The Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of the World's Industry at New York: 1853

This glass and cast iron structure officially called "The Temple of Industry and Art" housed America's first World's Fair. Shaped like a Greek Cross and crowned by a dome 148 feet high, the building was the country's largest at that date. It stood in what is today New York's Bryant Park with the related exhibition taking place between July 1853 and November 1854, featuring displays by nearly 4,400 exhibitors. This view of a crowd gathered outside on 42nd Street near a troop of marching soldiers was printed as a fold-out llustration for Samuel Maunder's "History of the World" (New York, 1852). One of the architects, Charles Gildemeister, provided the image well before the fair actually opened and the publishers mistakenly printed it in reverse, showing the Egyptian style distributing reservoir of the city's Croton water system at upper right instead of at upper left. The name "Crystal Palace" reminds us that the building was inspired by an even larger structure of the same name erected in London to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, inventively using pre-fabricated materials associated with greenhouses. President Franklin Pierce opened the New York fair, which was attended by over a million visitors but still managed to lose money. The structure then was used for other purposes until 1858 when destroyed by fire.