Visualizing 19th-Century New York Digital Publication

Nineteenth-century street views of New York used social typing to represent the diversity of classes and cultures in the great metropolis. In this woodcut, a beggar and a walking advertisement man mingle with fashionable ladies and gentlemen on Broadway. The epicenter of fashionable society in mid-nineteenth century New York, Broadway was the place to see and be seen. According to the article that accompanied this image: “How the ranks and antagonisms of life jostle each other on that crowded paves! Saints and sinners, mendicants and millionaires, priests and poets, courtesans and chiffoniers, burglars and bootblacks, move side-by-side in the multiform throng.”

— Kelsey Brow