The most impressive aspect of the sculptures was their size. One iguanodon stretched 30 feet long. During the model’s construction, 20 scientists dragged a table inside its hollow interior to ring in New Year’s Eve 1853. They dined on imitation pterodactyl wings and sang a song penned just for the occasion:

The jolly old beast
Is not deceased.
There’s life in him again.
ROAR!

Hawkins added ancient crocodiles and mammals to the park as well, situating the figures on fake islands amid artificial pools for a simulacrum of nature. But the dinosaurs were the exhibition’s star attraction. On the first day the park opened, 40,000 people streamed in to see them, paying £1 each—around $100 today. Visitors were awed. In fact, people were so mesmerized that some waded out to the islands and stole the dinosaurs’ teeth—yanking them right out of their mouths. Not even the Crystal Palace could compete with the sublime appeal of these terrible lizards.

The Crystal Palace dinosaur installation helped advance a new model for scientific institutions. Rather than house the private repositories of gentleman scientists or train tradesmen on the latest technologies, civic leaders realized these institutions could also serve the wider public by entertaining the masses while simultaneously educating them. The idea resonated far beyond England, too. Around the world, cities grew jealous of London’s menagerie—none more so than New York.

In the mid-1800s, New York needed what we would now call a rebranding. The city had a reputation as a crass, money-grubbing Gomorrah, lacking the refinement and culture found in places like Philadelphia and Boston. So in the 1860s, civic leaders decided to buy their way to refinement and build a grand dinosaur museum in their new Central Park. They dubbed it the Paleozoic Museum, a glass and cast-iron building with a huge arched roof in the spirit of the Crystal Palace.

In a coup, the city secured Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins himself to make the dinosaurs. As with the London park, Hawkins planned to set the sculptures on islands amid lush foliage. But unlike in London, the Paleozoic Museum would showcase North American beasts only. Officials requested “huge fishes, enormous birds,” giant sloths, mastodons and other “ponderous uncouth mammals,” and, of course, lots of dinosaurs.

Hawkins arrived in the United States in 1868 and set about studying fossils in Philadelphia and Washington for inspiration. He was especially taken with what is now called Dryptosaurus—a ferocious carnivore that stretched 25 feet long. He envisioned a scene with a Dryptosaurus attacking and killing a duck-billed dinosaur as the museum’s centerpiece attraction. Two other Dryptosaurus figures would be devouring a second victim in the background.

Plans proceeded swiftly. City officials hired crews to start digging the museum’s foundations near Central Park’s southwest corner, and Hawkins rented a workshop nearby to begin crafting the dinosaurs he was convinced would be his masterpiece.

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Less than a year later, the museum project was dead, and every bit of art that Hawkins had made for it lay in ruins.

The standard story of the Paleozoic Museum’s demise pins the blame on the notorious William Magear Tweed, better known as “Boss” Tweed. Tweed was something of an uncouth mammal himself, a rotund machine politician who by some accounts was the most crooked public official in New York history. He and his cronies stole at least $30 million from city coffers over his career, and possibly as much as $200 million—roughly $5 billion today.

Tweed amassed this fortune by never letting an opportunity for graft pass him by, and the Central Park museum was allegedly no exception. Its construction budget was just $300,000, a rounding error compared to what he had stolen over the years. He nevertheless demanded a cut and was furious when construction crews refused.

In a deft bureaucratic move, Tweed consolidated several New York park boards into a single two-man team staffed by his lackeys. The lackeys immediately halted construction. When the crews still refused to pay kickbacks, Tweed reportedly ordered the museum’s foundations demolished.

This turn of events shocked Hawkins. New York had a reputation as rough-and-tumble, but this was a whole new level of hardball. He kept working on his dinosaur statues anyway, hoping to sell them to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. But the more he thought about Tweed’s bullying, the angrier he supposedly got. So in March 1871, he attended a meeting of a natural history society and denounced Tweed for his attack on art, science, and the civic good.

It was a courageous stand—and a huge mistake. Tweed reportedly didn’t take kindly to the ridicule and engineered his revenge. In May 1871, goons broke into Hawkins’s studio and smashed his partly complete sculptures with sledgehammers. To make sure Hawkins got the message, they broke in again a few weeks later and smashed his molds.

According to different accounts, the remains were either buried in Central Park or dumped in a lake. With the museum dead and his figures in ruins, a disgusted Hawkins fled to Princeton. For Hawkins, the experience confirmed New York’s crass and uncouth reputation.

