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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections & Reading Rooms > Print Collection > MOVING UPTOWN

Section X (Including panoramas, houses, Brooklyn Bridge)

Panorama of New York and Vicinity. 1866

Julius Bien (American, b. Germany, 1826–1909)
after John Bachman(n) (American, active 1850–77)
Color lithograph
The Phelps Stokes Collection

High above a baseball game at Elysian Fields, Hoboken (where the first recorded baseball match took place in 1846), John Bachman(n) records Manhattan from the southern edge of Central Park down past the Battery to Staten Island. The house on the right, in the foreground, is Stevens Castle.

By 1864, half the city's population lived north of 14th Street. By 1867, the edge of the city had pushed as far north as 59th Street, with brick row houses on the crosstown streets from Third Avenue to the East River, and four- and five-story tenements lining First, Second, and Third avenues. Developers were building rows of brownstones and frame houses along the side streets in the West 40s and into the West 50s. Fifth Avenue was the best-known address in the country, though many of the "old guard" took a dim view of the opulent, but not always tasteful, mansions of the nouveau riche, who were sometimes referred to as "the Avenoodles" and "the Shoddy Aristocracy." After the Civil War, the earlier hesitation about the future of Fifth Avenue vanished, and speculators and the great families purchased land well ahead of the city's edge. Though prices were high, homes were in such demand that construction along Fifth Avenue was filling up five, sometimes even ten blocks ahead of the rest of the city. Like Broadway earlier in the century, Fifth Avenue now led the urban procession up Manhattan.

The economy was flourishing. One-third of the nation's exports and more than two-thirds of the imports passed through the city. The city was the financial center of the nation, and the main offices of most of the fast-growing corporations were situated in New York. With vast reserves of cheap labor, provided by the ever-growing immigrant population, the city was an important manufacturing center as well.


Printing-House Square. New York. 1865

Endicott and Company (American lithographic firm, 1852–86)
Color lithograph
Eno Collection

In the 1850s, New York was already the printing center of the United States, and by the next decade the city had 51 newspaper offices, 17 book publishers, and 81 job offices. The intersection of Park Row (on the right) and Nassau Street around 1860 earned the name "Printing-House Square," since many of the newspaper and publishing offices had congregated in that neighborhood. Among them were the Times (on the site of the Brick Presbyterian Church, which sold for $270,000 and then was demolished), the New York Tribune (the publishers of this print, Baker & Godwin, had offices in the Tribune building), the Globe and Commercial Advertiser, and the Recorder. South of the Times building were the offices of the World and the Scientific American. The area also was occupied by paper manufacturers, advertising agencies, photographers, printers, and printmakers, including Currier and Ives at 152 Nassau Street.


Proposed Arcade Railway. Under Broadway, View Near Wall Street. Probably 1870

Ferdinand Mayer and Sons (American lithographic company, 1854–about 1877)
after John M. August Will (American, b. Germany, 1834–1910)
Color lithograph
The Phelps Stokes Collection

The view of Printing-House Square includes Third Avenue horse-drawn street railways, one of several transportation systems developed in the course of the 19th century. The first railroad, the New York & Harlem Railroad (initially drawn by horses, later powered by steam above 23rd Street), was opened in 1832 along Fourth Avenue. Eventually running from Prince Street to Harlem, it spurred the growth of the East Side (the fare to Yorkville in 1834, 12 1/2 cents). In the 1850s, a number of stage companies converted their lines and reincorporated as street railways along Sixth, Second, Third, Eighth, and Ninth avenues; by the 1860s, First and Seventh avenues had their own rail routes, and between 1863 and 1885 the avenues were linked by crosstown lines, which also served passengers arriving and departing the Brooklyn and New Jersey ferries. The first elevated line, along Greenwich Street and Ninth Avenue, was short-lived (1867–70), but was reorganized as the New York Elevated Railroad Company in 1872, and the success of this line from South Ferry to 61st Street led to the formation of other elevated lines. By the end of the 1880s, Second, Sixth, Third, and Ninth avenues had their own "El" lines.

