Why Did America Destroy Its Most Beautiful Buildings? | America's Lost Landmarks

There is a particular kind of melancholy that comes from walking past an empty lot or a bland office tower and learning what once stood in its place. America has lost a staggering number of its most beautiful, ambitious, and downright silly buildings. Castles of robber barons, cathedrals of commerce, palaces of leisure, and railroad temples that made even commuting feel like an event. The following are some of the most spectacular among them. Hi everyone, Kenton here. Hit that subscribe button and let's explore America's lost landmarks. In 1853, New York unveiled the Crystal Palace, an iron and glass colossus on what is now Bryant Park, built as the most fireproof building ever constructed in America. It hosted the country's first World's Fair, drew Walt Whitman to write rapturously of its dome, and stood as proof that the young nation could rival London's wonders. Five years later, in 1858, a fire that started in a back lumber room consumed the entire structure in roughly 25 minutes. Two thousand people inside escaped without a single fatality, but the Crystal Palace and the era's confidence in fireproof iron went up with it. It was, in a sense, America's first lost landmark, and it set a tone that would be repeated again and again. Few buildings have ever earned the word preposterous more honestly than the Elephantine Colossus on Coney Island. Built in 1885 by James V. Lafferty, who had perfected the form with Lucy the Elephant in New Jersey, this seven-story folly contained 31 rooms, observation lounges, and shops. The phrase, seeing the elephant, became Coney Island slang for tourist mischief. And let us just say, the hotel did not spend its later years in entirely respectable company. A fire in September 1896 reduced the whole creature to ash, leaving behind nothing but old photos. But if Coney Island had a brief, brilliant golden age, Dreamland was its crown jewel. Opened in 1904 by a syndicate led by State Senator William H. Reynolds, the park was painted entirely in white and lit by a million electric light bulbs. In answer to the rougher, more carnivalesque Luna Park next door, visitors could ride a submarine through a simulated polar exploration, tour an incubator ward where premature infants were genuinely being saved, or watch a recreation of the fall of Pompeii staged with real fire. On the night of May 27th, 1911, a workman accidentally tipped over a bucket of pitch in the Hellgate boat ride, and within hours, Dreamland was burning so fiercely that the lions and its menagerie escaped onto the boardwalk. By morning, the park was gone, and the New York Aquarium would eventually be built on the site. Adolph Sutro, a silver baron, mayor, and incurable showman, looked at the windswept rocks at San Francisco's western edge and decided the only sensible thing to do was build a Victorian chateau over them. His cliff house opened in 1896, an eight-story wedding cake of turrets and gables clinging to the bluff above Seal Rock. The interior, reportedly, was equally improbable. Dining rooms, an art gallery, a 100-foot observation tower, and broad verandas with a Pacific Ward beneath your feet. It miraculously survived the 1906 earthquake, only to burn to the ground a year later in 1907. A simpler neoclassical cliff house replaced it, and that one still stands today. By the time the Blenheim Wing of the Marlborough Blenheim opened in 1906, Atlantic City had decided that good taste was for other people. The architect, William L. Price, paired the older 1902 Queen Anne Marlborough with a Spanish-Moorish reinforced concrete fantasy of domes, turrets, and arcaded loges. Thomas Edison personally consulted on the concrete, making the Blenheim one of the earliest large-scale poured concrete buildings in America, structurally identical to a fortress. For decades, it was the queen of the boardwalk, with broad sun decks and brine baths drawn straight from the Atlantic. Bally Manufacturing demolished it through 1978 and 1979 to clear the site for its casino. It is hard to invent a more 19th century story than Cracker Castle in St. Louis. Jonathan O. Pierce got rich selling hardtack to the Union Army during the Civil War, took his cracker fortune, and built himself a Victorian Italianate castle in St. Louis. Completed in 1863 at a cost of around $115,000, the place was such a thicket of towers, mansards, balustrades, pediments, and minarets that contemporary newspapers had sometimes got lost inside it. Pierce sold the house in 1868, and a series of attorneys lived there until the great St. Louis Cyclone of 1896 lifted one of its towers clear off and damaged the rest beyond repair. The Cracker Castle came down soon after, and by 1940, the only thing left of it was a single fence post. Meanwhile in the Midwest, Potter and Bertha Palmer essentially invented Chicago society, and their house had to do the same. Designed by Henry Ives Cobb and Charles Sumner Frost, and finished in 1885, Palmer Castle was a Norman Gothic limestone