Enid A. Haupt Conservatory

The New York Botanical Garden was founded in 1891 by the botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton and his wife, Elizabeth Gertrude Britton, who wanted the city to have an institution modelled on the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The great glasshouse was among its first projects. Designed by Lord & Burnham, the leading greenhouse firm of the day, with William R. Cobb as architect, it was begun on January 3, 1899, by the builder John R. Sheehan and completed in 1902 for $177,000. Its designers drew on both the Palm House at Kew and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace.

The building was repaired in 1935 and 1950, but by the 1970s it had deteriorated so badly that it faced either substantial rebuilding or demolition. The philanthropist Enid Annenberg Haupt settled the matter with $5 million for renovation and a further $5 million endowment for upkeep. The work, led by the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, was finished in 1978, when the glasshouse, until then known simply as the Conservatory, was renamed in her honour.

Between 1993 and 1997 a second, $25 million renovation by Beyer Blinder Belle computerised the control of temperature, humidity and ventilation and completely redesigned the displays. The conservatory is a designated New York City landmark (in 1973 or 1976) and lies within the garden, which was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1967.

The conservatory forms a symmetrical C, 512 feet (156 m) long, made up of eleven glass pavilions arranged on either side of the central Palm House. The Palm House rises to a dome 90 feet (27 m) high, while the flanking pavilions, largely open inside as greenhouses usually are, follow one another in sequence. The idiom is Italian Renaissance, translated into iron and glass.

The structure combines steel, cast iron, wood and glass. Panes are about 16 inches across in most pavilions and 20 inches in the Palm House. The base and trim use a carefully chosen palette of materials: bluestone, buff Bedford stone, North River brick and Tennessee marble. The renovation completed in 1997 installed computerised systems to regulate the climate of each pavilion, which is what allows environments as different as a humid rainforest and a desert to share one roof. In summer, two outdoor pools beside the building display lotuses and water lilies.

Since 1997 the displays have treated a walk through the pavilions as a journey over mountains: from the wet western slopes, up through the rainforest and down into the desert. Each pavilion accordingly holds a group of plants representing a particular environment, with palms under the great dome, rainforest vegetation, and cacti and other desert plants. The palm and cactus collections include rare species.

The conservatory is also the stage for the garden’s major seasonal shows. The Orchid Show, first held in 2002, brings thousands of orchids into the galleries each spring; the Holiday Train Show, running since 1992, sends model trains past replicas of New York landmarks made from natural materials; and since 2007 Kiku has celebrated, each autumn, the Japanese art of training chrysanthemums.

The conservatory stands within the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and makes a natural starting point for a day in its 250 acres of grounds. The calendar shapes the visit: the Orchid Show in spring, the lotus and water-lily pools in summer, Kiku in autumn and the Holiday Train Show, a family favourite, at the end of the year. The full circuit of the pavilions, from the palm dome to the deserts, runs as a loop. A visit is well extended into the outdoor gardens, notably the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, first laid out by Beatrix Farrand, and the Thain Family Forest, an old-growth woodland split by the Bronx River.