The Crystal Palace Stunned New York City—Until It Burned to the Ground

The Empire State Building. The White House. Grand Central Station. The Space Needle. These are just a few of the famed structures that have come to define the American cityscape. But there is another building that was poised to be among their ranks, one that was once considered the most famous structure in the United States, and that, today, you’ve probably never heard of: New York’s Crystal Palace.

In 1853, on what was then a worthless field on the outskirts of Manhattan (it would become Bryant Park), there rose a large structure made of the most cutting-edge materials to be found at the time—glass and cast-iron. Residents reported that the crystal dome that topped the building glittered in the sun with such splendor that it could be seen by residents at a far distance down the avenue. 

Sure, the idea of a Crystal Palace wasn’t wholly original—the New York building constructed for the second-ever world exhibition was loosely based on a similar structure built for the first-ever world exhibition in London two years earlier—but for the short five years it twinkled in the sun, it became the most famous building in the U.S.

Americans and foreigners traveled from near and far to see not only the exhibits found inside, but even more eagerly the building that housed them. 

And then, on October 5, 1858, the Crystal Palace burned to the ground. 

It all started in London in the early 1850s when the first Great Exhibition opened to a dazzled international crowd. Joseph Paxton, a gardener to nobility-turned-architect, created a massive structure modeled off of a greenhouse to house the modern wonders of industry on display. He called his architectural marvel the Crystal Palace.

Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, glass and iron were just becoming available in quantities that allowed for their use as the core materials in construction rather than just accent pieces.

According to Edwin G. Burrows in The Finest Building in America: The New York Crystal Palace, 6,000 Americans are thought to have made the journey to see this glass innovation, shelling out what today would have been around $16,000 for the trip. 

The overwhelming feeling was one of admiration, shortly followed by jealousy. Several prominent American visitors to London, including newspaperman, Horace Greeley, and the U.S. liaison to the London Exhibition Edward Riddle, decided that the U.S. needed to exert itself on the international stage with its own world exhibition. 

On his return home, Riddle quickly got things moving. While New York City wasn’t a tourist destination at the time—most people who could afford to travel chose rural rather than urban getaways—it was the only location considered for the honor of hosting the exhibition. 

In the summer of 1852, the association charged with getting the event off the ground issued a call for proposals with only one stipulation, according to Sheila Moloney writing for a Bard Graduate Center publication on the exhibition: “[T]he building must be constructed entirely of cast iron and glass.”

The American insistence on following so closely in London’s footsteps was questioned from the beginning.

Scientific American publicly declared its concerns that the “small and ridiculous copy of the Crystal Palace will disgrace us in the eyes of the world.”

But such were the wishes of what became known as the Crystal Palace Association and the city of New York that was happy to play host. The winning proposal was submitted by the duo of Georg Carstenson, a former Danish army officer who had helped create Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, and a young German architect named Karl Gildemeister. 

The designers drew inspiration from a variety of styles. The glass-covered building was constructed in the traditional Greek cross layout, but the overall style was Venetian, “the most favorable for lightness and elegance,” as their proposal stated.

While significantly smaller than London’s Crystal Palace, it was still a monumental size and made up in height what it lacked in sheer square feet; the pièce de résistance was the largest dome ever built in the U.S. featuring 32 panels of stained glass windows circling the exterior, with the American flag flying high from the pinnacle. 

As predictably happens when you have associations and cities and other interested parties all trying to exert their wishes, there were alterations to the design, delays with construction, and more than a little finger pointing over the $600,000 final price tag, three times what had been budgeted for the project. 

But on July 14, 1853, the Crystal Palace, or the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations as the official world fair was known, opened to the public. The New York Times estimated that 50,000 people attended the inaugural day.

At 2 p.m., the opening ceremonies officially presided over by a rain-soaked President Franklin Pierce launched the second-ever world exhibition. 

“The Crystal Palace is opened! The great event on which so many hopes and expectations and anxieties were clustered, is at last completed,” read the lead of the three-page New York Times spread, which continued on to proclaim that “[The] sun of American industrial splendor which rose to-day, shall never set, but shine like the arctic luminary, ever above the horizon.”

As the Times was quick to mention, the derision the copycat Crystal Palace had originally attracted quickly turned to admiration as the actual building took shape.

Visitors from far and wide came to see it, introducing a tourism industry to New York for the first time. Hotels were built specifically to house this influx, and a warren of carnivalesque attractions quickly popped up in the streets around the formerly forlorn Reservoir Square. 

“For some blocks we have been aware, by the accumulation of coffee houses, grog shops, ‘saloons,’ peep-shows of living alligators, model-artists and three-headed calves, that we were approaching the newly discovered, Sedgwickean centre of the metropolis. ‘Fortieth street, Crystal Palace’—says the conductor, stopping the cars handily on the crossing,” wrote George G. Foster in a guidebook to New York City.

But if the streets around the exhibition trafficked in the seedier side of entertainment, the wares on display inside were all about the elevation of human industry and spirit.

Burrows notes that there were not a large number of truly novel innovations on display, but what the exhibition lacked in a flood of cutting-edge ideas it made up for in sheer quantity. There were 4,300 exhibits representing 23 nations.

While industrial machinery made up a large portion of the curiosities on display—including an early Singer sewing machine, a prototype of what would become a typewriter, a battery-powdered motor, Eli Whitney’s original 1793 cotton gin, and a machine for washing sheep—there were also more domestic commodities on view.

Unlike the London exhibition which focused mostly on technological innovations, the New York display included clothing, furniture, and food items, among the diversity of the thirty-one exhibition categories.

It also included fine art, which had been absent in London. The Glass Palace became a museum to 675 paintings which were given equal respect as the feats of industry. 

World fairs were meant to be pop-up events; as such, the Crystal Palace exhibition was officially scheduled to close in 1854.

In that time, over a million people visited the glass enclave, including such future luminaries as Walt Whitman, who was such a frequent attendee, Burrows writes, that the authorities worried he was up to no good and began to trail him as he wandered. (Whitman reported that the Crystal Palace was “unsurpassed anywhere for beauty.”)

Another young fan, 17-year-old Samuel Clemens, reported that the building was “a perfect fairy palace—beyond beautiful description.”

The exhibition was such a success, and such a boon to the formerly desolate area that would become Bryant Park, that the association and city officials decided to extend its run indefinitely. The Crystal Palace was set to become a permanent fixture in the New York landscape. 

And then, disaster struck. “The destruction of the Crystal Palace, yesterday, was one of the most disastrous conflagrations that New-York has been visited with in a long time,” the New York Times reported on October 6, 1858. 

It was believed that a building made of glass and iron was virtually fireproof. (In reality, large quantities of wood had also been used in construction.) But that theory was shattered when a fire mysteriously broke out around 5 p.m. Within 15 minutes of it being discovered, “the immense dome, which has so long been an object of beauty towering over the City, and a landmark from every approach, fell, and the work of destruction was complete.” 

The loss was enormous. Not only was the building that had been one of the most famous in the country been destroyed, but so had much of the art and innovations on view inside. Miraculously, there were no fatalities despite the full-house of visitors and rapid advancement of the conflagration.

The cause of the fire was never determined. Whether the source of the blaze was shoddy gas lines, an act of arson, or something else entirely is unknown. What is known is that, in a fiery burst, an architectural wonder went from American icon to being nearly forgotten. 

“We shall never have another Crystal Palace,” lamented the New York Tribune. “Its glorious dome… is no more; its galleries, its treasures, its magnificent expanses indispensable to the mass-gatherings of this great metropolis—its superb memories are all gone, and gone forever.”