The silver crash of 1893 left Leadville with empty mines, idle men and a great deal of winter. In the autumn of 1895 a local real estate man proposed a cure he had read about: an ice palace and winter carnival like the ones Montreal and St. Paul had staged to draw visitors in the cold months. Leadville, at more than 10,000 feet, had plenty of cold.
Building it
The idea caught on quickly and then foundered on money, until a group of townspeople met at the Vendome Hotel and put a respected mine manager, Tingley S. Wood, in charge. Wood raised funds from the mines, banks and saloons, and on November 7, 1895, incorporated the Leadville Crystal Carnival Association. He brought in Charles E. Joy, a St. Paul architect who had designed ice palaces there, and the Leadville Ice Company took the contract for the ice.
The site was five acres on a rise between West Seventh and Eighth streets, partly cleared with dynamite. Carpenters raised a frame of timber, meant to stand through the year so the palace could be rebuilt each winter, and crews faced it with blocks of ice, shaped and smoothed until the whole building seemed to be made of it. It went up in about five weeks. Octagonal towers rose some ninety feet. Inside were a skating rink with columns of ice five feet thick down its sides, a dining room and halls for exhibits and dances.
The carnival
On January 1, 1896, a parade of officials, miners and firemen opened the Crystal Carnival. Adults paid fifty cents, children a quarter. The railroads ran excursions, a thousand people came up from Denver in the first week, and every day brought another parade, another contest on the ice, another delegation from somewhere. Promoters claimed a quarter of a million visitors over the season.
The weather did not cooperate. March was warm, the sun and wind went to work on the walls, and attendance fell off. The last official ceremony was held on March 28, 1896. Skaters used the rink into the spring while the ice around them slumped and ran, and later that year the remaining timber was torn down. The palace had cost at least $35,000, perhaps much more, and its investors lost money. Wood said afterward that it should be a one-time thing, and it was.
What it was for
The carnival bought Leadville one good winter and no recovery. That June the town's miners went on strike over wages, a bitter walkout that ran into 1897. The palace survives in photographs, a scale model and the name of Ice Palace Park, about a quarter mile from where it stood, and the town holds a Crystal Carnival weekend each March. Nobody has tried to build another.