There were also proposals to cope with street traffic by going underground, including this unrealized project for an Arcade Railway, which was authorized four times by the New York State Legislature, but vetoed each time by the governor. The project had another opponent as well: Boss Tweed, who was concerned this plan would end the kickbacks he received from the surface transportation companies. The first subway construction was undertaken only after the turn of the century.


The Bowery Looking South from Cooper Union. 1864

Anonymous
Oil on canvas
The Phelps Stokes Collection

The Bowery, extending from Chatham Square to Cooper Square, had been on the edge of the city around 1800, but as the population moved north, the Bowery was for a time home to the middle class and the well-to-do, and the street, with its taverns, oyster bars, and minstrel theatres, rivaled Broadway as a place to go for entertainment. The Bowery Theater, which opened in 1826, was the largest auditorium in the country. As the neighborhood declined in the 1840s, the Bowery became the shopping and entertainment street for the nearby boardinghouse and tenement district, home to growing numbers of immigrants, and after the Civil War it was a place to go for cheap entertainment and nickel museums. The elevated line built over it in 1878 sealed the area's fate, and the Bowery became synonymous with the drunks and derelicts that frequented the neighborhood's cheap lodging houses and missions.



Something Old and Something New

Between 1842 and 1866, D. T. Valentine's Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York commissioned artists to depict historical and contemporary New York. Although some of the reconstructions of 17th- and 18th-century Manhattan are reasonably faithful copies of earlier prints and drawings, others are pure fabrications. The most interesting prints are contemporary records of the 19th-century city. Many of these views show wonderful mixtures of old and new architecture, typical of the fast-growing city as it engulfed older farms, country residences, and taverns. Among them are several lithographs of the Murray Hill district, near the present site of The New York Public Library.


Old Residences on Murray Hill. The Caster Estate Betw. 35.th & 36.th St's. and Lexington Avs. 1865

Major & Knapp (American lithographic firm, 1864–1870s)
Color lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York
Print Collection

Murray Hill became the fashionable place to live in the 1850s. Not only was the land elevated, with abundant sunlight and good drainage, but there were very few extant taverns and old houses, like the Caster Estate, to impede growth. By the end of the century, many prominent families, including the Belmonts, the Rhinelanders, the Tiffanys, the Havemeyers, the Phelpses, the Delanos, and the Morgans had mansions in Murray Hill.


Murray Hill Old Country Inn (Croton Cottage) Cor. 5th Av. & 40.th St. 1865

Major & Knapp (American lithographic firm, 1864–1870s)
Color lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York
Print Collection

Though the Murray Hill neighborhood had changed dramatically around it, this country inn survived into the 1860s on the site of what is now the Mid-Manhattan Library.


Murray Hill the Keyser Estate. Cor. 4.th (Park Av. & 40.th St.)

Major & Knapp (American lithographic firm, 1864–1870s)
Color lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manuals for the Corporation of the City of New York
Print Collection

Park Avenue was not always a fashionable street. The New York & Harlem Railroad hauled trains along Park to the Centre Street terminal, but by the early 1850s, the tracks were sunken below street level, and between 34th and 38th streets, a 40-foot-wide landscaped mall covered the center of the street. The Herald wrote, "when the plots thus enclosed are enhanced with shrubs and flowers . . . they cannot fail to vastly enhance the general appearance of the locality."


View of 2.D Ave. Looking Up from 42D. St. –1861

Sarony, Major & Knapp (American lithographic firm, 1857–67)
Tinted lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York
Emmet Collection

Hills and rocky outcroppings had to be cleared and leveled as the city moved uptown, a formidable task as this view of 42nd Street looking north suggests. At this date, occasional frame houses and groups of row houses dotted the landscape, but within a few years, after the Civil War, the East Side east of Madison Avenue would develop into a working-class and middle-class neighborhood. Tenements lining First, Second, and Third avenues pushed northward beyond 42nd Street into the Upper East Side and eventually to Harlem. Red brick and brownstone row houses for middle-class families gradually filled the side streets from the 60s to the 80s. Already by 1858 a horse-drawn trolley was traveling up Second Avenue to 122nd Street, permitting residents to enjoy suburban living and lower housing costs, and to commute to work downtown.


