The New York Crystal Palace Essay -- Architecture History

Missing imageThe New York crystallization Palace The End of an Era So get arounds a bubble earlier n bingleworthy in the annals of New York. To be accurate, the bubble burst some years ago, and this catastrophe merely annihilates the apparatus that generated it. -George Templeton Strong It is disastrous that the wonderful lithographs in our collection which depict the burning of the New York vitreous silica Palace are not in this online exhibition. They include a garble lithograph by Currier & Ives which truly captures the excitement and confusion of that fateful night. However, the birds meat view of the New York Crystal Palace exhibited here does justice to this direful structure. The lithograph by Frank Leslie shows the extensive use of glass panes for which some(prenominal) the London and New York Crystal Palaces were given their names. It also shows the throngs of people that must have visited the New York Crystal Palace during the Exhibition, even though they w ere not numerous enough to make the construction profitable for investors.The lithograph duplicated on this web site is about 20 x 13 inches. i is able to see the details much more clearly by viewing the original itself. As opposed to those lithographs which showed only a construct with no background and no people, this image shows not only the metropolis behind the Palace, but also the city within the Palace. In the background, one can see the various modes of transportation that visitors must have use to get to the Exhibition. The railroad runs across the top of the image, with a train in the upper left. Sailboats and steamboats move along the river, and horse-drawn carriages pull up to the lie gates, unloading passengers into the crowd. The buildings behind the Palace fade away, but t... ...nd 2,000 people were in the building, but they were all evacuated in time by a broad(prenominal)-flown fire department that put redeeming(a) life ahead of saving merchandise. Having bee n constructed al close to entirely of iron and glass, with only a little woodwind near its base, and having been called fireproof at the time of its construction, the Palace faced the resembling sort of irony which the unsinkable Titanic faced in 1912. The awful building burnt to the ground in less than half an hour.The building itself, though no longer standing, remains one of Americas first and most interesting examples of glass and iron architecture. The exhibits of industrial and artistic objects, whether huge powered machines, intricately decorated home furnishings, or marble statues, attested to the high degree of invention and skill that characterized the artistic expressions of ante-bellum culture.