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United States
Government Building
Exterior of the building. In front are roads, railroad tracks and a platform, a cannon (the Rodman Gun), and people. Image courtesy Free Library of Philadelphia |
The exhibition building held items related to the history and resources of the United States such as stuffed fur seals, walruses, fishes and animals, Washington relics, a Lighthouse exhibit as well as Native American artifacts including an 'Indian tent'. A late arrival was the Siamese exhibit.
The exhibits were supervised by the Smithsonian Institution.
The building also contained the coordinating Post Office for the Centennial grounds wherein many postal boxes were available.
When the Exhibition closed, both home and international exhibits held in the building were shipped to Washington, DC and became the core of the Smithsonian's National Museum. The objects are still on display in the Arts and Industries Building in Washington, DC.
The US Government Building remained empty until the following year when it was dismantled, transported by barge and reconstructed with some modifications in the 'West Brighton' area of Coney Island to become the Sea Beach Palace Hotel and Railway Terminus opening in the following season.
It was the age of steam and the railroad. The Victorian entrepreneurs that had made their investment in the building, carefully planned to develop and remodel it as a new hotel and restaurant, with the provision of a rail link using the West End Railroad's rolling stock and rail also from the exhibition. In the new fast-developing resort of Coney Island, the building's use continued as a railway terminus on the ground floor, the upper interior converted into an hotel.
In Harper's New Monthly Magazine of 1878, the writer, describing a trip to Coney Island mentions:
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Image
courtesy of Larson collection, Special Collections Library, California
State University, Fresno.
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"Further west an immense building in glass and iron is going up, picked up bodily at the Philadelphia Exhibition, and set down here, hotel above and railway station below - the terminus of one of the many dummy roads which will soon make the Island rather more accessible from the lower part of the city than Central Park."
- and quoted in an article headed 'Improvements on Coney Island' from 'the Manufacturer and Builder' of May 1879 the writer describes the hive of activity on Coney Island; the development of the big hotels and railways that fed them -
"The New York and Coney Island Steamboat and Pier Company have 150 men at work building their 1,000 foot pier into the ocean not far from the Prospect Park and Coney Island Railroad depot, and just opposite the unused structure which was formerly one of the wings of the Centennial building in Philadelphia, and which will be used this summer as the depot of the New York and Sea Beach Railroad. Like the Long Branch pier, described in our April number, it will be built on hollow iron piles which will sink by their own weight, the sand and water being pumped up through them from the bottom. They will be embedded in the sand 18 feet. The structure is to be 120 feet wide, and two stories high.
The Atlantic Garden, the large pavilion-like place of entertainment, which was so popular last year, has changed its name and character during the winter; it is now called the West Brighton Beach Hotel. A second story has been added, in which are now exhibited 80 furnished rooms and the piazza has been widened to a depth of 135 feet in front and of 90 feet on the east side.
The new railroad (New York and Sea Beach) will have its starting point at the foot of 35th street, South Brooklyn. This is a point on the shore of Gowanus Bay, near which Brooklyn yachts have been accustomed to rendezvous. Work on the uncompleted part of this line has been commenced, and it will be finished before the 4th of July. The road is already completed from Coney Island to Weir's Hill.
Two-hundred and fifty men are employed on the extension of the Prospect Park and Coney Island Rail-road, which is to run from Cable's Hotel to the west point of the island (Norton's and Murray's). The road will run behind most of the intervening small hotels on the beach, but in front of the Centennial building, and directly over the site of the building used by the Children's Aid Society. President Andrew R. Culver has bought the Buckingham Hotel, just east of the depot, and the Children’s Aid Society will use it.
Contracts have
been given out for the building of an east wing on the Brighton Beach Hotel,
the lower part of which will be opened this month. This will also be done
at the Manhattan Beach Hotel about the same time. Elliott Brothers &
Co., of New York are building a variety theater in the rear of the Buckingham.
William Engerman has secured a 10 years’ lease from the Commissioners
of Common Lands of the town of Gravesend of 10 lots at tile east end of
the Boulevard, adjoining the Concourse, comprising about 800 by 130 feet,
on which he will erect additions to his pavilions."
As illustrated on the next page, the new location of the building was initially near to the sea, thus the name. Soon after the transplantation, in the 1880s land reclamations and shifting sandbars just offshore created a substantial additional tract of land in front of the hotel in West Brighton, where new businesses, amusements and rides quickly flourished. Conversely, in certain areas further east, the shape of the Island had been changing as well, with some shore erosion.
