Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [535]
Visitors of means clearly had no problem finding accommodations in New York City. What they needed—as did less affluent arrivals and even long time residents—was orientation. The cozy republican town had metamorphosed into a bewildering metropolis, and citizens and strangers alike sought ways to grasp its scale and meaning.
THE PIGEON PERSPECTIVE
In 1845-46, under the direction of E. Porter Belden, 150 artists, craftsmen, sculptors and mechanics collaborated on building a scale model of New York City. It represented Manhattan from 32nd Street down to the Battery and threw in part of Brooklyn for good measure. The model, twenty feet long by twenty-four feet wide, included two hundred thousand miniature buildings, two and a half million windows and doors, and 150,000 teensy chimneys. It was surmounted by a fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy festooned with a hundred oil paintings depicting the “leading business establishments and places of note in the city.” This wonder, exhibited at the Minerva Room (406 Broadway, between Walker and Canal), became a principal sight for visitors and residents.
Belden went on to publish New York: Past, Present, and Future (1849), one of a large number of prideful, self-congratulatory guidebooks that appeared during the boom years. New York was delighted by its emerging metropolitan status and not shy about trumpeting its virtues. Addressing a national, indeed an international, audience, the volumes—many of which were underwritten by the new monster hotels or prepared for visitors to the Crystal Palace—proclaimed the city’s civic grandeur, its commercial entrepots, its palaces of pleasure, its charitable and educational institutions. In Bunyunesque prose they boasted of the sheer scale of it all: their city had the greatest concentration of wealth and energy and people in America, it was the largest market in America, it had “become so enriched that she may call Ohio her kitchen-garden, Michigan her pastures, and Indiana, Illinois and Iowa her harvest fields.”
In addition to encomiums, the guidebooks offered solid information: where to stay and eat; how to get around the city (with rail and omnibus timetables appended). Beyond providing pathways through the city’s labyrinthine corridors, the books helped readers grasp the city in its entirety by including “panoramic” representations of it as seen (or imagined) from elevated vantage points. C. S. Francis, the publisher who brought out Audubon’s Birds, offered in his New Guide to the Cities of New-York and Brooklyn (1853) a view from atop the recently completed Trinity Church.
Such representations broke with traditional ways of seeing the city. Manhattan had customarily been presented as it appeared from the opposite bank of an adjacent river. In colonial days, the waterways—New York’s commercial lifelines—featured as prominently as the land; in the early nineteenth century, the ensemble was often framed with a pastoral foreground scene in the manner of Thomas Cole. The new panoramic views, however, planted themselves squarely inside the city, generally atop one of its many steeples, presenting a pigeon’s-eye view of the bustling streets below.
In the 1850s the pigeons took wing. Inspired, perhaps, by experiences at the Latting Observatory, where visitors could use telescopes to inspect the island and its surrounds, artists began imagining the city from ever higher perspectives. An 1853 electrotyped woodcut, Bird’s Eye View of the City of New York from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, encompassed the town as a whole. And in John Bachmann’s spectacular fish-eye view, New York & Environs (1859), the Empire City seemed to stretch to the ends of the earth.
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Manhattan, Ink
From a pigeon’s point of view, the most obvious sign of New York’s metropolitan transformation was the bulky physicality of its railroads, steamboats, factories, warehouses,