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I last visited this beautiful covered bridge in July of 2013. At that time, the bridge still exhibited damage from siding that had been removed as an emergency measure when the bridge was threatened by severe flooding in 2008. The siding was removed to allow the stream to flow freely through the understructure of the bridge, thus sparing it the full force of the current. The bridge was saved, but the removed siding was still missing 5 years later while funds for the repairs were sought.
When I returned again in June of 2017 I was happy to see that the repairs had, in fact, been made to the bridge and it was looking good as new . . . but for graffiti inside.
The Union Covered Bridge was built in 1871 and spans the Elk Fork of the Salt River on the Paris-to-Fayette road in Monroe County, Missouri. Joseph C. Elliot built the bridge, which is the only covered bridge left in Missouri representing the Burr-arch truss system. Theodore Burr, who created the Burr-arch design, built so many bridges using that design that he is called by many the father of American bridge building. The other remaining covered bridges in Missouri used the Howe-truss design. The timbers used in the Union Covered Bridge are fashioned from local oak and fastened together largely with treenails or trunnels, with a few bolts and nails added for strength. Hand-riven clapboard siding and wooden shingles enclosed the bridge. The bridge is 120 feet long, 17 1/2 feet wide and has an entrance 12 feet high - high enough to admit a wagonload of hay.
In 1968 a partial restoration was completed using materials from the Mexico Covered Bridge which was destroyed the year before by flood waters. In 1970 the Union bridge was closed after structural timbers were damaged by overweight trucks. A total restoration was completed in 1988. The bridge was entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. The bridge is no longer used for vehicle traffic, and is now maintained by the state of Missouri as a State Historic Site. It was one of only four remaining covered bridges in the state.
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I last visited this beautiful covered bridge in July of 2013. At that time, the bridge still exhibited damage from siding that had been removed as an emergency measure when the bridge was threatened by severe flooding in 2008. The siding was removed to allow the stream to flow freely through the understructure of the bridge, thus sparing it the full force of the current. The bridge was saved, but the removed siding was still missing 5 years later while funds for the repairs were sought.
When I returned again in June of 2017 I was happy to see that the repairs had, in fact, been made to the bridge and it was looking good as new . . . but for graffiti inside.
The Union Covered Bridge was built in 1871 and spans the Elk Fork of the Salt River on the Paris-to-Fayette road in Monroe County, Missouri. Joseph C. Elliot built the bridge, which is the only covered bridge left in Missouri representing the Burr-arch truss system. Theodore Burr, who created the Burr-arch design, built so many bridges using that design that he is called by many the father of American bridge building. The other remaining covered bridges in Missouri used the Howe-truss design. The timbers used in the Union Covered Bridge are fashioned from local oak and fastened together largely with treenails or trunnels, with a few bolts and nails added for strength. Hand-riven clapboard siding and wooden shingles enclosed the bridge. The bridge is 120 feet long, 17 1/2 feet wide and has an entrance 12 feet high - high enough to admit a wagonload of hay.
In 1968 a partial restoration was completed using materials from the Mexico Covered Bridge which was destroyed the year before by flood waters. In 1970 the Union bridge was closed after structural timbers were damaged by overweight trucks. A total restoration was completed in 1988. The bridge was entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. The bridge is no longer used for vehicle traffic, and is now maintained by the state of Missouri as a State Historic Site. It was one of only four remaining covered bridges in the state.
© All rights reserved - - No Usage Allowed in Any Form Without the Written Consent of the photographer.
The best way to view my photostream is on Flickriver: Nikon66's photos on Flickriver
The Johnson Creek Covered Bridge is located in rural southeastern Robertson County, and is currently closed to vehicular traffic. The bridge is important as the only known example of Robert Smith's truss system in Kentucky and the only covered bridge extant known to have been built by Jacob N. Bower (1819-1906).
The bridge was constructed in 1874. It is now one of less than 20 that remain of what were once four hundred covered bridges in Kentucky. Around 1912, Jacob Bower's son, Louis, added an arch on each side to support increased traffic using the bridge. The bridge is 114 feet long and 16 feet wide, according to Louis Bower, grandson of Jacob Bower and a local covered bridge builder.
It is located on what is now a bypass named Covered Bridge Road, off Kentucky Route 1029 (Old Blue Lick Road), about 6.4 miles southeast of Mount Olivet by road. It crosses Johnson Creek, a tributary to the Licking River.
Information from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Creek_Covered_Bridge
One of the most picturesque state parks in Georgia, Watson Mill Bridge contains the longest covered bridge in the state, spanning 229 feet across the South Fork River. Built in 1885 by Washington (W.W.) King, son of freed slave and famous covered-bridge builder Horace King, the bridge is supported by a town lattice truss system held firmly together with wooden pins. At one time, Georgia had more than 200 covered bridges; today, less than 20 remain.
The park is an ideal spot for an afternoon picnic or overnight stay in the quiet campground. Hiking, biking and horseback riding trails allow visitors to enjoy the thick forest and river. During summer, visitors often play in the cool river shoals just below the bridge. Watson Mill Bridge has become a popular destination for horse owners who have their own camping area near stalls.
www.gastateparks.org/WatsonMillBridge/
Photo taken 1/1/2014.
The date on the bridge differs from what is on the nomination form. www.lostbridges.org/details.aspx?id=ME/19-09-03&loc=n
One of the most picturesque state parks in Georgia, Watson Mill Bridge contains the longest covered bridge in the state, spanning 229 feet across the South Fork River. Built in 1885 by Washington (W.W.) King, son of freed slave and famous covered-bridge builder Horace King, the bridge is supported by a town lattice truss system held firmly together with wooden pins. At one time, Georgia had more than 200 covered bridges; today, less than 20 remain.
The park is an ideal spot for an afternoon picnic or overnight stay in the quiet campground. Hiking, biking and horseback riding trails allow visitors to enjoy the thick forest and river. During summer, visitors often play in the cool river shoals just below the bridge. Watson Mill Bridge has become a popular destination for horse owners who have their own camping area near stalls.
www.gastateparks.org/WatsonMillBridge/
Photo taken 1/1/2014.
The Rinard Family were among the earliest settlers in Ludlow Township. John Rinard moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio with parents early on. In 1824, John married Nancy Ray and raised 12 children. Among the 12 was John W. Rinard. John W. owned roughly 250 acres of land in this area, including the plot that this covered bridge was built on.
The Rinard covered bridge is located 1.5 miles north of the Hune covered bridge on County Road 406 (Tice Run) just off Ohio State Route 26. Numbered 35-84-28, the 130 foot span was built in 1875 using the Smith truss system. The bridge was swept off its piers during the flooding of September 19, 2004 caused by hurricane Ivan. It was rebuilt and rededicated on October 21, 2006.
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The bridge was built in 1884 by the Kennedy Brothers- Emmett L. Kennedy and Charles Kennedy sons of Archibald M. Kennedy. The Kennedy family built covered bridges in the region for three generations. In the bridges they built they employed the Burr arch truss system for it stability and ability to support long wood spans with little or no midstream support. According to the National Register of Historic Places Inventory- Nomination Form (No. 81000011), the Longwood Covered Bridge has a truss design that is unusual for the Burr arch, with two kingpost placed ten feet apart as in the queenpost arrangement instead of the multiple kingpost arrangement most often used with the Burr arch. The bridge has five panels on each side of the center, and the burr arch. The bridge originally spanned Williams Creek near Glenwood, Indiana. The bridge was relocated to Roberts Park in 1984.
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Close up view of the truss system that places guideway segments on the columns for the Airport section of the Honolulu rail project
**Offutt Covered Bridge** - National Register of Historic Places Ref # 83000098, date listed 19830202
SR 550
Rushville, IN (Rush County)
Erected in 1884 by brothers Emmett and Charles Kennedy, the bridge uses a Burr arch truss system and is supported at either end by cut stone abutments. The bridge truss is 85 feet in length; the enclosure is 16 feet longer so as to provide an additional eight feet of protective overhang at either end. (1)
References (1) NRHP Nomination Form npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/83000098.pdf
Sunset
Sonnenuntergang
The Brooklyn Bridge is a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge in New York City, spanning the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Opened on May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the first fixed crossing of the East River. It was also the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time of its opening, with a main span of 1,595.5 feet (486.3 m) and a deck 127 ft (38.7 m) above Mean High Water. The span was originally called the New York and Brooklyn Bridge or the East River Bridge but was officially renamed the Brooklyn Bridge in 1915.
Proposals for a bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn were first made in the early 19th century, which eventually led to the construction of the current span, designed by John A. Roebling. The project's chief engineer, his son Washington Roebling, contributed further design work, assisted by the latter's wife, Emily Warren Roebling. Construction started in 1870 and was overseen by the New York Bridge Company, which in turn was controlled by the Tammany Hall political machine. Numerous controversies and the novelty of the design prolonged the project over thirteen years. After opening, the Brooklyn Bridge underwent several reconfigurations, having carried horse-drawn vehicles and elevated railway lines until 1950. To alleviate increasing traffic flows, additional bridges and tunnels were built across the East River. Following gradual deterioration, the Brooklyn Bridge was renovated several times, including in the 1950s, 1980s, and 2010s.
The Brooklyn Bridge is the southernmost of four vehicular bridges directly connecting Manhattan Island and Long Island, with the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the Queensboro Bridge to the north. Only passenger vehicles and pedestrian and bicycle traffic are permitted. A major tourist attraction since its opening, the Brooklyn Bridge has become an icon of New York City. Over the years, the bridge has been used as the location of various stunts and performances, as well as several crimes, attacks and vandalism. The Brooklyn Bridge is designated a National Historic Landmark, a New York City landmark, and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.
Description
The Brooklyn Bridge, an early example of a steel-wire suspension bridge, uses a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge design, with both vertical and diagonal suspender cables. Its stone towers are neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches. The New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT), which maintains the bridge, says that its original paint scheme was "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", but other accounts state that it was originally entirely "Rawlins Red".
Deck
To provide sufficient clearance for shipping in the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge incorporates long approach viaducts on either end to raise it from low ground on both shores. Including approaches, the Brooklyn Bridge is a total of 6,016 feet (1,834 m) long when measured between the curbs at Park Row in Manhattan and Sands Street in Brooklyn. A separate measurement of 5,989 feet (1,825 m) is sometimes given; this is the distance from the curb at Centre Street in Manhattan.
