Visualizing 19th-Century New York Digital Publication

This fish-eye view by John Bachman is based on an imagined perspective high above the city, a radical break with Bachmann’s earlier bird’s-eye views. The fish-eye distortion makes New York appear at the center of the world. Labels around the perimeter indicate areas that were being rapidly incorporated into the increasingly metropolitan Empire City. Bachmann’s image echoes a description that appeared in a history of the city published in 1880: “A radius of from twenty to thirty miles from the City Hall has become almost a continuous city, and is virtually New York.”

– Hannah Wirta Kinney