Tuesday, August 20, 2024 – A SHORT LIVED UNIQUE PERFORMANCE SPACE

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THE HIPPOTHEOTRON

&

NEW YORK CIRQUE


TUESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2024

ISSUE # 1289


OLD STRUCTURES

ENGINEERING JOUURNAL

This story turns ugly rather quickly. From the New York Public Library scrapbook, The Hippotheatron and New York Cirque:

That’s 14^th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue, with an out-chapel of Grace Church next door.

As the name suggests, that weird building was a theater for horse shows, constructed in 1864. The NYPL has this flyer dated as 1864, but the name “Hippotheatron” was apparently not used until 1869, when it was already on its third owner. P. T. Barnum bought it in November 1872, and it burned down a month later. Four owners in eight years suggests that maybe making money from a building suitable for nothing but horse-shows wasn’t so easy. This is as good a place to warn about reading the newspaper accounts: the fire did not harm any people but killed a distressingly large number of animals, caged in the building for the shows. Given that the theater apparently had had well over 1000 people inside for some shows, this was the least-terrible bad outcome.

The structure of the building was interesting. The walls and roof were sheet iron; the roof was supported on a series of tension-rod girders supported at the perimeter and an intermediate ring of columns:

That engraving actually undersells the building’s size: the center performance ring was 43 feet, 6 inches in diameter; the building as a whole was 110 feet in diameter and the conical roof was 75 feet high. The way that the tension-rod girders run from the columns to the peak only would have worked if there was a compression ring there, but finding photographic proof of that is probably impossible. There was definitely some kind of ring beam there, as it was needed to support the peak cupola.

The biggest question in my mind is what, exactly, was burning? The newspaper accounts blame “gas” which probably means coal gas used for the lights, but that only provides the initial flame. The roof and exterior walls were iron and therefore not flammable. My guess is that the fuel for the fire was some combination of a wood floor, straw on that floor, and wood seating tiers.

CREDITS

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
OLD STRUCTURES ENGINEERING JOURNAL

PHOTO OF THE DAY

LITTLE FREE LIBRARY BOX 
LOCATED BY THE RIVERCROSS LAWN

BRUCE BECKER, DEVELOPER OF THE OCTAGON HAS RECENTLY OPENED THE MARCEL HOTEL IN NEW HAVEN.  THIS HOTEL IS USING FULLY SUSTAINABLE WAYS TO OPERATE.
CHECK OUT THE YOU TUBE VIDEO FROM LAST SATURDAY’S “CBS SATURDAY MORNING”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wea23LTmeMo

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.

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