Suspension span
The main span between the two suspension towers is 1,595.5 feet (486.3 m) long and 85 feet (26 m) wide. The bridge "elongates and contracts between the extremes of temperature from 14 to 16 inches". Navigational clearance is 127 ft (38.7 m) above Mean High Water (MHW). A 1909 Engineering Magazine article said that, at the center of the span, the height above MHW could fluctuate by more than 9 feet (2.7 m) due to temperature and traffic loads, while more rigid spans had a lower maximum deflection.
The side spans, between each suspension tower and each side's suspension anchorages, are 930 feet (280 m) long. At the time of construction, engineers had not yet discovered the aerodynamics of bridge construction, and bridge designs were not tested in wind tunnels. John Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge's truss system to be six to eight times as strong as he thought it needed to be. As such, the open truss structure supporting the deck is, by its nature, subject to fewer aerodynamic problems. However, due to a supplier's fraudulent substitution of inferior-quality wire in the initial construction, the bridge was reappraised at the time as being only four times as strong as necessary.
The main span and side spans are supported by a structure containing trusses that run parallel to the roadway, each of which is 33 feet (10 m) deep. Originally there were six trusses, but two were removed during a late-1940s renovation.[29][30] The trusses allow the Brooklyn Bridge to hold a total load of 18,700 short tons (17,000 metric tons), a design consideration from when it originally carried heavier elevated trains. These trusses are held up by suspender ropes, which hang downward from each of the four main cables. Crossbeams run between the trusses at the top, and diagonal and vertical stiffening beams run on the outside and inside of each roadway.
An elevated pedestrian-only promenade runs in between the two roadways and 18 feet (5.5 m) above them. It typically runs 4 feet (1.2 m) below the level of the crossbeams, except at the areas surrounding each tower. Here, the promenade rises to just above the level of the crossbeams, connecting to a balcony that slightly overhangs the two roadways. The path is generally 10 to 17 feet (3.0 to 5.2 m) wide. The iron railings were produced by Janes & Kirtland, a Bronx iron foundry that also made the United States Capitol dome and the Bow Bridge in Central Park.
Approaches
Each of the side spans is reached by an approach ramp. The 971-foot (296 m) approach ramp from the Brooklyn side is shorter than the 1,567-foot (478 m) approach ramp from the Manhattan side. The approaches are supported by Renaissance-style arches made of masonry; the arch openings themselves were filled with brick walls, with small windows within. The approach ramp contains nine arch or iron-girder bridges across side streets in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Underneath the Manhattan approach, a series of brick slopes or "banks" was developed into a skate park, the Brooklyn Banks, in the late 1980s.[40] The park uses the approach's support pillars as obstacles. In the mid-2010s, the Brooklyn Banks were closed to the public because the area was being used as a storage site during the bridge's renovation. The skateboarding community has attempted to save the banks on multiple occasions; after the city destroyed the smaller banks in the 2000s, the city government agreed to keep the larger banks for skateboarding. When the NYCDOT removed the bricks from the banks in 2020, skateboarders started an online petition. In the 2020s, local resident Rosa Chang advocated for the 9-acre (3.6 ha) space under the Manhattan approach to be converted into a recreational area known as Gotham Park. Some of the space under the Manhattan approach reopened in May 2023 as a park called the Arches; this was followed in November 2024 by another 15,000-square-foot (1,400 m2) section of parkland.
Cables
he Brooklyn Bridge contains four main cables, which descend from the tops of the suspension towers and help support the deck. Two are located to the outside of the bridge's roadways, while two are in the median of the roadways. Each main cable measures 15.75 inches (40.0 cm) in diameter and contains 5,282 parallel, galvanized steel wires wrapped closely together in a cylindrical shape. These wires are bundled in 19 individual strands, with 278 wires to a strand. This was the first use of bundling in a suspension bridge and took several months for workers to tie together. Since the 2000s, the main cables have also supported a series of 24-watt LED lighting fixtures, referred to as "necklace lights" due to their shape.
In addition, either 1,088, 1,096, or 1,520 galvanized steel wire suspender cables hang downward from the main cables. Another 400 cable stays extend diagonally from the towers. The vertical suspender cables and diagonal cable stays hold up the truss structure around the bridge deck. The bridge's suspenders originally used wire rope, which was replaced in the 1980s with galvanized steel made by Bethlehem Steel. The vertical suspender cables measure 8 to 130 feet (2.4 to 39.6 m) long, and the diagonal stays measure 138 to 449 feet (42 to 137 m) long.
Anchorages
Each side of the bridge contains an anchorage for the main cables. The anchorages are trapezoidal limestone structures located slightly inland of the shore, measuring 129 by 119 feet (39 by 36 m) at the base and 117 by 104 feet (36 by 32 m) at the top. Each anchorage weighs 60,000 short tons (54,000 long tons; 54,000 t).[5] The Manhattan anchorage rests on a foundation of bedrock while the Brooklyn anchorage rests on clay.
The anchorages both have four anchor plates, one for each of the main cables, which are located near ground level and parallel to the ground. The anchor plates measure 16 by 17.5 feet (4.9 by 5.3 m), with a thickness of 2.5 feet (0.76 m) and weigh 46,000 pounds (21,000 kg) each. Each anchor plate is connected to the respective main cable by two sets of nine eyebars, each of which is about 12.5 feet (3.8 m) long and up to 9 by 3 inches (229 by 76 mm) thick. The chains of eyebars curve downward from the cables toward the anchor plates, and the eyebars vary in size depending on their position.
The anchorages also contain numerous passageways and compartments. Starting in 1876, in order to fund the bridge's maintenance, the New York City government made the large vaults under the bridge's Manhattan anchorage available for rent, and they were in constant use during the early 20th century. The vaults were used to store wine, as they were kept at a consistent 60 °F (16 °C) temperature due to a lack of air circulation. The Manhattan vault was called the "Blue Grotto" because of a shrine to the Virgin Mary next to an opening at the entrance. The vaults were closed for public use in the late 1910s and 1920s during World War I and Prohibition but were reopened thereafter. When New York magazine visited one of the cellars in 1978, it discovered a "fading inscription" on a wall reading: "Who loveth not wine, women and song, he remaineth a fool his whole life long." Leaks found within the vault's spaces necessitated repairs during the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the late 1990s, the chambers were being used to store maintenance equipment.
Towers
The bridge's two suspension towers are 278 feet (85 m) tall with a footprint of 140 by 59 feet (43 by 18 m) at the high water line.[ They are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The limestone was quarried at the Clark Quarry in Essex County, New York. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, and delivered from Maine to New York by schooner. The Manhattan tower contains 46,945 cubic yards (35,892 m3) of masonry, while the Brooklyn tower has 38,214 cubic yards (29,217 m3) of masonry. There are 56 LED lamps mounted onto the towers.
Each tower contains a pair of Gothic Revival pointed arches, through which the roadways run. The arch openings are 117 feet (36 m) tall and 33.75 feet (10.29 m) wide. The tops of the towers are located 159 feet (48 m) above the floor of each arch opening, while the floors of the openings are 119.25 feet (36.35 m) above mean water level, giving the towers a total height of 278.25 feet (84.81 m) above mean high water.
Caissons
The towers rest on underwater caissons made of southern yellow pine and filled with cement. Inside both caissons were spaces for construction workers. The Manhattan side's caisson is slightly larger, measuring 172 by 102 feet (52 by 31 m) and located 78.5 feet (23.9 m) below high water, while the Brooklyn side's caisson measures 168 by 102 feet (51 by 31 m) and is located 44.5 feet (13.6 m) below high water. The caissons were designed to hold at least the weight of the towers which would exert a pressure of 5 short tons per square foot (49 t/m2) when fully built, but the caissons were over-engineered for safety. During an accident on the Brooklyn side, when air pressure was lost and the partially-built towers dropped full-force down, the caisson sustained an estimated pressure of 23 short tons per square foot (220 t/m2) with only minor damage. Most of the timber used in the bridge's construction, including in the caissons, came from mills at Gascoigne Bluff on St. Simons Island, Georgia.
The Brooklyn side's caisson, which was built first, originally had a height of 9.5 feet (2.9 m) and a ceiling composed of five layers of timber, each layer 1 foot (0.30 m) tall. Ten more layers of timber were later added atop the ceiling, and the entire caisson was wrapped in tin and wood for further protection against flooding. The thickness of the caisson's sides was 8 feet (2.4 m) at both the bottom and the top. The caisson had six chambers: two each for dredging, supply shafts, and airlocks.
The caisson on the Manhattan side was slightly different because it had to be installed at a greater depth. To protect against the increased air pressure at that depth, the Manhattan caisson had 22 layers of timber on its roof, seven more than its Brooklyn counterpart had. The Manhattan caisson also had fifty 4-inch-diameter (10 cm) pipes for sand removal, a fireproof iron-boilerplate interior, and different airlocks and communication systems.
Impact
At the time of construction, contemporaries marveled at what technology was capable of, and the bridge became a symbol of the era's optimism. John Perry Barlow wrote in the late 20th century of the "literal and genuinely religious leap of faith" embodied in the bridge's construction, saying that the "Brooklyn Bridge required of its builders faith in their ability to control technology".
Historical designations and plaques
The Brooklyn Bridge has been listed as a National Historic Landmark since January 29, 1964, and was subsequently added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966. The bridge has also been a New York City designated landmark since August 24, 1967, and was designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1972. In addition, it was placed on UNESCO's list of tentative World Heritage Sites in 2017.
A bronze plaque is attached to the Manhattan anchorage, which was constructed on the site of the Samuel Osgood House at 1 Cherry Street in Manhattan. Named after Samuel Osgood, a Massachusetts politician and lawyer, it was built in 1770 and served as the first U.S. presidential mansion. The Osgood House was demolished in 1856.
Another plaque on the Manhattan side of the pedestrian promenade, installed by the city in 1975, indicates the bridge's status as a city landmark.
