The Finest Building in America

The New York Crystal Palace, 1853-1858

Inbunden, Engelska, 2018

309 kr

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Built in 1853 in New York's Bryant Park and immediately pronounced the most beautiful structure in America, the Crystal Palace was intended not simply to emulate but rival the famous Victorian landmark in London's Hyde Park. As with its English counterpart, however, its beauty was ephemeral. It caught fire, and on October 5, 1858, "great waves of lurid light" overtook spectators and those rushing to save it. Within thirty minutes, the beloved dome was nothing but a heap of smoldering debris.In his latest book, Edwin G. Burrows, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History and co-author of Gotham: A History of New York to 1898, offers a memorable and elegiac look at the Crystal Palace. While it didn't match in dimension Robert Paxton's London original -- the scale of which was truly colossal -- the New York version became a beloved landmark almost from the instant of its creation. Centerpiece of the 1853 World's Fair, it was home to numerous exhibitions and became a showplace for displaying the growing industrial might of the nation. Walt Whitman rhapsodized about it as "Earth's modern wonder, History's Seven outstripping." Its sudden loss provoked intense mourning-matched only perhaps by the razing of the old Penn Station a century later-and then gradually it slipped from memory. The Finest Building in America will evoke the Crystal Palace's life and times, replete with beautiful period images. The first book-length account of the building's short but glorious life, Burrows book aims to restore it in the minds and hearts of New Yorkers and New York aficionados and fans everywhere.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2018-03-29
Mått178 x 127 x 20 mm
Vikt313 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor264
FörlagOUP USA
ISBN9780190681210

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Edwin G. Burrows is co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and author of Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War, which was named Best Book of the Year on the American Revolution by Fraunces Tavern Museum. He is currently Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Brooklyn College, and has been a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and served on the boards of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in Manhattan, New York History, and the Society of American Historians, and is a past president of the New York Academy of History.

"With characteristic elegance, Burrows guides readers around the mechanical leeches and statues of naked women on display at America's first World's Fair, a glass-and-steel monument in Manhattan to manufacturing, merchandising and materialism that became the most famous destination in the nation." - Sam Roberts, The New York Times"New York's magnificent Crystal Palace was a new kind of building in a new kind of city. Destroyed by fire shortly after its creation and largely forgotten in the twenty-first century, Edwin Burrows's The Finest Building in America restores the Crystal Palace to its social and architectural importance in American history. Like the Palace itself, this book shines." - Timothy Gilfoyle, author of City of Eros and A Pickpocket's Tale"The Crystal Palace, that grand and gaudy--how New York!--showplace of the nation's mid-nineteenth-century can-do adolescent years, finally gets its due. Burrows recounts the birth, life, and flaming demise of the Palace at a jaunty pace, enriching the story with a generous selection of marvelous and rarely seen illustrations." - Michael Miscione, The Manhattan Borough Historian"Burrows colorfully details the logistical and financial problems caused by the elaborate building and he makes the period come to life." - Publishers Weekly