Grey's Journal:

What is the Crystal Palace?

 July 9th, 2004
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Since I came to London, the words `Crystal Palace' haunted me.  They would float across my mind long enough for me to remember `I've been thinking about Crystal Palace for months' but before I could take action, other thoughts blew the words out of my mind.  I knew that Crystal Palace was a place in London, but I didn't know why it kept tugging at me.

Then, just before I moved to a new flat I was walking down Holloway Road for one of the last times when the answer to `What is the Crystal Palace?' burst into my head.

You know when you're out for dinner with friends and a movie is mentioned, Good Will Hunting for example, and you ask:

``Say, what was the guy's name?''

``Ben Affleck?''

``No, not Ben Affleck, the other guy.''

``Robin Williams?''

``No, of course not Robin Williams, the main guy.''

``Oh.'' The dinner table goes quiet for a moment as everyone ponders.  Eventually someone gives up, saying `I can't remember.  Anyway...' and restores the flow of the conversation -- only you're left holding your head as your brain circles endlessly trying to find the right answer.

Ben Affleck?  No! For the 100th time `No!' Not him!  The other guy.  Why can I remember stupid, talentless, giant-chinned and improbably successful Ben Affleck but I can't remember the main guy?!

``...OK?''

You look up, startled out of your private world.

``Huh?''

``I said, `Are you OK?'  You look really intense.''

``I'm fine, I was just trying to remember the guy's name.''

``Still?  Forget about it.  The rest of us talking about the Euro.''

And so you get swept away in the rest of the conversation until the end of the dinner when everyone is gathering their coats and saying their goodbyes and you have what can only be described as a mental orgasm.

``Matt Damon!'' you yell suddenly, snapping your fingers and startling your friends.  We all know the relief such answers bring after only an hour's tease, so imagine my satisfaction when, after months of wondering about Crystal Palace the answer burst into my head.

``The dinosaurs!''  I exclaimed to no one.

When I was a kid, my father enjoyed taping TV shows for me on any topic I expressed interest in.  I remember with fondness opening the cabinet below our TV and seeing the vast array of video tapes.  There were the boring ones my parents collected, the whole top shelf seemed to contain nothing but episodes of Poldark and Upstairs Downstairs but, on my shelf, were quality cinema titles like Aliens, The Lawnmower Man, and Predator.

When I was much younger, my tape collection was mostly dinosaur oriented.  Shows with low budget, stop-motion animated stegosauri and interviews with paleontologists that convinced me a career under the hot sun, digging in the dirt with a toothpick was in my future.

My favorite of these shows took rather fanciful liberties with the life of the average dinosaur enthusiast.  On it, the narrators visits the home of his paleontologist friend to find him sitting in a chair facing away from the door, like a James Bond villain.

``Is everything OK?  I came as soon as I got your call.''

``Well,'' replies the friend in a scratchy voice, ``I'm afraid I've been studying dinosaurs too much.  You see,'' -- a dramatic pause -- ``I'm turning into one.''

``Are you joking?''

``I'm afraid not.''

To illustrate his sincerity, a scaly hand reached out from behind the chair and pointed to the narrator.

``You must retrieve a sample of water from Dinosaur Island and bring it to me.  That should fix my... condition.''

Dinosaur Island, it transpired, was in jolly old England, at a place called, you guessed it, Crystal Palace.

So, you can imagine my delight when I discovered this was only a twenty minute bus ride from my new home.


* * *


Research revealed, much to my disappointment, that there is no palace of crystal at Crystal Palace.  It was of little conciliation to find drawings and photographs of the magnificent building that used to stand on the grounds.  Originally constructed in Hyde Park in central London, it served as a kind of proto-World's Fair, with galleries of technology and the arts.

At third of a mile long, it looked like Biosphere 2 150 years before its time -- not surprising since the original idea was for the world's biggest greenhouse.  I mentally added it to the long list of buildings more impressive than Buckingham that the royal family should have relocated to.









In 1936 a fire started in the building and the beautiful structure burned to the ground.  The BBC has the live radio broadcast from that night and it's delightfully British -- especially the part where the reporter makes it clear to the listeners at home that the firemen do have tea and meatpies available while they work, so don't worry.  His complaint that `there's a Dicken's of a lot of wind' is also charming.