Culture
The Brooklyn Bridge has had an impact on idiomatic American English. For example, references to "selling the Brooklyn Bridge" are frequent in American culture, sometimes presented as a historical reality but more often as an expression meaning an idea that strains credulity. George C. Parker and William McCloundy were two early 20th-century con men who may have perpetrated this scam successfully, particularly on new immigrants, although the author of The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History wrote, "No evidence exists that the bridge has ever been sold to a 'gullible outlander'".
As a tourist attraction, the Brooklyn Bridge is a popular site for clusters of love locks, wherein a couple inscribes a date and their initials onto a lock, attach it to the bridge, and throw the key into the water as a sign of their love. The practice is illegal in New York City and the NYPD can give violators a $100 fine. NYCDOT workers periodically remove the love locks from the bridge at a cost of $100,000 per year.
To highlight the Brooklyn Bridge's cultural status, the city proposed building a Brooklyn Bridge museum near the bridge's Brooklyn end in the 1970s. Though the museum was ultimately not constructed, as many as 10,000 drawings and documents relating to it were found in a carpenter shop in Williamsburg in 1976. These documents were given to the New York City Municipal Archives, where they are normally located, though a selection of them were displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art when they were discovered.
Media
The bridge is often featured in wide shots of the New York City skyline in television and film and has been depicted in numerous works of art. Fictional works have used the Brooklyn Bridge as a setting; for instance, the dedication of a portion of the bridge, and the bridge itself, were key components in the 2001 film Kate & Leopold. Furthermore, the Brooklyn Bridge has also served as an icon of America, with mentions in numerous songs, books, and poems. Among the most notable of these works is that of American Modernist poet Hart Crane, who used the Brooklyn Bridge as a central metaphor and organizing structure for his second book of poetry, The Bridge (1930).
The Brooklyn Bridge has also been lauded for its architecture. One of the first positive reviews was "The Bridge As A Monument", a Harper's Weekly piece written by architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler and published a week after the bridge's opening. In the piece, Schuyler wrote: "It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge." Architecture critic Lewis Mumford cited the piece as the impetus for serious architectural criticism in the U.S. He wrote that in the 1920s the bridge was a source of "joy and inspiration" in his childhood, and that it was a profound influence in his adolescence. Later critics would regard the Brooklyn Bridge as a work of art, as opposed to an engineering feat or a means of transport. Not all critics appreciated the bridge, however. Henry James, writing in the early 20th century, cited the bridge as an ominous symbol of the city's transformation into a "steel-souled machine room".
The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in numerous media sources, including David McCullough's 1972 book The Great Bridge and Ken Burns's 1981 documentary Brooklyn Bridge. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with an accompanying book, as well as Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge, a biography published in 2017.
(Wikpedia)
Die Brooklyn Bridge (ursprünglich New York and Brooklyn Bridge) in New York City ist eine kombinierte Hänge- und Schrägseilbrücke und eine der ältesten Hängebrücken dieser Bauart in den USA. Sie überspannt den East River und verbindet die Stadtteile Manhattan und Brooklyn miteinander. Die Brücke hat heute fünf Fahrstreifen für Fahrzeuge, drei von Manhattan nach Brooklyn, zwei von Brooklyn nach Manhattan. Der dritte Fahrstreifen nach Manhattan wurde zum Fahrradweg umfunktioniert. In der Ebene darüber befindet sich ein breiter Fußweg. Zum Zeitpunkt ihrer Fertigstellung 1883 war die Brooklyn Bridge die längste Hängebrücke der Welt; sie übertraf alle zuvor errichteten in ihrer Länge um mehr als 50 Prozent. Für die Stadt New York wurde die Brooklyn Bridge schnell zu einem neuen Wahrzeichen.
Geschichte
Vorgeschichte
Die Idee einer Brücke zwischen Manhattan und Brooklyn wurde schon seit dem frühen 19. Jahrhundert diskutiert, scheiterte aber immer am East River, der kein Fluss, sondern ein Meeresarm mit starken gezeitenabhängigen Strömungen und dichtem Schiffsverkehr ist. Eine Brücke ohne störende Pfeiler, die den Meeresarm weit über den Schiffsmasten in einer großen Spanne überquert, wäre die ideale Lösung gewesen, schien aber damals jenseits aller technischen Möglichkeiten zu sein.
Vorbereitungen
Der deutsch-amerikanische Ingenieur Johann August Röbling, der sich nach Einbürgerung John Augustus Roebling nannte und aus Mühlhausen in Thüringen stammte, hatte bereits mehrere Hängebrücken konstruiert und 1855 die Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge (ebenfalls eine kombinierte Hänge- und Schrägseilbrücke) mit einer Spannweite von 260 m fertiggestellt. Er war auch der Inhaber einer Seilerei, die Drahtseile aus hochfesten Stahldrähten herstellen konnte. Er schlug eine Hängebrücke vor, für die er auch schon Pläne mit zahlreichen Einzelheiten ausgearbeitet hatte, samt den beiden großen Granittürmen mit den vier Tragkabeln. Die Stadtverwaltungen von New York und Brooklyn reagierten zurückhaltend. Roebling konnte aber einen Geschäftsmann und Zeitungsverleger für die Idee begeistern, dem es nach längeren Bemühungen gelang, ein Gesetz des Staates New York zu erwirken, wonach eine private Gesellschaft eine Brücke über den East River bauen dürfe. 1867 wurde die New York Bridge Company gegründet. 1869 wurden Roeblings Pläne genehmigt und er selbst zum Chief Engineer für den Brückenbau ernannt.
Bei der Besichtigung des für einen der Türme vorgesehenen Platzes wurde Roebling jedoch Opfer eines Unfalls, bei dem sein Fuß von einer Fähre eingequetscht wurde. Er starb nur drei Wochen später infolge einer Tetanus-Infektion. Sein Sohn Washington übernahm daraufhin die Leitung des Projektes.
Bau
Die eigentlichen Bauarbeiten an der Brooklyn Bridge begannen am 3. Januar 1870 mit den Vorbereitungen für die Fundamente der Türme und der Anker. Die bis zu 23 m tiefen Baugruben wurden mit Hilfe von Senkkästen ausgehoben, ein in den USA erstmals eingesetztes Verfahren, das noch nicht voll beherrscht wurde und dessen medizinische Probleme überhaupt noch nicht verstanden wurden. Während der fünf Jahre dauernden Tiefbauarbeiten kam es immer wieder zu Unfällen und Krankheiten. Auch Washington Roebling erkrankte 1872 bei Arbeiten in einem der Senkkästen (Caisson) für die Errichtung der Pfeilerfundamente an der Dekompressionskrankheit (Taucherkrankheit) oder Caissonkrankheit. Er verfügte daraufhin nur noch über eingeschränktes Sprechvermögen und war auf einen Rollstuhl angewiesen. Während er die weiteren Bauarbeiten lediglich mit einem Teleskop von zu Hause aus verfolgen konnte, war es vor allem seine Ehefrau Emily, die die Arbeiten voranbrachte. Sie sollte später auch die erste Person sein, die die Brücke nach ihrer Fertigstellung überquerte.
Im August 1876 wurde das erste Seil von einem Anker über die Türme und den East River zu dem anderen Anker gespannt, mit dessen Hilfe anschließend ein schmaler durchhängender Steg (catwalk) gebaut wurde. Im Februar 1877 begann man mit dem Spinnen der Tragkabel. Die Spinnräder liefen bis Oktober 1878 hin und her, um die über 20.000 Stahldrähte für die vier Tragkabel über den Fluss zu ziehen. Im März 1879 begannen die Arbeiten an den Fahrbahnträgern, die weitere vier Jahre dauerten. Außer den beiden Fahrbahnen waren zwei Gleise für die Eisenbahn vorgesehen. Da deren Züge inzwischen schwerer geworden waren, musste Roebling verstärkte Streben in den Fachwerkkonstruktionen vorsehen. Vor der Eröffnung mussten noch die Mauthäuser an beiden Enden der Brücke geplant und gebaut und die Brücke selbst mit 70 elektrischen Lampen ausgerüstet werden.
Die Gesamtkosten betrugen 15,2 Millionen US-Dollar inklusive 3,8 Millionen US-Dollar Grunderwerbskosten. Insgesamt beschäftigte der Bau 6000 Arbeiter, 27 verloren dabei ihr Leben.
Eröffnung und erste Jahre
Am Tag ihrer Eröffnung, dem 24. Mai 1883, überquerten bereits 1.800 Fahrzeuge und 150.300 Menschen die neue Brücke. Pro Fahrzeug mussten fünf Cent, pro Fußgänger ein Cent bezahlt werden. Um die skeptische New Yorker Bevölkerung von der Stabilität des Bauwerks zu überzeugen, soll zuvor der Zirkus Barnum, der sein Winterquartier in Brooklyn hatte, mit 21 Elefanten zur Belastungsprobe über die Brücke geschickt worden sein. Es scheint dafür jedoch keine gesicherten Quellen zu geben. Manchen Berichten zufolge fand dieses Ereignis erst ein Jahr später statt.
Unklar ist, wie die New Yorker damals die neue Brücke akzeptiert haben. Teilweise heißt es, alle seien begeistert gewesen und hätten zu Hunderttausenden am Eröffnungstag die Brücke beschritten. Anderen Berichten zufolge war die Bevölkerung anfangs sehr zögerlich, demnach soll es lange gedauert haben, bis sich diese Vorsicht legte.
Einige Tage nach der Eröffnung, am 30. Mai, brach eine Panik in einem Gedränge aus, die zwölf Menschen das Leben kostete. Eine Frau schrie laut auf, als eine andere beim Gehen auf einer hölzernen Treppe den Halt verlor. In der Umgebung brach in Sekundenschnelle eine Massenpanik aus, in deren Verlauf zwölf Menschen starben und 35 teilweise schwer verletzt wurden.
