Carol Motsinger

cmotsinger@enquirer.com

Look closely and it's right there.

The Crystal Palace FC jerseys the visiting team's players will sport Saturday point to a place that shaped Cincinnati more than 125 years ago.

It's the elegant facade that anchors the team's logo. Some 30 years after its construction, that very building prompted the creation of a cultural icon about 4,000 miles away: The Cincinnati Art Museum.

The original Crystal Palace, the namesake of the English Premier League club, indeed inspired the founders of the Eden Park institution.

How FC Cincinnati decided on Crystal Palace

Founded in 1905, the team originally played near the site of this monument to Victorian opulence and originality in Hyde Park, London. Designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the stunning cast-iron and plate-glass structure stood at a staggering 990,000 square feet. That covers about 22 acres.

It showcased thousands and thousands and thousands of objects. Like 100,000 of them.

Most came from Britain, of course, and the displays celebrated materials, manufacturing, machinery and the fine arts.

During the exhibition's six-month run in 1851, more than six million people gawked at curiosities and inventions and natural wonders. Like tinned food and the huge Koh-i-Noor diamond. An envelope-folding machine and "a defensive umbrella." A stuffed elephant and a velocipede, an early ancestor of our bicycle.

All of those admission tickets added up to an 186,000-pound profit. That would be more than $27 million today. Organizers used that money to found a few museums in South Kensington, London.

One of those museums was The Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1899, it was named in honor of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, who championed Crystal Palace and visited the exhibitions frequently.

However, it was named South Kensington Museum when a certain exhibit inspired a motivated segment of Cincinnati's cultural elite.

'Downton Abbey' comes to Cincinnati

In 1857, the South Kensington Museum hosted a "Crystal Palace" exhibit, which examined the role of art in industry, according to Daniel Hurley's "Cincinnati, The Queen City."

More than 20 years later, Cincinnati's Women's Art Museum Association produced a speaker series on that very topic, with Charles P. Taft, leading lawyer and politician, giving the third and final lecture on the origins and impact of the South Kensington Museum.

That discussion directed the association's plans to build a new Queen City institution.

Like the soccer club's logo, museum founders embedded that Crystal Palace connection right before our eyes. The original 1886 tagline? "Art Palace of the West."

How FC Cincinnati awakened 'sleeping giant'

Crystal Palace now exists in name only. Sure, there is an impersonation of Sir Joseph Paxton's architectural design at Disney World. You can peruse the buffet in the glass atrium of "The Crystal Palace" at Magic Kingdom Park.

But after the Great Exhibition ended in October 1851, the building relocated and rebuilt at what is now called Crystal Palace Park. For decades, Crystal Palace 2.0 continued to the home of innovation and intrigue, hosting displays and festivals.

The grounds hosted a swamp with dinosaur replicas and roller coaster rides. There were concerts and cricket matches. And starting in 1905, the Crystal Palace F.C.

But a massive fire in 1936 ended it all. Despite the efforts of 88 fire engines and 438 officers, Crystal Palace burned to the ground that November, according to the BBC.

Crystal Palace F.C. had already moved on. The team transferred to its current home at Selhurst Park in 1924.

There's another way that the Crystal Palace – the one made of iron and glass, that is – impacts Cincinnati today. It's a life-altering legacy you'll find in Nippert Stadium, the Cincinnati Art Museum and beyond.

During the Great Exhibition, Crystal Palace hosted engineer George Jennings latest innovation, Monkey Closets.

Those go by another name now: Public flushing toilets.

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