At some point that story became enshrined in the lore of paleontology, and no wonder. It’s got crime, money, art, dinosaurs, and more. Some commentators also assumed Tweed’s religious beliefs made him deplore the very idea of “pre-Adamite” animals as blasphemous. Emotionally, too, the tale is infused with a keen sense of loss: while the Crystal Palace dinosaurs can still be seen in London today, not a single beast from Hawkins’s hands stalks Central Park.

There’s just one problem with the tale: Boss Tweed was almost certainly innocent.

In 2023 two researchers in England, Victoria Coules and Michael Benton, published a paper outlining their investigation of the meetings of the Board of Commissioners for Central Park in the early 1870s. They found strong evidence that the villain who orchestrated the vandalism was not Tweed, but board treasurer Henry Hilton.

Hilton was a former judge who possessed iffy financial skills and iffier morals. Most notoriously, he became embroiled in a scandal involving the estate of his patron, Alexander Stewart. Stewart was a department-store mogul who had amassed a fortune estimated at $50 million, more than a billion dollars today. When Stewart died in 1876, his wife and Hilton became co-executors of the estate—at which point Hilton proceeded to blow every penny. He spent lavishly, made terrible investments, and left Stewart’s wife bankrupt. In sum, he was the kind of dirtbag who screwed widows out of their inheritance.

Hilton was also arrogant and combative. Once, he thought a bronze statue of Eve in Central Park would look better painted white, possibly to mimic classic Italian marble. So he ordered the sculptor to whitewash the statue. When the sculptor told him to kick rocks, an enraged Hilton had the statue taken down and painted anyway, damaging the work. He did something similar with a whale skeleton donated to the park commission. Hilton again thought it would look better painted white—more like the bleached skeletons common on beaches. This alteration ruined the bones.

As Coules and Benton note, Hilton and Hawkins, who could be equally headstrong, likely clashed over several matters, including the anatomy and presentation of Hawkins’s dinosaur sculptures. Hilton’s impression of paleontology, which he disparaged as too speculative, likely added fuel to their feud. At one point he suggested channeling the funds for Hawkins’s art to a zoo instead. Moreover, Hilton and a few other bigwigs had dreams of opening their own natural history museum, one they could control. The Paleozoic Museum, naturally, would have been competition.

All in all, Hilton clearly had reasons to target Hawkins. It’s not hard to imagine him, in his blunt way, paying a few thugs to break into Hawkins’s studio and smash the sculptures and molds. In fact, it wasn’t really a secret at the time: Coules and Benton found it spelled out right in the park board records, which state that the vandalism took place under the “direction of the Treasurer.” What’s more, the whole city knew Hilton was responsible; the fact was widely reported.

The historians found other interesting details. In ordering the hit on the sculptures, Hilton ensured that the city could not sell them elsewhere. In fact, the director of the Smithsonian Institution later said he would have paid top dollar for them. Instead, New York never recouped a cent of the $12,000 it had already invested. Some treasurer Henry Hilton proved to be.

Considering that Tweed placed Hilton on the Central Park board, it’s possible he was manipulating things behind the scenes, using Hilton as a puppet. But Coules and Benton think not for several reasons.

Despite Tweed’s deep corruption, he had a track record of supporting enrichment programs for working-class people—the Paleozoic Museum’s raison d’être. Tweed was also embroiled in several other scandals in 1871 and would in fact be arrested late that year on corruption charges; he had far bigger things to worry about than some dinosaur statues. Finally, although Hilton and Tweed formed periodic alliances, Hilton mostly worked independently and didn’t need the big boss’s backing. He had been an operator in New York before Tweed’s rise and continued after Tweed’s downfall.

So, given all this, why did scientific lore end up blaming Tweed for the museum’s downfall for so long? Probably, in part, because Boss Tweed is a great villain. Meanwhile, who’s ever heard of Henry Hilton? Tweed is the exemplar of New York political corruption, so it resonated with what people already knew: in their minds, it stood to reason that Tweed would be involved somehow. (Indeed, who knows how many other misdeeds have been mistakenly pinned on him?) Once Tweed’s involvement became a supposed fact, the tale became very hard to dislodge, because it felt true. And despite Coules and Benton’s authoritative takedown, only time will tell whether the myth will die.

Incidentally, that rival museum Hilton and his associates envisioned did eventually get built. It’s now called the American Museum of Natural History, and it still sits in Central Park, one of the best-known museums in the world and not terribly far from where the Paleozoic Museum would have stood—if not for a couple of goons and a petty, belligerent bureaucrat who always knew best.