It's a shame they didn't rebuild it in the 60s.
But it was also really a neglected building by then; it was not the glamorous event space it was designed for when it was on the Hyde Park site. The money was running out for the company running it at Sydenham.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_F.C.#/media/Fil...
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4226201,-0.0739698,953m/data...
It felt so mysterious and strange. Headless statues, vast empty terraces - the old high level station ticket hall passed under a main road and come out the other side with a view of a huge railway tunnel blocked with an old wrought iron fence.
It's been cleaned up and opened to the public since then - which is almost a shame.
Anyhow,hope you eventually got a better girlfriend.
The Subway has recently been refurbished and looks nice. :) https://www.crystalpalaceparktrust.org/pages/crystal-palace-...
The dinos are getting a bit of love too at the moment it seems (was there last weekend and there is some construction going on the island and the lake around it.
It’s a very nice park to visit. :)
It took me a few seconds of confusion, each image is on its own page and tiny - you need to click on the "Full Screen" icon in the upper right corner of that tiny image to see the full quality.
> The Crystal Palace was at once the world’s largest building and its lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling— indeed, giddying. The arriving visitor’s first sight of the Exhibition Hall from afar, glinting and transparent, is really beyond our imagining. It would have seemed as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble. To anyone arriving at Hyde Park, the first sight of the Crystal Palace, floating above the trees, sparkling in sunshine, would have been a moment of knee-weakening splendor.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/20575/at-home-by-bil...
I should go and read it again, but I think I remember I've pushed it on somebody to borrow years ago, "you gotta read this!". Just... who...?
"Our image above isn’t a photograph but a print made from an engraving, made from a daguerreotype – one of the first photographic processes. Engravings could easily be printed multiple times and used to illustrate books, whereas photographs could not. "
I wonder what things we do we today will seem as anachronistic.
ggm•5mo ago