The real culprit behind the 1871 vandalism of the Paleozoic Museum in Central Park
Enlarge / Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' studio at the Central Park Arsenal in New York City, with models of extinct animals. (credit: Public domain)
The original plans for New York City's Central Park included a Paleozoic Museum at 63rd Street and Central Park West, which would have displayed life-size concrete models of dinosaurs placed in carefully designed dioramas. Those plans were dashed in 1871 when vandals broke into the workshop of the museum's designer, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and smashed the models with sledgehammers, burying the rubble in the southwestern corner of the park.
The traditional take in paleontology circles is that the man behind the destruction was William "Boss" Tweed, who pretty much ruled the city's Democratic Party political machine at the time with his cronies at Tammany Hall. But a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association identifies a different culprit: a lawyer and businessman named Henry Hilton, a member of the Tammany Hall contingent who championed plans for what would become the American Museum of Natural History.
Co-authors Victoria Coules and Michael Benton of the University of Bristol in England also found no evidence of a religious motivation for the destruction, i.e., opposition to the then-nascent field of paleontology and its associated implications for evolutionary theory, which were deemed "blasphemous" by some religious leaders. Rather, it seems to have been one of many "crazy actions" by Hilton. "We find that Hilton exhibited an eccentric and destructive approach to cultural artifacts, and a remarkable ability to destroy everything he touched, including the huge fortune of the department store tycoon Alexander Stewart," Coules and Benton wrote. "Hilton was not only bad but also mad."