Am 25. September 1883 begann auf den mittig zwischen den Richtungsfahrbahnen, beiderseits des Fußwegs gelegenen Gleisen der Zugverkehr über die Brücke. An den Brückenenden in Manhattan und Brooklyn hatte man die Strecke als Hochbahnen bis zu den nahen Endbahnhöfen weitergeführt. In den ersten Jahren pendelten Cable Cars, von denen 24 Fahrzeuge angeschafft wurden, zwischen den beiden Stationen. Diese Wagen wurden von Dampflokomotiven – denen man nicht zutraute, die Steigungen der Rampen zu bewältigen – aus den Endbahnhöfen bis zum Fuß der Rampen geschoben. Dort wurden die Wagen in ein stetig umlaufendes Seil eingeklinkt, das von einer Dampfmaschine auf der Brooklyn-Seite bewegt wurde.
1884 wurden ca. 9 Millionen Fahrgäste befördert, 1885 verkehrten die Züge während der Hauptverkehrszeit bereits im 90-Sekunden-Intervall. 1893 wurden zur Erhöhung der Kapazität im Brückenbereich ineinander verschlungene Gleise angelegt und ein zweites Zugseil installiert. Am 30. November 1896 endete der Einsatz der Dampflokomotiven, fortan brachten elektrische Triebwagen die – mittlerweile aus mehreren Wagen gebildeten – Züge zu den Rampen, wo weiterhin das Seil die Traktion sicherstellte. Nach der Vereinigung der Städte New York und Brooklyn übernahm 1898 die Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) die New York and Brooklyn Bridge Railway, verknüpfte die Strecke mit ihren vorhandenen und ließ einige ihrer Züge bis Manhattan durchlaufen. Die Dampfmaschine für das Bewegen des Zugseils wurde durch Elektromotoren ersetzt. Ab 1899 verkehrten außerhalb der Hauptverkehrszeit Züge auch rein elektrisch, ohne Zugriff auf das Kabel, über die Brücke.
1898 wurde die Straßenbahnverbindung über die Brooklyn Bridge eröffnet. Die Gleise wurden auf der jeweils linken Spur der beiden Fahrbahnen neben jenen der Kabelbahn angelegt.
20. Jahrhundert
Um das Jahr 1900 herum verkauften die Betrüger George C. Parker und William McCloundy mehrfach angeblich von ihnen besessene Grundstücke, über die neue Zufahrtsstraßen zur Brücke laufen sollten, an wohlhabende Besucher der Stadt, die sich davon hohe Renditen versprachen. Im Volksmund lief bald die Geschichte um, die beiden hätten unbedarften Fremden die Brücke selbst angedreht. „Selling the Brooklyn Bridge“ wurde bis heute zum geflügelten Wort in der englischen Sprache für jede Art von Missbrauch der Gutgläubigkeit anderer.
Ab dem 1. Oktober 1901 wurde die Kabeltraktion auf die nachmittäglichen lokalen Züge der Hauptverkehrszeit zwischen den beiden Flussufern beschränkt und am 27. Januar 1908 ganz eingestellt. 1944 endete der mittlerweile zur New York City Subway gehörende U-Bahn-Verkehr auf den BRT-Gleisen über die Brücke, fortan nutzte die Straßenbahn die Gleise der ehemaligen Kabelbahn. 1954 wurde auch der Straßenbahnverkehr über die Brooklyn Bridge eingestellt.
Zwischen 1944 und 1955 wurden umfangreiche Renovierungs- und Verstärkungsmaßnahmen durchgeführt. Dabei wurden zuletzt auch die Straßenbahngleise entfernt und die Brücke auf sechs Fahrstreifen für den Kfz-Verkehr umgestellt. 1999 wurde die Fahrbahndecke erneuert und eine Reihe verstärkender Stahlstreben eingesetzt.
Im Januar 1964 erhielt die Brücke den Status eines National Historic Landmarks. Im Oktober 1966 wurde die Brooklyn Bridge in das National Register of Historic Places der USA aufgenommen, die offizielle Liste schützenswerter Stätten und Bauten. Am 24. März 1983 erhielt sie den Titel einer National Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks. Um ihre herausragende architektonische Stellung zu unterstreichen, wird die Brücke seit den 1980er Jahren nachts beleuchtet.
21. Jahrhundert
Seit 2009 wird am Fuß der Brücke entlang des East Rivers der Brooklyn Bridge Park errichtet. Eine grundlegende Renovierung der Brücke begann ebenfalls 2009 und dauert an (Stand: August 2016). Nachdem bei der Sanierung weitere Schäden entdeckt worden sind, verzögert sich der Abschluss der Sanierungsarbeiten. Bis zum endgültigen Abschluss der Sanierung wird mit Kosten von mehr als 600 Millionen Dollar gerechnet. Während der Sanierungsarbeiten bleibt die Brücke zwar geöffnet, es kommt jedoch insbesondere an Wochenenden immer wieder zu Teil- und Vollsperrungen für den Fahrzeugverkehr. Mit einem Abschluss der Arbeiten wurde für das Jahr 2016 gerechnet, mittlerweile ist der geplante Fertigstellungstermin auf 2022 verschoben worden.
Im Mai 2024 wurde der neue Radweg auf der Fahrbahnebene eröffnet. Der alte Fuß- und Radweg ist jetzt nur noch Fußweg.
Technische Beschreibung
John Augustus Roebling wandte bei der Brooklyn Bridge die gleichen grundlegenden Prinzipien an wie bei seinen früheren Brücken: Die Brücke wird von massiven Steintürmen getragen. Der Fahrbahnträger ist eine kastenförmige Fachwerkkonstruktion, die für sich allein bereits eine hohe Steifigkeit aufweist, um die gefürchteten Schwingungen und Verdrehungen bei Stürmen zu verhindern. Der Fahrbahnträger wird nicht nur mit senkrechten Hängern an die Tragkabel gehängt, sondern zusätzlich mit Schrägseilen an den Türmen befestigt. Die Dimensionierung erfolgt großzügig, so dass die Brücke auch große Lasten und schwere Stürme schadlos überstehen kann. Obwohl die Brooklyn Bridge ursprünglich für Pferdekutschen, Ochsenfuhrwerke und die damaligen leichten Eisenbahnen konzipiert war, überstand sie später die enorme Zunahme des Straßenverkehrs und der Fußgängermassen.
Die Brooklyn Bridge hat eine Länge von insgesamt 1834 m (6016 ft) einschließlich der Auffahrtsrampen, die wegen der Nutzung durch Eisenbahnen flach gehalten werden mussten. Die Länge zwischen den Ankern der Tragkabel beträgt 1068 m (3455 ft 6 in). In der Hauptöffnung hat sie eine Stützweite von 486,3 m und in den beiden Randöffnungen eine von jeweils 284,4 m, was eine Gesamtstützweite von 1055,1 m ergibt.
Der 25,9 m breite, in zwei Hälften geteilte Fahrbahnträger bietet Platz für insgesamt sechs Fahrstreifen, jeweils drei pro Richtung. Ursprünglich waren es vier Fahrstreifen sowie zwei Gleise für Vorortzüge auf den inneren Fahrstreifen, die später in Straßenbahntrassen umgebaut wurden. 1950 wurden auch diese Gleise entfernt. Ein Zwischenraum in der Mitte ist nicht als Fahrstreifen ausgebildet, da er von den mittleren Pylonen zwischen den großen Portalen in Anspruch genommen wird. In der Ebene über den Fahrbahnen befindet sich mittig ein separater Überweg, der sich in Hälften aufgabelnd durch die Portalöffnungen durchfädelt. Dazwischen ist ein Metallnetz waagrecht gespannt. Bis zum Umbau 2024 war der Weg für Fußgänger und Fahrradfahrer, seit Mai 2024 nur noch für Fußgänger. Für die Fahrradfahrer wurde von den drei nach Manhattan führenden Fahrstreifen die linke zu zwei Fahrradspuren (nach und von Manhattan) umgebaut und mit einer Trennwand zum übrigen Verkehr versehen.
Die Brooklyn Bridge hat eine lichte Höhe von 41,15 m (135 ft) in der Mitte des leicht nach oben gewölbten Fahrbahnträgers. Zu den Ufern hin vermindert sich die lichte Höhe auf 36,27 m (119 ft) an den Pylonen.
Die beiden mit neugotischen Stilelementen versehenen Türme bestehen aus Granit. Als Stilvorlage sollen Roebling die gotischen Bogenfenster der Divi-Blasii-Kirche in seinem deutschen Geburtsort Mühlhausen/Thüringen gedient haben. Sie haben zwei Spitzbogenportale für die drei Fahrbahnen auf den beiden Hälften des Fahrbahnträgers, die dementsprechend jeweils zwei Tragkabel haben. Die Türme überragten mit einer Höhe von 48,50 m (159 ft) über der Fahrbahn und von 84,30 m über dem mittleren Hochwasser alle damaligen Gebäude bis auf die Turmspitze der Trinity Church, die noch einen guten Meter höher war. Die Fundamente der Türme reichen auf der Seite von Manhattan 23,7 m (78 ft) und 13,4 m (44 ft) auf der Seite von Brooklyn in den Boden.
Die Brooklyn Bridge war die erste Hängebrücke, für die Tragkabel aus Stahl verwendet wurden. Die vier Tragkabel sind Paralleldrahtseile; sie bestehen aus jeweils 5434 parallel nebeneinander liegenden Stahldrähten, die zunächst in 19 Bündeln zu je 286 Drähten zusammengefasst und anschließend durch große Seilklemmen zu den rund 40 cm starken Tragkabeln zusammengepresst und mit glühendem Draht ummantelt wurden. Sie wurden mit Roeblings patentiertem Luftspinnverfahren vor Ort hergestellt. An den Tragkabeln sind insgesamt 1520 Hänger aus normalem, geschlagenem Drahtseil befestigt. Außerdem wurden zwischen den Turmspitzen und dem Fahrbahnträger noch insgesamt 400 Schrägseile gespannt.
Roebling arbeitete einen großen Sicherheitsfaktor ein, indem er die Tragseilkonstruktion für eine sechsmal höhere Last auslegte als erforderlich. Dies machte sich vor allem bezahlt, als man während der Arbeiten entdeckte, dass ein Zulieferer minderwertige Drähte geliefert hatte. Diese waren bereits eingebaut und konnten nicht mehr entfernt werden. Da die Belastungsfähigkeit dadurch aber nur so weit sank, dass die Brücke immer noch die vierfache Beanspruchung verkraftete, beließ man es dabei. Insgesamt wurden 24.000 km Draht für die Seile verwendet.
