chile and Denmark.

“I do archival repair,” she told the Hyattsville Wire. “I do not change the originality of the doll but repair to stop deterioration from going any further. I try to use chemistry that fits that period of the doll — non-toxic if possible.”

In the past, Fanning did more than just repairs.

She used to sell more dolls at the store and host a doll museum for parties at her house. But as dolls fell out of favor in recent years and repair requests took off, she’s turned both her shop and her home toward that work full-time.

She even studied at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University as she helped develop her own sculpted life-size knit dolls and hand-carved dolls made using traditional 19th century methods.

Still, Fanning continues a long tradition of working with children who want to learn how to make things like “bed post dolls,” a tradition from the 1800s, through Emily’s Youth Entrepreneurs in Fine Art, a youth nonprofit, which teaches the basics in fine arts as well as sewing, drawing and history. During the coronavirus pandemic, three of her older students have started hosting some classes on Zoom.

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