fortress on Lakeshore Drive. So improbable that the Palmers had it built without exterior door handles, since visitors had to be admitted by a servant from inside, which seems to have been entirely the point. Bertha Palmer's salons there shaped American art collecting. She filled the rooms with the impressionists she championed long before American taste caught up, and many of those paintings are now anchors of the Art Institute of Chicago. After her passing in 1918, the family kept the house, but it eventually became a white elephant in a changing neighborhood. The castle was demolished in 1950, and a luxury apartment tower rose on its grounds. Going back up to New York City, Senator Willie May Clark, the Montana Copper King, did not believe in subtlety. Beginning in 1897, and not finished until 1911, 14 years and roughly $7 million later, he completed a 121-room French Beaux-Arts pile at 962 Fifth Avenue with 31 bathrooms, four art galleries, a swimming pool, a private rail line to deliver coal to its furnace, and an entire New Hampshire quarry purchased to supply the granite. New Yorkers christened it Clark's Folly, almost from the moment the foundation was poured. Clark passed away in 1925, and just two years later, the house was sold and demolished and replaced by 965th Avenue, a Rosario Candela cooperative that still ranks among the most desirable apartment buildings in the world. Jumping back to the other coast, it took San Francisco 27 years and several rounds of contractor scandals to build its first proper city hall, a dome Beaux-Arts Colossus completed in 1899 atop the old Yerba Buena Cemetery. The dome rose more than 300 feet over Larkin and Market, and the building was supposed to be the city's permanent declaration of arrival as a great American capital. Unfortunately, decades of graft had left the structure full of sand mortar joints and structural shortcuts, so when the earthquake struck in 1906, the entire ornamental facade peeled away in seconds, leaving the iron skeleton standing naked over the rubble. The photographs that survived, of a dome cage stripped of its skin, became some of the most haunting images of the disaster. Arthur Brown Jr.'s magnificent 1915 city hall replaced it, but the wreckage of the original served as a permanent civic lesson about cutting corners on public buildings. Few American buildings have ever been so thoroughly disliked by their own city than Mullet's monstrosity in New York. Designed by treasury architect Alfred B. Mullet and completed in 1880, the Second Empire pile occupied the southern tip of City Hall Park, a triangular wedge of Dix Island granite with a steeply pitched roof and a tower that loomed over Broadway. New Yorkers christened it Mullet's Monstrosity, almost on opening day, and never stopped complaining about it. By 1939, the city had finally had enough. Demolition crews showed up expecting an easy job and discovered that Mullet had built walls up to ten and a half feet thick, with iron framing so dense that wrecking balls reportedly shattered against it. Modern critics have come around, several historians now consider it among Mullet's finest works, but the consensus arrived about 40 years too late. Henry Ives Cobb's Federal Building filled an entire block of downtown Chicago with a dome bazaar mass, topped by what was then one of the largest masonry rotundas in the country. It opened in 1905 and immediately became the place where ordinary Chicagoans dealt with their federal government, buying stamps, paying taxes, registering for the draft, and so forth. Its dome rose nearly 300 feet, taller than the U.S. Capitol's, and the rotunda interior was finished in marble drawn from across the country. By the 1960s, the building was considered outdated for federal needs, and it was demolished in 1965 to make way for Mies van der Rohe's stark glass and steel federal building. The new complex is touted as one of Mies' masterpieces, but it is hard to look at photographs of the old rotunda and feel that the trade was even. Such was the case for another federal building. James H. Windram's Romanesque Revival Federal Building opened in 1897 in downtown Detroit, with a 243-foot clock tower of Bedford limestone, stone-cut, as it happened, by inmates at the Indiana State Penitentiary at Joliet. Inside was a courtroom finished in such lavish marble that it was nicknamed the Million Dollar Courtroom. By the late 1920s, the federal government had outgrown the building, and in 1931, it was torn down to make way for a new Detroit federal courthouse on the same block. At the corner of 4th Avenue and Smithfield Street, on a granite foundation that probably could have survived a small artillery barrage, stood Pittsburgh's old Federal Post Office and Courthouse. Designed under treasury architect William A. Potter and completed in 1891, the five-story building was a Romanesque Revival chateausque pile with a steeply pitched roof, dormer windows, and the kind of muscular masonry that the Gilded Age reserved for institutions it expected to last forever. By the 1930s, a