After
Samuel Sarphati had visited
The Great Exhibition, he decided to found the
Vereeniging voor Volksvlijt (Association for Popular Diligence) with the goal of erecting a building similar to the Crystal Palace in London. In 1853, he petitioned the municipality. His new Palace was to be part of an extensive plan of expansion of the city, which also included construction on the banks of the
Amstel and in what is now
De Pijp. In 1855, municipal authorities agreed to Sarphati's plan. A prize was offered for building designs in 1856, but not awarded to any contestant. The Association then contacted Outshoorn. On September 7, 1859, construction was officially started in the presence of king
William III. The building was opened on August 16, 1864. Starting 1865, it hosted weekly concerts by its own Palace Orchestra, directed by
Johannes Meinardus Coenen until 1891, then by
Richard Hol. The famous French constructor of organs,
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, put in place a large concert organ in 1875. This organ was first played by
Alexandre Guilmant on October 26, 1875. It was later played by
Charles-Marie Widor (1886),
Louis Vierne (1895) and
Camille Saint-Saëns (1897). The Palace's regular organist, from 1879, was the Belgian
Jean-Baptiste de Pauw. It soon turned out that exploitation of the building as an exhibition hall was infeasible. The Palace, instead, turned into an entertainment center, and part of its garden was sold off. The ground was to house a luxury shopping gallery designed by
Adolf Leonard van Gendt in 1881–1883. Under the directorate of Johannes George de Groot, his operatic troupe performed in the Palace, until it went bankrupt in 1895. The Palace orchestra and organ player were laid off in the same year and the Palace gradually lost its position as a cultural center. The placing of an organ in the
Concertgebouw drew the crowd away from the Cavaillé-Coll organ, which was sold to the
Haarlem municipality (sponsored by the business men
Adriaan Stoop and
Julius Carl Bunge). In 1922 it was moved to the
Philharmonie Haarlem, where it still resides. == Destruction by fire ==