Visualizing 19th-Century New York Digital Publication

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Thomas Hogan

“Up Among the Nineties”

From Harper’s Weekly [August 11, 1868], p. 520

1868

Woodcut 

Closed: 16 1/8 × 11 1/2 in. (40.8 × 28.4 cm)

Library, Bard Graduate Center

Ice cream offered rich and poor alike a common respite from the brutal heat wave that felled New Yorkers in July of 1868, “a July week of hot days and suffocating nights” to which the title of Hogan’s image and the accompanying article refer. However, Hogan’s scene and the article it illustrates reveal the profound class contrasts as to where that ice cream was consumed—between the “fashionable” Broadway group in an “elegant saloon” and a “ragged band” of “Bowery waifs,” who “do not deign to lunch on Broadway.” Striking juxtapositions of social types were common in the mid-century illustrated press, helping astute Harper’s Weekly readers to decode class difference and navigate the urban landscape.

Andrew Gardner + Virginia Fister