Das Gewicht der Brücke beträgt ca. 13.300 metrische Tonnen (ohne Türme, Caissons und Verankerungen).
Täglich passieren rund 120.000 Fahrzeuge, 4000 Fußgänger und 3100 Radfahrer die Brücke. Die Nutzung ist beschränkt auf Fahrzeuge bis zu 3,4 m Höhe und 2,7 t Gesamtgewicht.
In Kunst und Medien
Die Brooklyn Bridge steht zusammen mit der Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge im Mittelpunkt des Films und Musicals Saturday Night Fever, beide als Sinnbilder für den Weg in eine neue Welt – zu einer glamourösen Karriere anstelle trister Arbeit. Der Hinterhof-Junge aus Brooklyn träumt von der feinen Gesellschaft in Manhattan. Die zwei Welten sind durch den East River getrennt, aber die Brooklyn Bridge verbindet sie und wird so zum Ort der Hoffnung auf den sozialen Aufstieg.
Das gleiche Motiv gibt es bei Katharina Weingartner in ihrem Film Sneaker Stories. Neben Red Hook in Brooklyn werden Viertel aus Wien und Accra dargestellt, in denen arme Jugendliche davon träumen, mittels Baseballspielen reich zu werden und dann ein lukratives Sponsoring von Nike etc. zu bekommen. Weingartner kontrastiert Red Hook und das Finanzviertel von Manhattan, sie sind nur durch den Fluss getrennt: seit dem Industrieabbau … und dem darauf folgenden Aufstieg schwarzer Musik- und Sport-Ikonen ist er unüberwindbar geworden, und doch sind die beiden Viertel symbolisch verbunden: Wie soll sich ein Jugendlicher auf Lebensmittelmarken in Red Hook diesem Mythos entziehen?
In die Gegenrichtung verlaufen die Sehnsüchte in Leslie Kaplans Roman Brooklyn Bridge. Für die Hauptfigur stellt der abschließende Gang über die Brücke die erträumte mentale Rückkehr in die Kindheit, in die Heimat, dar.
Der Expressionist Robert Müller schrieb 1920 die Erzählung Brooklyn-Bridge.
Der US-amerikanische Dichter Harold „Hart“ Crane war bei seinem Poem The Bridge (1930; dt. Die Brücke) von der Brooklyn Bridge inspiriert. Hart Crane lebte einige Zeit in 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, mit guter Sicht auf die Brücke. Unter der Adresse hatte zuvor auch der Erbauer Washington Roebling gewohnt.
In Richard Crabbe’s historischem Thriller Die Brooklyn Verschwörung steht die Brooklyn Bridge im Mittelpunkt einer dramatischen Epoche der Stadtgeschichte.
Als eines der Wahrzeichen der Stadt New York ist die Brooklyn Bridge Handlungsort in zahlreichen Romanen, Fernsehsendungen, Filmen (z. B. Es war einmal in Amerika [1984], Godzilla [1998], Deep Impact [1998], I Am Legend [2007]), Cloverfield [2008] und Computerspielen (z. B. SimCity 3000).
Der Dokumentarfilmer Ken Burns drehte 1981 einen oscarnominierten Dokumentarfilm über die Entstehung der Brücke (Brooklyn Bridge).
Im Sommer 2008 war die Brooklyn Bridge selbst Teil einer großen Installation: The New York City Waterfalls war von Mitte Juli bis Mitte Oktober 2008 zu sehen. Der dänisch-isländische Künstler Olafur Eliasson hatte mit einem Budget von 15 Millionen Dollar mehrere künstliche Wasserfälle konstruiert, einen davon unter der Brooklyn Bridge.
Andreas Feininger schuf mehrere Fotos der Brücke (darunter z. B.: im Nebel; zur Nacht) aus verschiedenen Perspektiven, die ein weitverbreitetes Poster-Motiv abgeben. Eine eher unbekannte Version, bei der die Brücke waagerecht vor der Hochhauskulisse verläuft, dient als Coverbild (vorn und hinten) eines Düsseldorfer Ausstellungskatalogs über Rose Ausländer unter dem Titel Ich fliege auf der Luftschaukel Europa – Amerika – Europa von 1994
Am 22. Juli 2014 wurden zwei im Wesentlichen weiße Flaggen geborgen, die Unbekannte auf den zwei Pylonen statt der Staatsflaggen aufgezogen hatten. Am 13. August 2014 bekannten sich zwei Berliner Künstler, Mischa Leinkauf und Matthias Wermke, als für diese Aktion verantwortlich.
(Wikipedia)
"lightBOX" by Gary Lewis and Julia Wong.
The Big Vision
What if the traditional town square was transformed into the idea of the neighborhood squares, where everyday activities can create the new hub for social life. Each square gives a variety of program to the neighborhood and can act as the neighborhood ‘living rooms’ where movies, plays, weddings, farmers markets, art events, festivals, and holiday events can play out. The once underutilized fire alarm service building can be revitalized into a public amenity and at the center a beacon placed over the top of it can act as the focal point for these neighborhood activities. The existing historic fire alarm service building is given a new prominence in the neighborhood; when closed at night it acts as the neighborhood ‘Light box’. Sloping one of the neighborhood squares toward the ‘Light box’ provides accessibility and doubles as seating for movie nights and performances; on the inside, the upper floor is transformed from a coworking and coffee shop into a night lounge.
Program
The variety of programs at the newly designed Winn Park allows it to be active during days, nights, weekends, and holidays. An area dedicated to kids allows them to play in fountains, on the grass, rock climb, slide, and lay in a large netted hammock underneath a tree. Others can play bocce ball, run the track, or have yoga/fitness gatherings on the grass. People in the neighborhood can play with their dogs at the dog park, BBQ for weekend birthday parties, holidays, or picnics, or attend farmers markets and food truck events. Diverse seating arrangements offer a variety of places to eat lunch for the community that works in the area. When formal events, such as marriage ceremonies are not in occurrence, the rose garden near the main entrance of ‘Light Box’ can be enjoyed. During the day, a coworking and coffee bar is active on the second floor of the existing building. On the lower floor, a restaurant serves people to the outside where outdoor dining activates the surrounding areas. At night, a movie or neighborhood performance can occur at ‘Light Box’, and inside, the second floor transforms into a lounge.
HISTORIC CONNECTION
Instead of creating something that would be the main attraction and potentially take away from the historic building, the idea of ‘Light box’ is to create a framework around the building. A new significance is given to the historic building by creating a box in the same proportion as the existing fire alarm building. The large scale of ‘Light box’ gives a new prominence and magnifies the buildings historical presence.
Inside, where the coworking and night lounge are located, (top right rendering on presentation board) the light blue colored room wrapping the existing fire alarm panels is a box inside of a box; a translucent box inside of the historic box, inside of ‘Light box’. The polycarbonate ‘box’ lights up at night, which showcases the fire alarm panels. The light blue translucent material is also used on the exterior stair enclosure and is a contemporary interpretation of the glass block to the art deco building.
Materials & Building Components
Looking at structures that would allow for relatively large spans with affordability in mind, ‘Light box’ is made of aluminum truss system components, similar to what are used at concert venues, wrapped in a translucent fabric, allowing it to glow at night. This makes it affordable and extremely quick to build and engineer. ‘Light box’ is lit up white from the inside at night and the historic building is lit in different colors, enhancing the presence of both in the neighborhood (as seen in the movie night rendering). This also allows for movies to be projected onto the surface at night. During the day when ‘Light box’ is open, a set of large format garage doors wrapped in translucent fabric roll up and act as awnings; making it more affordable than other custom design options. The existing historic building is rehabilitated and painted, restoring its historic character. The translucent box at the coworking and lounge on the second floor and the exterior stair enclosure, as previously discussed, is made from polycarbonate sheets that are backlit during the night resembling the existing glass block.
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AIA Central Valley Emerging Professionals got a chance to tour the historic Albert Winn Park building that once housed an elaborate fire alarm electronic system which connected to up to 550 publicly accessible fire alarm boxes. Built in 1937 and vacant for more than 12 years, the building and park are the subject of an AIACV design competition.
The American Institute of Architects, Central Valley Chapter, in partnership with the Midtown Association and the City of Sacramento, are looking for new ideas to successfully activate Albert Winn Park and the abandoned fire alarm building in its center. Dreyfuss + Blackford will have two teams competing in this unique endeavor.
The Brooklyn Bridge.
The brigde was initially designed by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, Waco Suspension Bridge in Waco, Texas, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio.
While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes he developed a tetanus infection which left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son Washington Roebling in charge of the project.
Washington Roebling also suffered a paralyzing injury as a result of decompression sickness shortly after the beginning of construction on January 3, 1870. This condition, first called "caisson disease" by the project physician Andrew Smith, afflicted many of the workers working within the caissons. After Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand, his wife Emily Warren Roebling stepped in and provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Under her husband's guidance, Emily studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years assisting Washington Roebling helping to supervise the bridge's construction.
When iron probes underneath the caisson found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the aggregate overlying the bedrock 30 feet (9 m) below it to be firm enough to support the tower base, and construction continued. Harbor pilot Joseph Henderson was called upon as an expert seaman to determine the height of the water span of the Brooklyn Bridge. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, delivered from Maine to New York by schooner.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display.
On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 m). The bridge cost $15.5 million to build and approximately 27 people died during its construction.
On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a rumor that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.
At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—50% longer than any previously built — and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".
At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh—by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty.
After the collapse in 2007 of the I-35W highway bridge in the city of Minneapolis, increased public attention has been brought to bear on the condition of bridges across the US, and it has been reported that the Brooklyn Bridge approach ramps received a rating of "poor" at its last inspection. According to a NYC Department of Transportation spokesman, "The poor rating it received does not mean it is unsafe. Poor means there are some components that have to be rehabilitated." A $725 million project to replace the approaches and repaint the bridge was scheduled to begin in 2009.
The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in the 1978 book The Great Bridge by David McCullough and Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first PBS documentary film ever made by Ken Burns. Burns drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with accompanying book.
The Brooklyn Bridge.
The brigde was initially designed by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, Waco Suspension Bridge in Waco, Texas, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio.
