Visualizing 19th-Century New York Digital Publication

The City of New York demonstrates Manhattan’s, and Brooklyn’s, considerable development in the twenty years since Currier & Ives’ 1856 bird’s-eye view. Perhaps the most obvious addition, rather fancifully depicted here before its 1883 opening, is the Great East River Suspension Bridge (as Currier & Ives called the Brooklyn Bridge), which connected an increasingly urban Brooklyn to the island of Manhattan. The captions highlight many more buildings than had existed in 1856, and green spaces within the city have also become more defined. At the tip of Manhattan, Battery Park appears more manicured than its former incarnation, and the recently completed Central Park draws attention to uptown expansion.

— Kirstin Purtich