The remnants of the palace are preserved still and the grounds are used as parks.  I trudged along until I stumbled upon what I at first thought was a tiered sports field, but I eventually realized were the ruins themselves.  I was disappointed.  In my mind's eye, I imagined the palace grounds to be a blackened wasteland with crumbling bits of wall.  A place where you could walk around the skeleton of the building and run an idle hand over a broken stone fountain.  I know the fire happened 68 years ago, but I still hoped to smell the smoke and for the scorched grounds to be a place where the sense of loss would be physical and overwhelming.

Not so.

All that remains is a tiny wall.  The ground is flat and gravel covered.  If you didn't know this was the former site of the Crystal Palace you might think that the area had been cleared for future development.

I walked around and discovered much to my annoyance that what little remained of the palace is fenced off.  When I first arrived in the country, I was surprised at how accessible things were compared to America.  My favorite two examples being the lions at Trafalgar Square and Cleopatra's Needle.  The lions, with their dangerous height above the cocreate ground and the number of climbers they get each day, would be roped off for safety reasons and to avoid lawsuits in the States.  Cleopatra's Needle on the north bank of the river is the oldest human construction in London, dated at 1500 BC, and it's just out in the open for anyone to see and touch.  Amazing.

But here, where there was no perceivable danger and nothing worth preserving, some idiot put up a fence.  I felt is if I was back in the United States.

On my walk around the park, I came upon a clump of trees, with a gate in them, the sign above reading: The Maze.  I went inside the dark opening.

Back in college, when I was a sophomore, I traveled to the Great American Maize Maze with some students from the Geneseo Physics Club.  I went mostly because of the then-president, Michelle, a red-headed senior whom I held up as an idol.  She was smart, hard working and employed on the particle accelerator in the basement of the science building.  This was the height of cool in the geek world: so many blinking lights, glowing monitors, tubes, pumps, dials, vats of liquid nitrogen and a wall of concrete to protect one's DNA from radiation damage.

When we arrived at the Great American Maize Maze, a 22 acre monstrosity so impossible to escape by chance that bits of a map were posted throughout, I positioned myself to make sure I was paired with Michelle when the teams were decided.  She didn't know me well then and I unsure what she thought of the chatty sophomore who was obviously trying to be her friend, but I thought the world of her.  I came to view Michelle as a mentor, and when she graduated that year, I was devastated.

Walking around this tiny maze in London, near the ruins of a formerly magnificent palace and thinking of Michelle, who I lost contact with some time ago, made me all too sad.  I quickly left the maze, finding my way out was no problem as `maze' was a bit of a misnomer.  Escape would only be difficult for those unable to grasp the geometric mysteries of a spiral.

I wandered around for a while, not really sure of where I was going, and then, all of a sudden, I stumbled upon Dinosaur Island.

This was the moment I had waited for.  I had read a great deal about the place.  It was built around 150 years ago to showcase Victorian knowledge of fossils and had been fully restored two years ago.  The models were actually called prehistoric monsters, as the term dinosaur had not yet come into use.  Photographs showed them as huge, bulky-looking things (a dinner for 22 was held inside one) unlikely to be favored by natural selection but, as Darwin's theory was also unknown at the time, this was not a concern to the builders.

As I looked across the water to the island containing the monsters constructed during the victorian age, a single word leapt to my mind:

Underwhelming.

Dinosaur Island is ten times smaller than I expected.  I thought from the descriptions and my television-based memories it was a small jungle you could wander around, turning a corner to find yourself face-to-teeth with the open jaws of a hungry predator.  Instead, the island is a patch of land about the size of a tennis court in the lake with a scattering of dinosaur models on top and in the water.  I scanned the island for a beast capable of seating 22, but couldn't find one unless the dinner guests were midgets.









Photographs courtesy of Gary Holland, BBC London


I circled the island and tried one last time to muster up a feeling of impressiveness but failed.  A duck building a nest in the mouth of one of the water monsters was the final blow.

This was the second time I found myself experiencing the deflating, hollow sensation of anticipointment.  I had hoped that Crystal Palace would be a secret side of London I could show friends when they visited.  This, I thought, would be a prime example of the treasures you can find when you live in a city and have time to explore it fully.  Alas, it was not to be.

But, my memory did provide me with one amusement before I departed.  I remembered that in the dinosaur TV show that had drawn me here, the narrator did complete his task of traveling to London and getting a sample of the water from the island but, when he returned to his friend with the antidote, he found him completely transformed into a velociraptor.  In the final scene, the camera-angle rushed toward the narrator as he dropped the vial of glass and screamed, leaving the viewer to imagine the gory details of his death.