While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes he developed a tetanus infection which left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son Washington Roebling in charge of the project.
Washington Roebling also suffered a paralyzing injury as a result of decompression sickness shortly after the beginning of construction on January 3, 1870. This condition, first called "caisson disease" by the project physician Andrew Smith, afflicted many of the workers working within the caissons. After Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand, his wife Emily Warren Roebling stepped in and provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Under her husband's guidance, Emily studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years assisting Washington Roebling helping to supervise the bridge's construction.
When iron probes underneath the caisson found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the aggregate overlying the bedrock 30 feet (9 m) below it to be firm enough to support the tower base, and construction continued. Harbor pilot Joseph Henderson was called upon as an expert seaman to determine the height of the water span of the Brooklyn Bridge. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, delivered from Maine to New York by schooner.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display.
On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 m). The bridge cost $15.5 million to build and approximately 27 people died during its construction.
On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a rumor that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.
At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—50% longer than any previously built — and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".
At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh—by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty.
After the collapse in 2007 of the I-35W highway bridge in the city of Minneapolis, increased public attention has been brought to bear on the condition of bridges across the US, and it has been reported that the Brooklyn Bridge approach ramps received a rating of "poor" at its last inspection. According to a NYC Department of Transportation spokesman, "The poor rating it received does not mean it is unsafe. Poor means there are some components that have to be rehabilitated." A $725 million project to replace the approaches and repaint the bridge was scheduled to begin in 2009.
The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in the 1978 book The Great Bridge by David McCullough and Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first PBS documentary film ever made by Ken Burns. Burns drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with accompanying book.
Wright Bridge is located in Washington County, Pa. and crosses the North Fork of Pigeon Creek. The structure utilizes the Kingpost design and is 26 ffeet long and 13 feet 4 inches wide. The builder of the bridge is unknown, the owner is the County. It is open to vehicle traffic up to 15 tons.
The Wright Bridge has a tin-covered gable roof with vertical plank siding that is painted barn red inside and out. The deck, abutments, wigwalls and timber supports resting in the stream are also typical of other Wahington County covered bridges. It is located just a few miles west of the Kammerer exit off of Interstate 70. This is the most easily visible of all the covered bridges in Washington County. With the exception of two, all of the Kinposts in the truss system are sawed, indicating that the timbers from a previous bridge were used. While the original date of the construction of The Wright is estimated between 1875 and 1899, it was restored in 1999.,
Best View on Black Background
The Brooklyn Bridge.
The brigde was initially designed by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, Waco Suspension Bridge in Waco, Texas, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio.
While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes he developed a tetanus infection which left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son Washington Roebling in charge of the project.
Washington Roebling also suffered a paralyzing injury as a result of decompression sickness shortly after the beginning of construction on January 3, 1870. This condition, first called "caisson disease" by the project physician Andrew Smith, afflicted many of the workers working within the caissons. After Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand, his wife Emily Warren Roebling stepped in and provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Under her husband's guidance, Emily studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years assisting Washington Roebling helping to supervise the bridge's construction.
When iron probes underneath the caisson found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the aggregate overlying the bedrock 30 feet (9 m) below it to be firm enough to support the tower base, and construction continued. Harbor pilot Joseph Henderson was called upon as an expert seaman to determine the height of the water span of the Brooklyn Bridge. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, delivered from Maine to New York by schooner.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display.
On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 m). The bridge cost $15.5 million to build and approximately 27 people died during its construction.
On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a rumor that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.
At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—50% longer than any previously built — and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".
At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh—by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty.
After the collapse in 2007 of the I-35W highway bridge in the city of Minneapolis, increased public attention has been brought to bear on the condition of bridges across the US, and it has been reported that the Brooklyn Bridge approach ramps received a rating of "poor" at its last inspection. According to a NYC Department of Transportation spokesman, "The poor rating it received does not mean it is unsafe. Poor means there are some components that have to be rehabilitated." A $725 million project to replace the approaches and repaint the bridge was scheduled to begin in 2009.
The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in the 1978 book The Great Bridge by David McCullough and Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first PBS documentary film ever made by Ken Burns. Burns drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with accompanying book.
I saw these green plaques on King Street in King's Lynn. I took the plaques, then I took the building to go with it, I ignored the buildings without green plaques.
This is 7 - 9 King Street. A large 14th century Hall House stands behind a 15th century front range. It was a warehouse.
Listed as the Medieval Merchant's House.
Grade II* listed.
House. Late C14 hall house, altered C15 and considerably
since. L-plan, with hall range in the rear wing to north of
courtyard. Brick with stone dressings. Plain tiled and slate
roofs.
2-storey, 7-bay east facade to street of c1830. Yellow brick.
Sash windows with glazing bars and gauged skewback arches. In
third bay (from left) is a timber-framed passage to rear, the
front with a timber lintel under a brick relieving arch, the
rear with an arched, chamfered, C15 opening.
Present entrance to No.9 in bay to north of passageway:
panelled door in panelled reveals under a 6-vaned fanlight and
a round arch. Gabled roof with internal gable-end stacks.
Panelled door into No.7 opens from south-west end of
passageway.
Rear of front range is whitewashed over passage and to south.
Window over passage and narrow windows over C19 outshut light
No.7. Hall range remodelled C17 and C18 into a 2-storey, 5-bay
elevation. Central panelled door of late C17: six-panelled and
of plank construction inside; split overlight and gabled hood
on brackets. Fenestration of late C18 sashes with glazing bars
set within late C17 or early C18 flush frames. Stone jambs of
original entrance remain in junction of front and rear ranges,
formerly opening directly into west end of hall. Stone jambs
of C15 dais window remain either side of 2 ground-floor west
sashes. Gabled roof-line changes above these and is marked by
a gabled dormer and a late C16 ridge stack on a stepped
plinth. Attached to east end is a 2-storey, early C18 brick
and slate addition with its 4-bay facade to the west. Late C18
sashes with glazing bars set within early C18 flush frames.
Platband between storeys. Doorway to right under C20 sloping
hood. Hipped roof.
INTERIOR of No.9. Hall range is now 3 rooms at ground-floor
level. Hall dais window with moulded stone jambs of late C14
type: keeled wave, bowtell and filleted wave. Immediately left
is a cinquefoiled window with an ogee head and wave-moulded
jambs.
Large open fireplace at west end of this room is an insertion:
stone jambs and renewed lintel. Chamfered bridging beams and
rough-cut joists date from early C17 insertion of floor. Room
to west of hall with complete late C17 large-framed bolection
panelling and H-L hinges to door in south-east (to former
hall) and north-east (to C17 passageway and staircase)
corners. Panelled ante-room leads to ground-floor room of west
addition: large-framed panelling of c1730 and a shouldered
overmantel panel above inserted Greek key frieze.
Inserted C17 passage runs past N side of former hall, cut from
the former courtyard serving the south side of No.11, but
still leaving 2 small courtyards in situ. Staircase is at
north-west corner of passage: closed string, turned balusters,
square newels and moulded handrail. Panelled dado.
Front range to street with early C19 panelling and associated
details. Room over former hall has large-framed early C18
panelling. Rooms west of this now constitute a late C20 flat,
with corresponding details except for hollow chamfered jambs
of 2 late C14 windows in former gable wall. Roof structures
all replaced early C16.
Main front roof: common rafters, 2 tiers butt purlins, collars
on arched braces. 2 complete trusses survive, forming 3 bays,
the rest are too altered to classify. Hall range roof of
principals, collars, butt purlins and arched braces, some of
latter replaced by cranked braces. Collars and principals are
moulded. Inserted stacks interrupt truss system.
INTERIOR of No.7 to south of carriageway entirely late C19,
stripped out C20. An early example of the standard L-plan
house favoured in King's Lynn from the Middle Ages to c1600.
The lack of timber-framing is probably the result of
remodelling in the C15 and C16, and it should not be assumed
that this house is one of the earliest in Norfolk to be
entirely of brick and stone construction.
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
The Story of Abraham Series
Ten panels from a series of Brussels tapestries made from 1540 to 1543 depicting the scenes from the life of the Prophet Abraham, from Genesis, chapters 12-24, woven in the workshop of Willem Pannemaker, perhaps after designs by Pieter Cocke van Aelst. The scenes depicted are: the Departure of Abraham; the Return of Sarah; the Separation of Abraham and Lot; the Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek; God appears to Abraham; the Circumcision of Isaac and the Expulsion of Hagar; the Sacrifice of Isaac; the Purchase of the Field of Ephron; the Oath and Departure of Eliezer; and Eliezer and Rebekah at the Well.
Although it is not yet known if Henry VIII commissioned this set of ten tapestries, that it is the only known set of this series woven in gilt-thread, suggests that it is highly likely Henry was the patron, and that the Hampton Court set is the first weaving. Two other sets are recorded, one in Madrid and one in Vienna, neither of which combine gilt-thread with silk and wool. Henry’s tapestry collection was extensive, exceeded only in number by Louis XIV of France at the end of the seventeenth century. Henry owned a number of other tapestry series woven with gilt metal-wrapped thread, none of which survive. One hundred years after Henry’s death, after the regicide of Charles I, the Royal Collection was valued, and large quantities sold off. The Abraham series, however, was not sold, but reserved for Cromwell’s use. The series was valued at the astonishing sum of £8260, far in excess of any other work (or collection of works) of art, and almost double the value of the next most valued tapestry series, the Caesar set, valued at £5022. Henry may have conceived of this series and its Old Testament Patriarchal subject matter as particularly powerful in the context of his own political situation: following the Break with Rome in 1530, the establishment of the Church of England and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry may have used the Story of Abraham, and the Covenant with God as a means of legitimizing his own direct God-given rule. Furthermore, Henry’s desperate attempts to provide a male heir and to secure the Tudor dynasty are hinted at in The Circumcision of Isaac, in which God’s covenant with Abraham is continued through his son Isaac. The subsequent use of the tapestries in England is also significant: the set remained at Hampton Court, probably in The Great Hall, but were brought to Westminster Abbey for later Tudor coronations, possibly for Elizabeth I’s coronation. They may have been used at early Stuart coronations, as many Tudor rituals were continued under the Stuarts. They were certainly used to splendid effect at the coronation of James II in 1685 when they were hung about the Theatre and Shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. During William III’s reign, some of the Abraham tapestries furnished the new King’s apartments: that tapestries some one hundred and fifty years old, not a newly commissioned set, were used to furnish the King’s Bedchamber, gives a strong sense of the importance and magnificence that these tapestries imparted.