new federal building had been built nearby, and the old post office was repurposed for various functions. It was finally demolished in 1966 in the urban renewal sweep that produced Mellon Square and the surrounding office towers, and today the corner is rather unremarkable. Another fortress of a building, the Erie County Savings Bank in Buffalo, was George B. Post's improbable answer to a triangular site at Shelton Square, a Richardsonian Romanesque castle of pinkish-maine granite built around an internal steel frame so its enormous walls could rise 9 and 10 stories without crushing themselves. It opened in 1893 to handle the savings of one of the most prosperous cities in the country, and Buffalo at that moment really was that prosperous, with more millionaires per capita than any other city. Bronze lines guarded the entrance, the interior banking hall was finished in marble, and the building had the unmistakable aura of a place that kept your wealth secure. By 1968, Buffalo's downtown was being rebuilt around urban renewal logic, and the bank came down for the main place tower and mall. Some of the bronze and granite was salvaged and now lives at Buffalo State. Ernest Flagg's Singer Building in Manhattan was briefly the tallest building in the world. Completed in 1908 at the corner of Broadway and Liberty for the Singer Manufacturing Company, the 612-foot tower rose from a 14-story base into a slender, mansard-topped shaft of red brick and bluestone trim. The lobby was finished in marble and bronze, and the elevators were the marvel of their day. In 1968, U.S. Steel demolished the Singer Building to clear the site for One Liberty Plaza, an act that earned it a melancholy distinction it held for more than 50 years. At the time of its destruction, it was the tallest building ever voluntarily torn down. P. Thornton Mayer's Atlanta Terminal Station opened in 1905 with twin-dome bazaar towers presiding over Spring Street, an architectural exclamation point declaring that Atlanta had recovered from Sherman, industrialized, and arrived. It was the principal southern station for the Southern Railway, the Seaboard Airline, the Central of Georgia, and the Atlanta and West Point, handling more than 80 trains a day at its peak. By 1970, passenger rail in the South had effectively collapsed, and the building was demolished in 1972 for the Richard B. Russell Federal Building. George J. Gold wanted his own Pittsburgh Railroad Terminal, and in 1904, Theodore Sealing delivered him one of the most ambitious station buildings ever built west of the Alleghenies. The Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal occupied a prominent site on Smithfield Street, with Beaux-Arts facades, a grand vaulted waiting room, and an approach so geographically improbable that it required boring a tunnel under Mount Washington and constructing one of the most expensive bridges in the country to reach it. The Wabash Railroad went bankrupt within four years of the Terminal's opening, in part because of the cost of getting trains to it. Two fires in 1946 gutted the structure, and it stood as a hollow ruin until 1953, when the wreckage was finally cleared for the Gateway Center Urban Renewal Complex. There has never been a more universally loved building in America than the original Pennsylvania Station. Charles F. McKim's 8-acre temple, modeled directly on the Baths of Caracalla, occupied two full city blocks of midtown Manhattan, and was finished in 1910 with a 150-foot pink granite door colonnade, a 138-foot travertine waiting room, and a ceiling glass concourse that turned ordinary commuting into something approaching transcendence. The Pennsylvania Railroad, in financial decline, sold the air rights in 1962, and demolition began on October 28th, 1963, to make way for a charmless New Madison Square garden and a featureless office tower above it. The architectural historian Vincent Scully wrote that one used to enter the city like a god, and now scuttled in like a rat. The destruction was so traumatic to New Yorkers that it directly produced the city's 1965 Landmarks Preservation Law, and with it, the entire modern American preservation movement. We learned, in other words, by losing the most beautiful building we had. Walk through any American city, and you will find these absences. The parking lot where a chateau once stood. The blank tower that replaced an Iron Dome Cathedral of Commerce. We did not lose all these places to fire, or earthquakes, or war. We lost most of them to ourselves, and the conviction that what was new would always be better than what was. Their stories are passed along to the next person who looks at an empty lot and asks the right question, what was here before? Maybe that question is the most important kind of preservation there is. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. Let me know your thoughts on these lost landmarks down below in the comment section, and if you enjoyed this video, make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an interesting episode of This House.