opened to the public New Year's Day, 1896, and was an immediate sensation. It was huge. Gleaming blue-white walls three feet thick surrounded an ice skating rink, restaurants, ballrooms, a merry-go-round, and a toboggan slide. Thousands of tourists came to Leadville to see the frozen castle. Special trains brought visitors up the mountains of Colorado, and word spread rapidly around the country. The colossal structure was built on a site roughly five acres in size, on the west side of Harrison Avenue, using almost 5 tons of ice. Boiling water was poured over this, which quickly froze, thus strengthening the walls even further. The Ice Palace remained open for only three months, and it was not a financial success. An early spring thaw ensured that the structure would not last but a short time. Because of the fact it did not pull in much money, the Leadville city council decided not to rebuild the following winter. Periodically, there has been a resurgence of interest in building another Ice Palace, but nothing has ever come of it. The original site has since been built up with houses. There have been modern developments in ice construction, including the now widespread use of snice as a mortar-alternative, instead of the more simple, but less reliable, use of water alone. In popular culture In the 1920 short story "The Ice Palace" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the protagonist, Sally Carrol, visits a recreation of the 1886-1887 St. Paul ice palace in the early 20th century. In the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, villain Gustav Graves has built a massive ice palace in Iceland for a demonstration to the world media. He later melts it with a solar beam from his "Icarus" satellite. In the 2013 animated Disney film Frozen, Queen Elsa builds herself an ice palace using her ice powers. It is later partially destroyed after she is captured by Prince Hans' men. It reappears in the short sequel, Frozen Fever and the film's sequel, Frozen II. See also Ice hotel Palacio de Sal – Spanish for "palace of salt", it is a hotel built of salt blocks Notes Buildings and structures made of snow or ice Palaces Water ice