Two other high-quality weavings of the same design survive, one in the Spanish royal collection and the other in the former Habsburg collection in Vienna. Neither includes gold thread.
•Provenance: Probably commissioned by Henry VIII circa 1540, and delivered autumn 1543 or early 1544, Hampton Court Palace. Recorded in 1547 inventory taken after the death of Henry VIII. They were displayed during the solemnization of the peace with Spain in December 1530, the celebration of St. George’s Feast in April 1635, and the receptions of the Moroccan and of the Spanish ambassadors in 1637 and 1649 respectively. Recorded in the 1649 inventory of Charles I’s Goods when they were valued at £10 per yard or £8260. Pieces from the set were hung in Westminster Abbey for the coronations of Charles II and James II. Mentioned in the 1695 inventory taken after Queen Mary II’s death. In 1742 tapestries from the set were recorded in the Audience Chamber and Drawing Room.
•People Involved:
oCreator(s):
Attributed to: Pieter Coeck van Aelst (1502-50) (designer); Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547) (commissioners); Wilhelm Pannemaker (maker)
Attributed to the Circle of: Bernard van Orley (c. 1488-1541/2) (designer); Brussels (place of production); Flemish (nationality)
oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)
•Physical Properties:
oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool and silk tapestry with gilt metal-wrapped thread
wool; silk (textile); gold thread
tapestry; woven
oMeasurements: 488.0 × 854.0 cm (whole object)
•References:
oAlternative Title(s): Oath and Departure of Eliezer
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders
Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.
•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.
•People Involved:
oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)
oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)
oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor
•Physical Properties:
oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry
wool
tapestry; woven
oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)
•References:
oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
Merrickville, United Counties of Leeds and Grenville, Ontario.
Built in 1860, The Baldachin Inn was once the largest department store between Chicago and Montreal. It was built by Harry MacLean, and Harry MacLean's Pub commemorates his name.
The Baldachin Ballroom uses a unique building style, the King Post Truss system, only found in one other building (still in use in Chicago) which eliminates the need for ceiling supports. This means the 6000 sq. ft. ballroom is completely open, with seating for 200.
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders
Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.
•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.
•People Involved:
oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)
oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)
oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor
•Physical Properties:
oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry
wool
tapestry; woven
oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)
•References:
oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel
The Brooklyn Bridge.
The brigde was initially designed by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, Waco Suspension Bridge in Waco, Texas, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio.
While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes he developed a tetanus infection which left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son Washington Roebling in charge of the project.
Washington Roebling also suffered a paralyzing injury as a result of decompression sickness shortly after the beginning of construction on January 3, 1870. This condition, first called "caisson disease" by the project physician Andrew Smith, afflicted many of the workers working within the caissons. After Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand, his wife Emily Warren Roebling stepped in and provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Under her husband's guidance, Emily studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years assisting Washington Roebling helping to supervise the bridge's construction.
When iron probes underneath the caisson found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the aggregate overlying the bedrock 30 feet (9 m) below it to be firm enough to support the tower base, and construction continued. Harbor pilot Joseph Henderson was called upon as an expert seaman to determine the height of the water span of the Brooklyn Bridge. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, delivered from Maine to New York by schooner.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display.
On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 m). The bridge cost $15.5 million to build and approximately 27 people died during its construction.
On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a rumor that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.
At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—50% longer than any previously built — and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".
At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh—by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty.
After the collapse in 2007 of the I-35W highway bridge in the city of Minneapolis, increased public attention has been brought to bear on the condition of bridges across the US, and it has been reported that the Brooklyn Bridge approach ramps received a rating of "poor" at its last inspection. According to a NYC Department of Transportation spokesman, "The poor rating it received does not mean it is unsafe. Poor means there are some components that have to be rehabilitated." A $725 million project to replace the approaches and repaint the bridge was scheduled to begin in 2009.
The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in the 1978 book The Great Bridge by David McCullough and Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first PBS documentary film ever made by Ken Burns. Burns drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with accompanying book.
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders
Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.
•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.
•People Involved:
oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)
oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)
oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor
•Physical Properties:
oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry
wool
tapestry; woven
oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)
•References:
oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel
The Johnson Creek Covered Bridge is located in rural southeastern Robertson County, and is currently closed to vehicular traffic. The bridge is important as the only known example of Robert Smith's truss system in Kentucky and the only covered bridge extant known to have been built by Jacob N. Bower (1819-1906).
The bridge was constructed in 1874. It is now one of less than 20 that remain of what were once four hundred covered bridges in Kentucky. Around 1912, Jacob Bower's son, Louis, added an arch on each side to support increased traffic using the bridge. The bridge is 114 feet long and 16 feet wide, according to Louis Bower, grandson of Jacob Bower and a local covered bridge builder.
It is located on what is now a bypass named Covered Bridge Road, off Kentucky Route 1029 (Old Blue Lick Road), about 6.4 miles southeast of Mount Olivet by road. It crosses Johnson Creek, a tributary to the Licking River.
Information from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Creek_Covered_Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge.
The brigde was initially designed by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, Waco Suspension Bridge in Waco, Texas, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio.
While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes he developed a tetanus infection which left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son Washington Roebling in charge of the project.
Washington Roebling also suffered a paralyzing injury as a result of decompression sickness shortly after the beginning of construction on January 3, 1870. This condition, first called "caisson disease" by the project physician Andrew Smith, afflicted many of the workers working within the caissons. After Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand, his wife Emily Warren Roebling stepped in and provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Under her husband's guidance, Emily studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years assisting Washington Roebling helping to supervise the bridge's construction.
When iron probes underneath the caisson found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the aggregate overlying the bedrock 30 feet (9 m) below it to be firm enough to support the tower base, and construction continued. Harbor pilot Joseph Henderson was called upon as an expert seaman to determine the height of the water span of the Brooklyn Bridge. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, delivered from Maine to New York by schooner.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display.
On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 m). The bridge cost $15.5 million to build and approximately 27 people died during its construction.
On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a rumor that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.
At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—50% longer than any previously built — and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".
At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh—by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty.
After the collapse in 2007 of the I-35W highway bridge in the city of Minneapolis, increased public attention has been brought to bear on the condition of bridges across the US, and it has been reported that the Brooklyn Bridge approach ramps received a rating of "poor" at its last inspection. According to a NYC Department of Transportation spokesman, "The poor rating it received does not mean it is unsafe. Poor means there are some components that have to be rehabilitated." A $725 million project to replace the approaches and repaint the bridge was scheduled to begin in 2009.
The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in the 1978 book The Great Bridge by David McCullough and Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first PBS documentary film ever made by Ken Burns. Burns drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with accompanying book.
The gusset plates here are pentagonal shaped pieces of steel used to support the trusses of the Palmer Tennis House. Gusset plates are integral civil engineering elements that help reinforce the integrity of structural beams particularly where the members intersect in three or more places. Plates are welded and bolted to add strength.
The truss system of the Palmer Tennis House is really a work of art and reflective of Edgar Palmer's own training as an engineer at Princeton.
Children enrolled in the Jay Heritage Center's architecture camp learn about the importance of elements like these in the construction of buildings and bridges.
Palmer's legacy also lives on in Princeton's James Hayes-Edgar Palmer Prize in Engineering: "This award was established in 1968 by Zilph H. Palmer in memory of James Hayes, Class of 1895, and Edgar Palmer, Class of 1903, and is awarded to the senior or seniors who have manifested excellent scholarship, a marked capacity for leadership, and promise of creative achievement in engineering. "
www.princeton.edu/engineering/news/archive/?id=3120
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The Brooklyn Bridge.
The brigde was initially designed by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, Waco Suspension Bridge in Waco, Texas, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio.
While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes he developed a tetanus infection which left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son Washington Roebling in charge of the project.
Washington Roebling also suffered a paralyzing injury as a result of decompression sickness shortly after the beginning of construction on January 3, 1870. This condition, first called "caisson disease" by the project physician Andrew Smith, afflicted many of the workers working within the caissons. After Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand, his wife Emily Warren Roebling stepped in and provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Under her husband's guidance, Emily studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years assisting Washington Roebling helping to supervise the bridge's construction.
When iron probes underneath the caisson found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the aggregate overlying the bedrock 30 feet (9 m) below it to be firm enough to support the tower base, and construction continued. Harbor pilot Joseph Henderson was called upon as an expert seaman to determine the height of the water span of the Brooklyn Bridge. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, delivered from Maine to New York by schooner.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display.
On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 m). The bridge cost $15.5 million to build and approximately 27 people died during its construction.
On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a rumor that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.
At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—50% longer than any previously built — and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".
At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh—by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty.
After the collapse in 2007 of the I-35W highway bridge in the city of Minneapolis, increased public attention has been brought to bear on the condition of bridges across the US, and it has been reported that the Brooklyn Bridge approach ramps received a rating of "poor" at its last inspection. According to a NYC Department of Transportation spokesman, "The poor rating it received does not mean it is unsafe. Poor means there are some components that have to be rehabilitated." A $725 million project to replace the approaches and repaint the bridge was scheduled to begin in 2009.
The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in the 1978 book The Great Bridge by David McCullough and Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first PBS documentary film ever made by Ken Burns. Burns drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with accompanying book.
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
The Story of Abraham Series
Ten panels from a series of Brussels tapestries made from 1540 to 1543 depicting the scenes from the life of the Prophet Abraham, from Genesis, chapters 12-24, woven in the workshop of Willem Pannemaker, perhaps after designs by Pieter Cocke van Aelst. The scenes depicted are: the Departure of Abraham; the Return of Sarah; the Separation of Abraham and Lot; the Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek; God appears to Abraham; the Circumcision of Isaac and the Expulsion of Hagar; the Sacrifice of Isaac; the Purchase of the Field of Ephron; the Oath and Departure of Eliezer; and Eliezer and Rebekah at the Well.
