Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 100, April, 1876

by Various

The edifices, according to the original plan, were to excel their European exemplars not less in elegance and elaboration than in completeness for their practical purposes, in adaptation and in capacity. The uncertainty, however, of success in raising the necessary funds in time enforced the abandonment of much that was merely ornate—a circumstance which was proved fortunate by the excess in the demands of exhibitors over all calculations, since the means it was at first proposed to bestow upon the artistic finish of the buildings were needed to provide additional space. As it is, the architectural results actually attained are above the average of such structures in general effect. The Main Building strikes the eye, at an angle of vision proper to its extent, more pleasingly than either of the English or French structures; while for the massiveness and dignity unattainable by glass and iron Memorial Hall has no rival among them, and its façade is inferior chiefly in richness of detail to the main entrance at Vienna. Were it otherwise, some shortcoming in point of external beauty might be pardoned in erections which are meant to stand but for a few months, and which can have no pretensions to the monumental character belonging to true architecture. Suitability to their transient purpose is the great thing to be considered; and their merit in that regard is amply established. Mr. P. Cunliffe Owen, familiar with all the minutiæ of previous expositions, declares them supreme "in thoroughness of plan and energy of construction"—a judgment designed to coyer the whole conception and administration of the exhibition, and one which, coming from a disinterested and competent foreign observer, may be cited as an amply expressive tribute to the zeal and fidelity of those in control. Ex-Governor Hawley of Connecticut, president of the commission, is a native of North Carolina, and brings to the cause a combination of Southern ardor with Northern tenacity. The secretary of the commission, Mr. John L. Campbell of Indiana, was a good second in that bureaucratic branch of the management. The trying charge of supervising the work generally, conducting negotiations and correspondence, and leading as one harmonious body to the objective point of success an army of artists, contractors, superintendents, clerks, exhibitors, railroad companies and State and national commissioners, fell to General A.T. Goshorn of Ohio, director-general. We do not know that anything more eloquent can be said of him than simply thus to name what he had to do and point to what he has done. The duties of procuring the ways and means and controlling their expenditure devolved upon the Centennial Board of Finance. Of this body Mr. John Welsh is Chairman; Mr. Frederick Fraley, Treasurer; and Mr. Thomas Cochran, Chief of the Building Committee. Their office was fixed upon the grounds at an early stage of the proceedings. Mr. Welsh, more fortunate than Wren, has been able while yet in the flesh to point to his monument, and see it rising around him from day to day.

The exposition is peculiarly fortunate in its site. Had historical associations determined the choice of the ground, the array of them in Fairmount Park would have sufficed to justify that which has been made. Its eminences are dotted with the country-houses of the Revolutionary statesmen and with trees under which they held converse. On one of them Robert Morris, our American Beaumarchais, enjoyed his financial zenith and fell to its nadir. To another the wit and geniality of Peters were wont to summon for relaxation the staid Washington, the meditative Jefferson, Rittenhouse the man of mathematics, the gay La Fayette with enthusiasm as yet undamped by Olmütz, and his fellow-émigrés of two other stamps, Talleyrand and the citizen-king that was to be. The house of one of the Penns looked down into a secluded dell which he aptly dubbed Solitude, but which is now the populous abode of monkeys, bears and a variety of other animals, more handsomely housed than any similar collection in America.

Knolls not appropriated by the villas of the old time, or from which they have disappeared, offered admirable locations for some of the buildings of the exposition, and a broad and smooth plateau, situated precisely where it was wanted, at the point nearest the city, offered itself for the largest two, the Main Building and Machinery Hall, with room additional for the Art Building. The amphitheatrical depression flanked on the east by this long wall of granite and glass, and spreading northward to the heights occupied by Horticultural Hall and the Agricultural Building, was assigned to the mushroom city to be formed of the various State and foreign head-quarters, restaurants, the Women's Pavilion, the United States Government Building, that of the press, a monster dairy, a ditto brewery, and a medley of other outcroppings of public and private spirit. To this motley and incoherent assemblage a quiet lakelet nearly in the centre would supply a sorely-wanted feature of repose, were it not to be vexed by a fountain, giving us over bound and helpless to the hurly-burly. But that is what every one will come for. When each member of the congregated world "tries its own expressive power," madness not inappropriately rules the hour. Once in a hundred years a six months' carnival is allowable to so ponderous a body. Civilization here aims to see itself not simply as in a glass, but in a multitude of glasses. To steer its optics through the architectural muddle in the basin before us it will need the retina that lies behind the facets of a fly.