View of the Brevoort Estate and Vicinity, Between 54 & 55 Sts. Near 1st. Ave. About 1850

Major & Knapp (American lithographic firm, 1864–1870s)
Colored lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York, 1866
Emmet Collection

The Upper East Side was rapidly losing the landmarks of its rural past as small estates along the East River were sold off, and country houses were torn down or converted into taverns or boardinghouses, before ultimately being replaced by row houses or tenements. The Brevoort Estate shared this fate. By 1805 it had become "Cato's" (Cato Alexander's Tavern), and eventually was demolished around 1853. By 1861, a writer for Harper's Monthly surveying 57th Street from a boat in the East River commented that the "streets are fast finding their inexorable way . . . to the river in this neighborhood, as they had done below." The shot tower in the left background, seen in Fay's Views in New-York and Its Environs, survived into the 20th century.


Grand Union Hotel, Opposite the Grand Central Depot, Fourth Avenue, 41st and 42nd Sts., New York. 1874

Augustus Fay (American, b. about 1824, active 1848–1870s)
Wood engraving
Eno Collection

In 1869, Cornelius Vanderbilt consolidated the New York & Harlem Railroad with the New York & Hudson River Railroad, and at 42nd Street between Lexington and Madison avenues constructed Grand Central Terminal, which was completed in 1871. Never successful, this building was constantly being rearranged and enlarged. Soon after the depot was built, Vanderbilt began to lower the tracks in a deep cut, which was roofed over, and later enclosed in a tunnel that began at 96th Street. The 1871 terminal was demolished in 1910, replaced in 1913 by the present Grand Central Station.


Broadway & 42nd Street. About 1899

Charles Magnus (American lithographic firm, 1854–77)
Lithograph
Print Collection

This view of Broadway at 42nd Street around 1899 was published by Charles Magnus, who produced urban views of cities across the United States as letterheads on notepaper. By the turn of the century, New York's theatre and entertainment district had moved north past Madison Square, up Sixth Avenue to Herald Square, and on into the 40s; many of the newspapers were soon to leave Printing-House Square and follow suit.

Delmonico's Restaurant offers an interesting indicator of changing fashion in neighborhoods. Founded in 1827 at the corner of South William and Beaver streets, the restaurant, after the fire of 1845, opened a new restaurant, now with a hotel at 25 Broadway. By 1862, Delmonico's had moved uptown to Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, and by 1867 had moved again, to West 26th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. In 1898, Delmonico's relocated once again, now to 44th Street.


Central Park Entrance at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. 1886

Charles Magnus (American lithographic firm, about 1854–1880s)
Colored lithograph, from 150 Views of New York and Environs
Eno Collection

The old Plaza Hotel, on the site of the present structure (built in 1907), offered spectacular views of Central Park. Across the street on the northeast corner of 57th Street was the Mary Mason Jones mansion. Tbe model for Mrs. Manson Mingott in The House of Mirth, written by her niece, Edith Wharton, Mrs. Jones had built her home on 57th and Fifth Avenue in 1869 when this was north of the city's fashionable limits. As Mrs. Mingott, she was portrayed by Wharton, "sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries, the one-time saloons, the wooden greenhouses in ragged gardens, and the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the advance of residences as stately as her own. . . ." By the 1880s, Fifth Avenue had been invaded by fancy shops, jewelry stores, hotels, and boardinghouses almost up to Central Park. The only truly residential portion of Fifth Avenue began at about 50th Street with a parade of Vanderbilt family mansions stretching from 51st to 58th streets.


Old Dutch Farmhouse, Cor. 7.th Ave. & 50th. St. 1865

Major & Knapp (American lithographic firm, 1864–1870s)
Color lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York
Print Collection

The West Side rapidly filled up into the West 50s during the 1840s and 1850s; even Tenth and Eleventh avenues past 42nd Street were respectable addresses. For a time, excitement over Central Park encouraged some New Yorkers to believe that the West 50s around Seventh and Eighth avenues might replace Fifth Avenue as the fashionable address. By the 1860s, Seventh Avenue was "very wide and well paved" and the site of "a number of fine edifices . . . in course of erection, under the pressure of Central Park excitement." The Herald also observed that the West Side had "a superior class of residents than those on the East Side of town," the not-so-hidden implication being that more foreigners lived on the East Side, while West Side residents were more apt to be native-born.


