The whole thing began with a Jewish physician named Samuel Sarphati, who walked through Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace in London in 1851 and could not stop thinking about it. Sarphati was already a public-health crusader in Amsterdam, the kind of restless reformer who pestered city councils about clean water, bread quality, and proper schools. When he came home, he founded the Vereeniging voor Volksvlijt, the Association for Popular Diligence, with one goal: Amsterdam needed a building that would announce, in glass and iron, that the Netherlands belonged in the industrial age. He petitioned the municipality in 1853. He got approval in 1855. He outlasted a failed design competition. On September 7, 1859, with King William III standing in the autumn cold, the first stones went into the ground. The building opened on August 16, 1864.

Cornelis Outshoorn's design rose 64 meters at its central dome, a transparent vault held up by an iron frame so slender it seemed to defy gravity. Inside, the hall held machinery exhibits, orchid shows, balloon ascents, weekly concerts. The Palace Orchestra played here every week from 1865, and in 1875 the French organ-builder Aristide Cavaille-Coll installed a concert organ that ranked among Europe's finest. Alexandre Guilmant opened it on October 26 of that year. Over the following decades, Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne, and Camille Saint-Saens all sat at its keyboard. The Belgian Jean-Baptiste de Pauw was the resident organist from 1879. For a stretch of years, if you wanted to hear the great organ music of the late nineteenth century in the Netherlands, the Paleis voor Volksvlijt was the room to be in.

It never quite paid for itself. Exhibitions did not draw the crowds Sarphati had imagined, and the building drifted from industrial showcase to all-purpose entertainment hall. Part of the garden was carved off for a luxury shopping arcade, designed by Adolf Leonard van Gendt and built between 1881 and 1883, which wrapped along Sarphatistraat in glass-roofed elegance. When the Concertgebouw opened across town in 1888 with its own grand organ, audiences quietly migrated. The operatic company that performed here went bankrupt in 1895. The orchestra was dismissed. The Cavaille-Coll organ was sold to Haarlem, where two wealthy patrons named Adriaan Stoop and Julius Carl Bunge sponsored the move, and it still plays today at the Philharmonie Haarlem. By the 1920s, the Palace was a glamorous shell hosting circuses and trade shows.

Around midnight on April 17, 1929, fire broke out in the main hall. The cause was never definitively settled. What is certain is that an iron-and-glass building stuffed with dry timber flooring and decades of accumulated stage equipment goes up the way a torch does. Firefighters could only contain the edges. The arcade survived; the main palace did not. The site sat as ruined ground for years. The novelist Gerard Reve lived in one of the arcade apartments in the 1950s, writing in rooms that looked out onto absence. In 1960 the arcade itself came down to make way for the headquarters of De Nederlandsche Bank, the central bank that now occupies the Frederiksplein. Stand on the square today and you can trace the old footprint in the paving stones if you know where to look.