Eighteen hundred and eighty feet long, four hundred and sixty-four wide, forty-eight to the cornice and seventy to the roof-tree, are figures as familiar by this time to every living being in the United States as pictures of the Main Building. At each corner a square tower runs up to a level with the roof, and four more are clustered in the centre of the edifice and rise to the height of a hundred and twenty feet from a base of forty-eight feet square. These flank a central dome one hundred and twenty feet square at base and springing on iron trusses of delicate and graceful design to an apex ninety-six feet above the pavement—the exact elevation of the interior of the old Capitol rotunda. The transept, the intersection of which with the nave forms this pavilion, is four hundred and sixteen feet long. On each side of it is another of the same length and one hundred feet in width, with aisles of forty-eight feet each. Longitudinally, the divisions of the interior correspond with these transverse lines. A nave one hundred and twenty feet wide and eighteen hundred and thirty-two feet long—said to be unique for combined length and width—is accompanied by two side avenues a hundred feet wide, and as many aisles forty-eight feet wide. An exterior aisle twenty-four feet wide, and as many high to a half-roof or clerestory, passes round the whole building except where interrupted by the main entrances in the centres of the sides and ends and a number of minor ones between.

The iron columns which support the central nave and transept are forty-five feet high, the roof between rising to seventy. Those of the side avenues and transepts are of the same height, with a roof-elevation of sixty-five feet. The columns of the centre space are seventy-two feet high. In all, the columns number six hundred and seventy-two. They stand twenty-two feet apart upon foundations of solid masonry. Being of rolled iron, bolted together in segments, they can, like the other constituents of the building, be taken apart and erected elsewhere when the gentlemen of the commission, their good work done and the century duly honored, shall fold their tents like the Arabs, though not so silently.

A breadth of thirty feet will be left to the main promenades along and athwart, of fifteen feet to the principal ones on either side, and of ten feet to all the others. Narrow highways these for traversing the kingdoms of the world, but, combined, they nearly equal the bottom depth of the Suez Canal, very far exceed the five feet of the Panama Railway, and still farther the camel-track that sufficed a few centuries ago to link our ancestors to the Indies. The berths of the nations run athwartship, or north and south as the great ark is anchored. The classes of objects are separated by lines running in the opposite direction. Noah may be supposed to have followed some such arrangement in his storage of zoological zones and families. He had the additional aid of decks; which our assemblers of the universe decline, small balconies of observation being the only galleries of the Main Building. Those at the different stages of the central towers will be highly attractive to students who prefer the general to the particular, or who, exhausted for the time, retire to clear their brains from the dust of detail and muster their faculties for another charge on the vast army of art. From this perch one may survey mankind from China to Peru through "long-drawn aisles" flooded with mellow light, the subdued tones of the small surface that glass leaves open to the paint-brush relieved with a few touches of positive color to destroy monotony. These are assisted by the colored glass louvres, which have no other artistic merit, but serve, where they are placed over the side-entrances, to indicate the nation to whose department belongs that particular vomitorium.

Four miles of water- and drainage-pipe underlie the twenty-one and a half acres of plank floor in this building. The pillars and trusses contain thirty-six hundred tons of iron. The contract for it was awarded in July, 1874, and it was completed in eighteen months, being ready for the reception of goods early in January last. The cost was $1,420,000, and in mechanical execution the iron-, glass- and wood-work is pronounced fully equal to either of the British structures and superior to those of the Continent. In economy of material for producing a given result it is probable that the iron trusses and supports of the English buildings are as much excelled as the iron bridges of this country surpass those of Great Britain in the combination of lightness with strength. Our metal is better, and its greater cost has united with the scarcity of labor which so stimulated ingenuity in other departments of industry to enforce tenuity of form. Foreign engineers wonder that our viaducts stand, but somehow they do stand.

The turrets and eagles of galvanized sheet iron, not being intended to support anything but jokes, need not be criticized as part of the construction. The tiled pavements of the vestibules, designed to sustain, besides criticism of the he-who-walks-may-read order, the impact of the feet of all nations, are more important. Their pattern is very fair—their solidity will doubtless stand the test. The turf and shrubbery meant to brighten the entourage, especially at the carriage concourse on the east front, we can hardly hope will fare so well. The defence of their native soil, to prevent its being rent from them by the heedless tread of millions and scattered abroad in the shape of dust, will demand the most untiring struggles of the guardian patriots in the Centennial police service.