Summer Residence of Fernando Wood, Mayor, 1855, –56, –57, –58. Broadway and 77th. Street, N.Y. 1857

Anonymous
Tinted lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York
Emmet Collection

Poor public transportation hampered the growth of the Upper West Side. A single car traveled back and forth between 59th and 84th streets along Eighth Avenue, and a stage rolled down Bloomingdale Road only once every hour. Summer estates, like Fernando Wood's, would not be threatened by the city's growth for almost another 30 years, not until after the opening of Riverside Drive and the Ninth Avenue El.

Fernando Wood, Mayor of New York in 1855–57 and again in 1859–61, had a checkered reputation. Convicted of defrauding investors during the Gold Rush, as mayor he nevertheless proposed innovative city programs, though few of these were realized. A role model for "Boss" Tweed, he defended slavery in the South for economic and racist reasons, and had proposed New York become a "free city" in 1861. Popular opinion quickly turned against him after the attack on Fort Sumter, and the pro-Southern Wood was defeated in the mayoral election of December 1861.


Clendening Mansion Betw. Bloomingdale Road & 8th. Ave. 90th. St. 1863

Sarony, Major & Knapp (American lithographic firm, 1857–67)
Color lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manual
Print Collection

Until the mid-1880s there was still considerable open land on the Upper West Side, which was dotted with shantytowns, old country homes, farms, and taverns. When an opulent apartment building was built on Eighth Avenue (now Central Park West) between 72nd and 73rd streets in 1881, wags commenting on its remoteness said it might as well have been in the Dakotas –and the name "Dakota" stuck! Even the opening of Riverside Drive and the Ninth Avenue El in 1880 did not immediately fulfill the promise of the glorious future that many had predicted for the Upper West Side. Only in the mid-1880s did the building boom begin in earnest.

Bloomingdale Road was renamed the Boulevard in 1868, and only in 1899 was the street officially named Broadway.


Harlem. From the Old Fort in the Central Park. 1869

Anonymous
Color lithograph, from D. T. Valentine's Manuals of the Corporation of the City of New York
Emmet Collection

Even though Harlem was about three miles above the northern edge of the city proper, public transportation (the New York & Harlem Railroad) connected Harlem to downtown in 1837, and by the late 1850s horse-drawn trolleys reached Harlem via both Second and Third avenues. The Evening Post (1852) considered that Harlem "to a much greater extent . . . than . . . any other place on this island" was the best location for "the working and laboring classes wishing to settle themselves in New York at moderate rents." The area developed much like the East 70s and Yorkville, where tenements lined the avenues.


City Hall and Vicinity New York City. Probably 1874

Currier and Ives (American lithographic firm, 1857–1907)
Colored lithograph
Eno Collection

New York has consistently grown more quickly than anticipated; when City Hall was built in 1811, the city economized by facing only the south, east, and west walls with white marble, assuming that the common brownstone on the north wall "would be out of sight for years to come." However, by 1820 the city had already surrounded the building.

In 1873, a depression slowed construction and even real estate values declined, but within a few years prosperity returned, and all available downtown space was in demand for offices, shops, and restaurants. Architects started to build up –six and seven stories high –when elevators became the norm.


The Great East River Bridge. 1872

Currier and Ives (American lithographic firm, 1857–1907)
Colored lithograph Eno Collection

Considered the "eighth wonder of the world" at the time of its completion in 1883, Brooklyn Bridge connected Manhattan to Brooklyn with an open span of 1595 feet 5 inches, for a time the longest in the world. It cost its designer, John Augustus Roebling, his life, and robbed his son, Washington Roebling, of his health, but this monument has inspired generations of writers and artists as a symbol of America. The critic Lewis Mumford wrote that the bridge had become "a source of joy and inspiration to the artist, perhaps the most completely satisfying structure of any kind that [has] appeared in America." This view was published long before the bridge's actual completion, in 1872, the year that Washington Roebling became a victim of the bends while working on the western caisson. He continued to supervise the project from his room on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, with the help of a telescope and his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, who communicated his instructions to his crew.


