Designs for the Crystal Palace: Sir Joseph Paxton

In the summer of 1852, the Association sponsored a competition for the design of a glass and iron building to rival the original Crystal Palace. The committee disqualified a plan sent in from London by Joseph Paxton himself because its elongated shape was wrong for the planned location in Reservoir Square. Paxton’s plan for the Crystal Palace in New York envisioned a structure 600 feet long and 200 feet wide but similar in appearance and construction to its Hyde Park counterpart. A London paper observed, “The design is, on the whole, remarkable for its simplicity and practicability, and is another proof of Sir Joseph Paxton’s great skill in this department of art.”

Image courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.

Designs for the Crystal Palace: James Bogardus

James Bogardus, a New York contractor who had already started to build with iron, sent in a plan for a circular building with a suspension roof that resembled the Roman Coliseum. Its base consisted of a huge circular hall, 400 feet in diameter, ringed by a four-story self-supporting cast-iron exterior wall. At its center was a thirteen-story, 300-foot-high cast-iron circular tower, inside of which was a steam-powered elevator that would carry visitors up to an observatory at the top. Linked chains from the tower supported the sheet-iron roof of the hall. Scientific American campaigned hard for Bogardus, claiming that his design was “superior in all its details to the London Crystal Palace. . . . It is so planned that none of the braces and binders, which so disfigured the interior of Paxton’s great work, will be required; it will be simple, yet beautiful and grand—a design original and unique, one worthy of our country . . . and it will never leak.”

Image courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.

Designs for the Crystal Palace: Andrew Jackson Downing

A plan by Andrew Jackson Downing (submitted just prior to his death in a steamboat explosion), failed to pass muster because it used too much wood and canvas and not enough glass and iron, as stipulated by the city. Pictured above is Downing’s vision of a Crystal Palace for New York—a design “of great novelty and bold conception,” even though the dome was constructed of wood and canvas.

Image courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.

Designs for the Crystal Palace: Carstensen and Gildemeister

In August 1852 the committee chose a proposal from Georg Carstensen and his partner Karl Gildemeister. Carstensen reasoned, if the New York Crystal Palace were to be compared favorably with its London counterpart, it must rely on “the charms of novelty and originality, and thus escape the stigmatizing ridicule of being a miniature imitation of something much superior.” Pictured is a section of the original design, adopted in 1852. Note the grand staircases leading from the first floor to the basement, the large central fountain, and the entrance next to the Croton Reservoir on the right-hand side—none of which was ever built.

Image courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.

Carstensen and Gildemeister: the central dome

Recognizing the shortcomings of Reservoir Square, Carstensen and Gildemeister proposed an octagonal iron and glass building “mostly on the Venetian style” but in the form of a Greek cross capped by a central dome section showing the bracing and, on top, the lantern or cupola. “To our untravelled countrymen it may be a instructive example of the beauty and fine architectural effect of which this structure is capable.”

Image courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.

Carstensen and Gildemeister: foundation and interior

Because the square sloped down from east to west, they would first have to construct a two-foot-wide stone foundation wall that rose from ground level near the Reservoir to just over seven feet in height on the Sixth Avenue side of the Square. This foundation, plus freestanding interior piers of brick and stone, supported the floor joists as well as 190 slender cast-iron columns bolted to heavy baseplates. As in Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the exterior columns were cast hollow to carry rainwater from the roof. Pictured are the prefabricated cast-iron panels that formed the walls of the New York Crystal Palace.

Image courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.

The Latting Observatory

The Latting Observatory, the brainchild of a local inventor/hustler named Waring Latting, began construction directly opposite the Crystal Palace in March of 1853. It had dawned on Latting that he could make money by charging people to climb hundreds of feet for a panoramic view of the city below, plus suburban towns and villages in New Jersey, Westchester, Queens, and Brooklyn. Pictured is the Latting Observatory, with the 42nd Street entrance to the Crystal Palace on the far right.

The Latting Observatory, the brainchild of a local inventor/hustler named Waring Latting, began construction directly opposite the Crystal Palace in March of 1853. It had dawned on Latting that he could make money by charging people to climb hundreds of feet for a panoramic view of the city below, plus suburban towns and villages in New Jersey, Westchester, Queens, and Brooklyn. Pictured is the Latting Observatory, with the 42nd Street entrance to the Crystal Palace on the far right.

Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.

The Crystal Palace and gas lamps

It was often pointed out that the Crystal Palace eventually boasted almost as many gas lamps as the rest of the city combined. When the lights were turned on, the effect was magical. Said Putnam’s with eerie prescience: “if the roof of the Palace were all of glass, the space it occupies would, at night, look from a distance, like a conflagration.”

Image courtesy of Columbia University Libraries.

The Atlantic Cable

By 1858 the Crystal Palace remained standing on Reservoir Square, forlorn and slowly falling apart for lack of proper maintenance. On September 1, 1858, it was pressed into service as the northern terminus of a huge procession celebrating completion of the Atlantic Cable between England and America. “Cable fever runs wild” in New York, wrote the Times, describing hotels overflowing with guests and sidewalks thronged with excited visitors from town. Those people with tickets filed into the Crystal Palace for entertainments and speeches extolling the cable as well as the wondrous benefits it would bring. No American city has ever witnessed a more “picturesque display,” boasted the Times. They said it was “the greatest event of the age.”

Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Destruction of the Crystal Palace

On 5 October, the Crystal Palace burned to the ground. Lithographers and engravers tried to convey the magnitude of the disaster with scenes of billowing smoke and raging flames and crowds of onlookers rushing back and forth. Overshadowed by the back and forth over whether or not an arsonist caused the 1858 fire is the more arresting question of whether the Crystal Palace was prudently or competently built to begin with. Early in 1853, drawing attention to repeated delays, Scientific American had reprinted an article from the New-York Sun alleging that “The engineers and architects are at loggerheads; much of the material has to be fitted after it reaches the ground, beams being found too long, and girders too short.”

Pictured is a tribute of the Crystal Palace fire by Currier & Ives—the view from Sixth Avenue. Just before the dome collapsed, the flames burned through the halyard attaching a large American flag to the cupola. Along with panels of tin from the roof, the flag floated off into the sunset.

Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.