Dinosaur Vandalism
Unfortunately, no, we’re not talking about times when dinosaurs perpetrated acts of vandalism. We will be diving into an interesting case of potential museum-on-museum crime.
The Paleozoic Museum
Before we talk about this mysterious case of vandalism, we first need to talk a little bit about the proposed Paleozoic Museum. After the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the Crystal Palace (which was built to house the exhibition) was dismantled and taken to a new location in South London. When the Crystal Palace reopened in 1854, one of the new exhibits was sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ life-sized concrete dinosaur models (called the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs). They were a huge hit and people came from all over to see them.
In 1868 Hawkins came to America and displayed a mounted dinosaur skeleton in Philadelphia. The newly formed Board of Commissioners of Central Park (BCCP) were inspired by Hawkins’ work and commissioned him to create more dinosaur replicas for a new proposed museum in Central Park. The museum was going to be called the Paleozoic Museum, and Hawkins accepted the commission in May 1868.
The designs for the museum were drawn up and they took a lot of inspiration from the Crystal Palace, like that structure this museum would be a combination of iron beams and glass panels shaped like a dome where the dinosaurs and other replicas to be displayed. The foundation was even laid at Central Park West and 63rd Street.
Hawkins’ drawings show that his plan was to create an entire menagerie within the new museum, and even though it had Paleozoic in the name it would cover a more vast swath of time than simply this period. He planned to include replicas of the theropod Laelaps (Dryptosaurus), the hadrosaurid Hadrosaurus, the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus, and the mosasaur Mosasaurus (all from the Upper Cretaceous marls of New Jersey), along with glyptodont models, a pair of giant ground sloths, giant Pleistocene elk, mammoths, and extinct mammalian carnivores. Phew, that’s a lot of work.
A Change Up
In 1870, unfortunately the political tides were shifting in New York City. A new BCCP was appointed, led by Peter B. Sweeny (who is largely understood to have been strongly influenced by his patron William Magear Tweed or “Boss Tweed”). By this time the plans for developing the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) were underway and though the two museums were never meant to compete with each other, the original board supported them both, this new board decided to stop the Paleozoic Museum project in May 1870 due to economic reasons. “Their 1871 annual report specifically cited the high cost of completing the Paleozoic Museum (some $300,000, or about $7.5 million today), all coming from public funds, unlike the AMNH, which was supported by philanthropic fundraising. This was deemed “too great a sum to expend on a building devoted wholly to paleontology—a science, which however interesting, is yet so imperfect as not to justify so great a public expense for illustrating it” (Ouellette, 2023). The museum was officially cancelled on December 6, 1870.
The Vandalism
Two months after the museum project died, Hawkins gave a report on his work and the project’s cancellation at the Lyceum of Natural History which was covered by the New York Times. In this report, he spoke hopefully about the cancellation only being temporary and his colleague said, pessimistically “the only way… in which the museum could be successful was to elect Tweed as president, Sweeny as treasurer, and the rest of them as directors” (Ouellette, 2023).
Two months later, vandals broke into Hawkins’ workshop in Arsenal and smashed the seven completed dinosaur models along with all the moulds, smaller replicas, drawings, plans, and anything else they could find with sledgehammers. There were literally only crumbs left.
Many people at the time, and to this day, believe that Boss Tweed was behind this attack. Some of the reasons for this theory include that he was angry for the perceived criticism of his board in Hawkins’ presentation at the Lycrum of Natural History, Tweed was Irish and Hawkins was English and it was an especially tense time between the two countries, and that it could have been a religiously motivated crime with Tweed believing in creationism.
However, not everyone was convinced that Tweed was behind this. After all, he likely didn’t even know about Hawkins’ presentation of his report and if he didn’t want to work with an Englishman he could have just fired him. Also, why would he have waited two months after this slight in order to take his revenge. Things just weren’t adding up. So in 2023, researchers and co-authors Victoria Coules and Michael Benton of the University of Bristol, England, decided to investigate and they wrote a paper about their findings.
A New Suspect Emerges
Coules and Benton, in their research and writing, found no evidence of religious motivation for this act of vandalism. This made them stop thinking about Tweed as the prime suspect and look around for who else could be responsible. And that’s when they landed on lawyer and businessman Henry Hilton, another member on the board.
Then they found the smoking gun in the board meeting minutes from May 2, 1871. “Resolved, That the shed building on Central Park, near Sixty-second street and Eighth avenue, be removed to the north-easterly end of the Park, and that the old barn, shed, and structures at that place be removed under the direction of the Treasurer, retaining only such as can be appropriated and temporarily used to advantage as work-shops” (Ouellette, 2023). The shed that they’re referring to here is Hawkins’ workshop and this order came directly from Hilton.
The workshop was broken into a destroyed the very next day.
But what would Hilton’s motivation be to destroy all of Hawkins’ work?? Well, Coules and Benton found some compelling things in this area too. He was a big supporter of the ANHM and perhaps ordered this hit on the sculptures in order to get in the generous donors’ good books. Additionally, Hilton liked to think of himself as a sort of expert on museum matters and had a history of interfering with Hawkins’ work in the past. Hawkins didn’t take too kindly to this interference and the two men frequently butted heads. Hilton also had a weird fascination with white paint once painting a bronze statue and the skeleton of a whale acquired by the ANHM.
There’s also a report from 1872 that makes it pretty clear that Hawkins himself placed the blame for this vandalism squarely on Hilton’s shoulders, “claiming he had done so “out of ignorance, just as he had a coat of white paint put on the skeleton of a whale… and just as he had a bronze statue painted white”” (Ouellette, 2023).
Ironically, if the Paleozoic Museum had been completed it would never have been competition for the ANHM, with the former being more like a theme park than a scientific space. Experts estimate that within a decade it would already have been outdated. But that’s no justification for this vandalism and one museum isn’t entitled to destroy another one, if that’s what happened. So what do you think? Team Tweed or Team Hilton?
Works Cited
Boucher, Brian. “Was History’s Worst Case of Dinosaur Vandalism a Museum-on-Museum Crime? A New Study Suggests it Could Be”. ArtNet. 2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/dinosaur-vandalism-amnh-museum-crime-2312223
Ouellette, Jennifer. “The Real Culprit Behind the 1871 Vandalism of the Paleozoic Museum in Central Park”. Ars Technica. 2023. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/the-real-culprit-behind-the-1871-vandalism-of-the-paleozoic-museum-in-central-park/