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Map of the Week 12-19-2011:Bird's Eye View of New York City
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Map of the Week 12-19-2011:Bird's Eye View of New York City
Bird’s Eye View of New York by John Bachmann, 1866
In the 18th and 19th centuries, these bird’s eye views of locations were very popular. They combined the virtues of a map with a 3-D representation of the landscape, and more often than not were not true bird’s eye views, but oblique views, shown on an angle. They are called, variously, bird's eye views, panoramic maps, or perspective maps. The web site http://www.bigmapblog.com/ has many of these, and all are worth looking at. In the past, nearly every large city, and many much smaller towns, had their streets and landmarks memorialized in a bird's eye view map. Some of them are amazingly detailed, showing every ship in the harbor and every window in buildings. They were the Google Street Views of their day.
This one, of NYC, features mainly Manhattan, as usual. However, this is OK, since historically speaking, NYC was not “Greater New York City” until 1898, and this map dates from 1866, prior to consolidation. Basically, NYC WAS Manhattan, back then. Brooklyn was a separate city altogether, and Queens was a collection of small villages and farming communities. The Bronx and Manhattan were two parts of the same county up until then. The five boroughs did not join up to become what we now think of as NYC until 1898. Coincidentally, NYC was consolidated the same year as the US starting building its overseas empire in earnest, acquiring, Guam, Puerto Rico, The Philippines, and Hawai’i. Hmm, I never made the connection before: I guess NYC was just jumping on the expansionist bandwagon when it incorporated the other boroughs!
In any event, you can see that when this view was drawn showing the city as it was in 1866, there is nothing higher than the church steeples. A few years later, with the advent of the Otis elevator, and the steel frame construction enabling “skyscrapers,” all that would change forever.
Details from Bachmann's map - boats in the harbor, above, and City Hall, below. Amazing!
Detail, Rockerfeller Center, Panoramic Map of NYC, by Herman Bollman, 1962
For a brief history and examples of United States and Canadian panoramic maps, 1847-1929, see the Library of Congress American Memory Project site at:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/pmhtml/panhome.html