Although it is not yet known if Henry VIII commissioned this set of ten tapestries, that it is the only known set of this series woven in gilt-thread, suggests that it is highly likely Henry was the patron, and that the Hampton Court set is the first weaving. Two other sets are recorded, one in Madrid and one in Vienna, neither of which combine gilt-thread with silk and wool. Henry’s tapestry collection was extensive, exceeded only in number by Louis XIV of France at the end of the seventeenth century. Henry owned a number of other tapestry series woven with gilt metal-wrapped thread, none of which survive. One hundred years after Henry’s death, after the regicide of Charles I, the Royal Collection was valued, and large quantities sold off. The Abraham series, however, was not sold, but reserved for Cromwell’s use. The series was valued at the astonishing sum of £8260, far in excess of any other work (or collection of works) of art, and almost double the value of the next most valued tapestry series, the Caesar set, valued at £5022. Henry may have conceived of this series and its Old Testament Patriarchal subject matter as particularly powerful in the context of his own political situation: following the Break with Rome in 1530, the establishment of the Church of England and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry may have used the Story of Abraham, and the Covenant with God as a means of legitimizing his own direct God-given rule. Furthermore, Henry’s desperate attempts to provide a male heir and to secure the Tudor dynasty are hinted at in The Circumcision of Isaac, in which God’s covenant with Abraham is continued through his son Isaac. The subsequent use of the tapestries in England is also significant: the set remained at Hampton Court, probably in The Great Hall, but were brought to Westminster Abbey for later Tudor coronations, possibly for Elizabeth I’s coronation. They may have been used at early Stuart coronations, as many Tudor rituals were continued under the Stuarts. They were certainly used to splendid effect at the coronation of James II in 1685 when they were hung about the Theatre and Shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. During William III’s reign, some of the Abraham tapestries furnished the new King’s apartments: that tapestries some one hundred and fifty years old, not a newly commissioned set, were used to furnish the King’s Bedchamber, gives a strong sense of the importance and magnificence that these tapestries imparted.
Two other high-quality weavings of the same design survive, one in the Spanish royal collection and the other in the former Habsburg collection in Vienna. Neither includes gold thread.
•Provenance: Probably commissioned by Henry VIII circa 1540, and delivered autumn 1543 or early 1544, Hampton Court Palace. Recorded in 1547 inventory taken after the death of Henry VIII. They were displayed during the solemnization of the peace with Spain in December 1530, the celebration of St. George’s Feast in April 1635, and the receptions of the Moroccan and of the Spanish ambassadors in 1637 and 1649 respectively. Recorded in the 1649 inventory of Charles I’s Goods when they were valued at £10 per yard or £8260. Pieces from the set were hung in Westminster Abbey for the coronations of Charles II and James II. Mentioned in the 1695 inventory taken after Queen Mary II’s death. In 1742 tapestries from the set were recorded in the Audience Chamber and Drawing Room.
•People Involved:
oCreator(s):
Attributed to: Pieter Coeck van Aelst (1502-50) (designer); Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547) (commissioners); Wilhelm Pannemaker (maker)
Attributed to the Circle of: Bernard van Orley (c. 1488-1541/2) (designer); Brussels (place of production); Flemish (nationality)
oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)
•Physical Properties:
oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool and silk tapestry with gilt metal-wrapped thread
wool; silk (textile); gold thread
tapestry; woven
oMeasurements: 482.0 × 793.0 cm (whole object)
•References:
oAlternative Title(s): The Sacrifice of Isaac
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders
Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.
•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.
•People Involved:
oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)
oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)
oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor
•Physical Properties:
oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry
wool
tapestry; woven
oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)
•References:
oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders
Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.
•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.
•People Involved:
oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)
oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)
oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor
•Physical Properties:
oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry
wool
tapestry; woven
oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)
•References:
oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel
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Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
One of the most picturesque state parks in Georgia, Watson Mill Bridge contains the longest covered bridge in the state, spanning 229 feet across the South Fork River. Built in 1885 by Washington (W.W.) King, son of freed slave and famous covered-bridge builder Horace King, the bridge is supported by a town lattice truss system held firmly together with wooden pins. At one time, Georgia had more than 200 covered bridges; today, less than 20 remain.
The park is an ideal spot for an afternoon picnic or overnight stay in the quiet campground. Hiking, biking and horseback riding trails allow visitors to enjoy the thick forest and river. During summer, visitors often play in the cool river shoals just below the bridge. Watson Mill Bridge has become a popular destination for horse owners who have their own camping area near stalls.
www.gastateparks.org/WatsonMillBridge/
Photo taken 1/1/2014.
85 West 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC.
Historic Place:
The historic place, a familiar local landmark, is the large, red, wood industrial building at 85 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver, built in or around 1930 and located on city-owned landin South East False Creek.
Heritage Value:
The Vancouver Salt Company Building has heritage value for representing the secondary food-processing industry and the diversification of the local economy to meet the needs of the fishery; for its architectural and structural qualities; as a rare intact survivor of the industrial buildings that once dominated South East False Creek (SEFC); and as a neighbourhood landmark. SEFC was, through much of the twentieth century, a beehive of industrial activity. Most industries located here for access to water, rail, and road transportation. Heavy industrial uses, such as sawmills and steel fabrication, prevailed. The subject site was used from the early 1900s for gravel storage.
The Vancouver Salt Co. operation was important technologically for the means of
extraction, for using False Creek to transport goods, for its contributions to other
industries, and for the way in which ownership changes illustrate patterns of international trade and corporate acquisition. Unrefined salt was shipped to Vancouver from the San Francisco Bay Area, where it had been recovered from brine by solar evaporation. This unusual technique was traditional to the Bay Area, originating with the Ohlone Indians and continued by the Spanish missionaries. The Vancouver-bound salt was extracted by the Leslie Salt Refining Co. of Newark, California (acquired in 1978 by Cargill Inc.), which owned the Vancouver Salt Co. The operation changed to Arden Vancouver Salt Co. Ltd. in 1970 and was later acquired by Domtar Ltd. By the late 1980s the building was used for paper recycling: first by Belkin Paper Stock Ltd. and then by Paperboard Industries. Raw salt was unloaded at Burrard Inlet and brought by scow to False Creek, where the Vancouver Salt Co. ‘semi-refined’ it by washing, drying, grinding, and sifting it into a coarse product fit for human consumption. The original market was as a preservative for the fishery, particularly the area’s Asian-Canadian fish-packers. Subsequent uses included other kinds of food-packing, tanneries, cold-storage plants, and highway ice removal. By 1950 rail and then trucks replaced boats for receiving and shipping the salt, reflecting changes brought about by the development of wheeled transport.
The building has heritage value as a pragmatic and attractive response to the needs of the salt operation and the site. It was built about 1930, squeezed between two lumber operations and mostly on a City-owned water lot, with only the southwest corner situated above the historic high water line. The original structure, a block about 90 by 145 feet, is supported on piles. A complex roof truss system directs the loads onto columns in the lateral walls and down the centre, creating a large open space. A raised monitor roof has a clerestory to admit light and air. The expansion of the building to the north in 1954-55 (Wright Engineers Ltd.) speaks to the growing demand for salt and the evolving refinery technology. New equipment was accommodated in part by building a roof over the existing 35-foot-deep apron at the rear, the former loading dock. The gable-roofed eastern portion held four large brine tanks, and the shed-roofed western part became a dry storage shed. A new hopper and conveyor were installed by the 1st Avenue loading dock, since the raw salt now arrived by truck. The conveyor may have necessitated raising the roof, which would date the tall silo-like cap at the front to this time. Minor alterations were made in 1970 for the Arden Vancouver Salt Co. Ltd. (Richard E. Cole, Engineer). The replacement of the salt-processing machinery with paper-shredding equipment in 1987 reflects the growing importance of the recycling industry. Belkin Paper Stock Ltd. also clad the sides with galvanized steel and cut new doors in the north elevation (De Guriby Ltd., Engineers, and Amundson Construction Co. Ltd). The building stands empty today, displaying physical evidence of its evolution and its uses.
Character-defining Elements:
- Broad building with a medium-sloped roof and gable at the front (south)
- Monitor roof, with a clerestory containing a row of 15-pane windows and cedar
ventilation louvres
- Taller, silo-like, gable-roofed feature at front of monitor
- Small-paned windows on the front elevation
- Loading dock at the front, protected from the weather by a shed roof
- Wood stud walls, covered externally with diagonal sheathing and horizontal
finished siding
-
- Large, open interior space, interrupted only by a row of columns down the centre
- Elaborate roof truss and knee braces, composed of wood members with metal
fastenings and hardware
- Two salt hoppers along the side wall (inside the building)
- Profile of main gable and monitor roof seen from the rear (north)
- Location on the axis of Manitoba Street
- Wetland beneath building
- City of Vancouver
The bridge in Fallasburg was built in 1871 by Jared N. Brazee and Joseph H. Walker.
They purchased timber from a mill in Greenville and floated the logs down the Flat River to Fallasburg.
The Fallasburg Bridge is one of four bridges to be built with the patented Brown truss system. All these bridges happen to be in Michigan. Along with the Fallasburg Bridge, the White's Bridge and the Ada Bridge are still standing today; all built with the Brown truss design.
Great Hall
Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.
Henry VIII’s Great Hall
The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.
William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.
In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.
Historic Tourists to the Great Hall
“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”
—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)
“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”
—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)
In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.
The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.
The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.
When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.
A History of the Great Hall
The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.
The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.
A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.
In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.
Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.
In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.
The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.
Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.
When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.
In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.
On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.
A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.
With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.
The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.
Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders
Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.
•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.
•People Involved:
oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)
oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)
oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor
•Physical Properties:
oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry
wool
tapestry; woven
oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)
•References:
oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel
View of the truss system being installed on the roof the Cannon Building's west wing. The protective roof covering system will surround the existing roof during the demolition of the fifth floor.
Phase 1 of the Cannon Renewal Project began in January 2017 and is scheduled to be complete in November 2018. The entire west side of the building, from the basement to the fifth floor, is closed. Work includes demolishing and rebuilding the fifth floor, conserving the exterior stonework and rehabilitating the individual office suites.
Full project details at www.aoc.gov/cannon.
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Reference: 464734