Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [533]
Construction advanced quickly, and New Yorkers soon had a Crystal Palace to boast about: eighteen hundred tons of iron supporting fifteen thousand panes of translucent enameled glass that peaked in a 123-foot dome, the highest ever built in America. When the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations officially opened on July 14, 1853, tens of thousands of residents and visitors turned out for the occasion. President Franklin Pierce and Charles Lyell, the great English geologist, made speeches hailing the event as the birth of a new era, in which war would be replaced by the heroic advances of science and technology. There was art, too, “to educate and refine the masses” (said the catalog), including a colossal equestrian statue of Washington and thirteen gigantic sculptures of Christ and His Apostles.
The Crystal Palace, 1853, by Nathaniel Currier. The Latting Observatory rises to the left, on the north side of 42nd Street. “In remote districts of this great and growing country,” declared Scientific American, “young men, and old, too, have begun to lay by a few shillings weekly or monthly that they make be enabled to come from the far prairie and backwoods to see the Crystal Palace in New York.” (© Museum of the City of New York)
For the next five years, crowds roamed the building’s halls past shimmering fountains and glaring clusters of gas lights, marveling at the miracles of the age, great and small: scales, meters, guns, lamps, safes, clocks, carriages, scientific instruments, agricultural implements, a Fresnel lighthouse lens, telegraphy and photography equipment, fire engines, ships, and plans for an elevated railroad above Broadway. And machinery, everywhere machinery—machinery to pump water, sew, print, finish wood, refine sugar, set type, make ice cream, and wash gold.
The machine that would have the most dramatic impact on New York’s cityscape—the elevator—was on display in a sideshow area across 42nd Street, in two different versions. One lifted passengers to the first- and second-floor landings of the Latting Observatory, a 350-foot-high viewing structure of iron-braced timber. The second elevator, less spectacular but more momentous, hoisted a mountable platform just high enough to clear the heads of onlookers. The man who mounted it was Elisha Graves Otis, a master mechanic turned inventor. Some years earlier, Otis had produced a machine that made bedsteads, and when the Yonkers bedstead plant where he worked needed an elevator, Otis was asked to install one. He did, and he also added an automatic device to prevent it from falling. Otis was just about to seek his fortune in the California goldfields when an unsolicited order for two “safety” elevators arrived from a Hudson Street manufacturer and Otis realized his fortune lay in New York City. Canceling his trip, he borrowed funds, set up a small shop to make the devices, and then introduced one, with theatrical flair, on 42nd Street. When the elevating platform reached its highest level, an assistant presented the inventor with a dagger on a velvet cushion. Otis cut the cable holding them aloft and, voila, nothing happened, thanks to the invisible safety catches. Three years later E. V. Haughwout and Company installed a passenger version in its new five-story Broadway store, and Manhattan took a decisive step upward.
The Crystal Palace pulled people to New York from across the country. Seventeenyear-old Sam Clemens came all the way from Missouri. Entranced by the