I decided to head home.  On my way to the bus I passed the Crystal Palace train station.  On the wall, children had painted their own version of the island.  I stoped and examined the painting for a long, long time; ultimately deciding this was better than the island itself.  The children, in the way that children tend to do, had created a technicolor version of the world and added their own embellishments.  The dinosaurs were colored so brightly and so wildly it would guarantee that in the real world they would never be able to either hide from predators or sneak up on prey.  There were pink dinosaurs with purple pokadots and a dinosaur with blue and yellow stripes that lined up with the bricks in the wall.  Also, exploding volcanos dotted the land, an addition I greatly approved of.

Just before I reached the bus station, I noticed the Crystal Palace Museum and wavered outside.  The day was a washout and since I was fairly sure I wouldn't be back this way, I thought I might as well see the tiny museum.

I stepped inside the foyer.  An article titled Crystal Palace Restoration Complete! with a big photo of one of the dinosaurs pinned to a news board caught my eye.  Now having been to see the island, I realized that what I had thought were many photos of different dinosaurs were actually photos of the two most impressive ones from many different angels.  I skimmed through the article, not expecting to find anything interesting, but I discovered with horror a large number contained within.

Normally, I'm not the kind of person who complains at restoration costs.  Some people may balk at the idea of spending tremendous amounts of money to keep up historic sights, but I think it's worth it.  I'd rather spend more money on taxes and live in a place with a sense of history than save a few bucks and live in a soul-less concrete-and-glass city.  But this time my heart stoped.

I read that to restore the 33 creatures on Dinosaur Island had cost...

Four. Million! Pounds.

£4 million!

I made a little chocking/gasping sound as the number crossed my mind and had to steady myself with a hand against the wall.  A quick calculation broke the sum into £121212.12 per creature.  Even the pleasingly repetitive nature of the number couldn't prevent me from making another gasp of horror.


For that kind of money, I could have built a much better dinosaur island: twenty times the size, filled with fog machines and animatronic velociraptors triggered to attack visitors with motion detectors.  Hell, if the local council was willing to spend 4 million, why not make it 10 and buy some genome sequencing machines, dig for Jurassic mosquitos preserved in amber and make a real park of it.

My shock prevented me from noticing the old man approaching until he tapped me on the shoulder.

``Hello there, young man!  Welcome to the Crystal Palace museum.  I heard you making some noise out here,'' by this he must have meant my chocking sounds, ``and I thought I'd make myself known to you.''

I gathered myself and shook his hand.  He was the curator of this establishment and looked old enough to have fond memories of playing cricket on the lawn of the palace before it burnt down.  He showed me the best way to go around the museum (which was to walk in a circle in the only room) and then went off to sit at his desk.

I started to look casually at the photographs and he appeared again at my side.

``If you look out that window, you can see the TV tower.  The palace stretched all the way from here to there,'' he told me.

I said an obligatory ``Oh, really?''

He nodded and then went back to his desk and watched me.

Walking around, I noted some of the photographs of the original palace and took out my notebook to jot down a few points.  I found a drawing of the dinner party and felt profoundly disappointed.  The top of the dinosaur had been chopped off, and the guest packed in like sardines.  Again, the curator snuck up on me to explain a further piece of information.  I gathered that visitors were occasional at best, and visitors who actually wrote things down were the stuff of legend.  So it went.  I slowly walked around the room, and he could never bring himself to stay away for more than a few minutes at a time.




Copyright © The Natural History Museum, London.


When I started to get near a television screen displaying a video on the palace (badly in need of tracking correction) the man ran to get his keys, opened the locked cupboard below the TV and fiddled with the nobs.

I wanted to tell him not to bother, as he was having a great deal of trouble with the recalcitrant VCR, but I think it would have broken his heart for me to express disinterest.  After many uncomfortable moments he gave up and apologized.  I lied and said I didn't have the faintest idea how to work VCRs either.

When I was on the final wall of the museum, he approached me once again, but this time he didn't go away.  I didn't have anywhere else to be, so I hung around and provided him an outlet for the little speech about Crystal Palace that he doubtlessly rehearsed to himself many times and enjoyed now giving to a live person.  I wasn't as interested in the Palace he was, and certainty not interested enough to apply for the curatorship of this museum, a position that would be open in a few months time when I am sure he would die, but I did enjoy chatting with him.

However, when a mother and daughter appeared in the museum and he excused himself to attend to them, I took that as my opportunity to make an exit.  I didn't know when the next convenient time would be, and I didn't want to find myself here until closing.

I did however, warn the mother on the way out by discretely whispering, ``Be careful, he's awfully chatty.''





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