New York Botanical Garden Bronx conservatory
— — a glass cathedral kept warm in winter.
Not only on a wall.
“The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden, a Victorian glass house opened in 1902 and modeled on Kew's Palm House and the conservatories of the Crystal Palace tradition. Inside, eleven interconnected pavilions hold the tropics and the deserts of the world under one roof, a quarter mile north of the Bronx River gorge. In December the model trains come out and the conservatory glows from a distance like a lantern set down in the borough.
New York Botanical Garden Bronx conservatory, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The New York Botanical Garden was founded in 1891 on a 250-acre parcel in the northern Bronx, set aside specifically to preserve a remnant of the old hemlock forest that once covered the lower Hudson Valley. The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, completed in 1902 by Lord & Burnham, is the centerpiece, a glass-and-iron Italian Renaissance plan of eleven connected pavilions covering nearly an acre under glass. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1967. The Bronx River runs through the Garden, the only freshwater river entirely within New York City.
The Conservatory's frame is wrought iron and curved glass, set on a base of brick and stone, with a 90-foot central dome under which the tallest palms grow. Lord & Burnham built it in the same tradition as Kew's Palm House and the Crystal Palace, drawing on a 19th-century lineage of show-glass-house construction. Inside, the architecture disappears within five steps of the door. What you see instead is a Brazilian rainforest, a Mojave desert house, and an orchid gallery the Garden has kept under glass for more than a century.
The Garden is open Tuesday through Sunday throughout the year, closed Mondays except select holidays. The Conservatory is included with general admission and accessible from the Mosholu Gate near Metro-North's Botanical Garden station, a 20-minute ride from Grand Central. The Holiday Train Show runs from late November through mid-January and is the busiest stretch on the calendar; advance timed tickets are required. The Orchid Show takes the Conservatory each spring, usually February into April, and is the second-busiest run.