View of Broadway, Looking North from Just Below Fulton Street. 1875

Currier and Ives (American lithographic firm, 1857–1907)
Colored lithograph
Eno Collection

Looking north from Fulton Street, we see Broadway on the left, Park Row on the right. The trees marking the edge of City Hall Park are visible to the right of the Post Office, built at the southern end of the park in 1875, the same year that the city's population passed the one million mark. St. Paul's Chapel and the Astor House (the white building beyond St. Paul's) are surrounded by a changing neighborhood. Just completed was George Post's 230-foot-tall Western Union Telegraph building at the corner of Broadway and Dey (1873–75, on the far left); topping that building by some 30 feet was Richard Morris Hunt's Tribune building (1874) at 260 feet (the tower visible on the right, partially hidden by an American flag), on the corner of Nassau and Spruce. The traffic, offering no evidence of any rules of the road, includes a wide variety of vehicles found on New York City streets, including horse-drawn street railways, omnibuses, private carriages, and commercial wagons. The hurtling fire engine is preceded by a fireman, apparently giving an alarm and clearing a path. The firemen, now professional civil servants, wear identifiable uniforms, as does the policeman in the foreground. Only in 1850 were the New York police fitted with uniforms.


The New York Stock Exchange Building. 1882

Charles Hart (American, active 1840–90s)
after Hughson Hawley (American, b. England, 1850–1936)
Color lithograph
Eno Collection

In the 1860s, Wall Street was known for the "greatest gambling in the Republic." The stock market prospered so well that the Stock Exchange building at 10–12 Broad Street, completed in 1865, was enlarged in 1870, in 1881, and again in 1887. Even then the board room was not adequate, and this building was demolished in 1901 and replaced with the present-day Stock Exchange Building, which opened on the same site in 1903.

As the wholesale drygoods trade which once had filled Broad and Pearl streets left for Park Place and later for the lofts of present-day Soho, the pressing demand was for downtown office space to accommodate lawyers, brokers, and corporations. Some of the last remnants of 18th-century New York were sacrificed for new office buildings: the Old Middle Dutch Church, which had been used as the Post Office, was purchased in 1881 by the Mutual Life Insurance Company for $650,000, torn down, and replaced by an office building. The 18th-century Kennedy mansion at No. 1 Broadway, by 1848 a hotel, was bought in 1881 by Cyrus W. Field, who demolished it and put up the Washington Building on that site.


Maiden Lane, New York Jewelry Centre of the World. About 1885

J. J. Fogerty (publisher, active about 1885–86)
Color lithograph
Eno Collection

As early as 1795 there was a small jewelry district on Maiden Lane. Nearly 100 years later, Maiden Lane, seen from Broadway, is crowded with six- and seven-story buildings, most of them accommodating the jewelry trade. While the busy street is filled with omnibuses, carriages, a United States mail wagon, and even a circus band wagon, visible overhead is one of the many new inventions which were facilitating business –telegraph wires. By 1880, utility poles on Broadway near Trinity Church had 15 horizontal arms, each with over a dozen wires for telephone, telegraph, and electricity. The tangle was not only unsightly, it was also dangerous, and in 1884 the city passed a law requiring all wires to be buried underground. The first conduits were dug in 1886.


The Sky Line of New York. 1896

Charles Graham (American, active about 1879–1905)
Color lithograph, supplement to the Journal, N.Y.
Eno Collection

When Charles Graham's view of New York was published, the new term used in the title, "sky line," caught on immediately. The following year, Montgomery Schuyler wrote in Harper's Weekly that though the tall new buildings, which gave New York its distinctive silhouette, were not individually distinguished, "it is in aggregation that the immense impressiveness lies. It is not an architectural vision, but it does, most tremendously, 'look like business!'"

With the development of the steel skeleton and the passenger elevator, buildings could grow upward, taking full advantage of increasingly valuable downtown property. By 1875 the city already had several ten-story buildings, including the Western Union building on Broadway and Dey and the Tribune building on Nassau and Spruce. A cluster of tall buildings grew up around City Hall in the 1880s, and at the end of that decade the Tower Building on 50 Broadway won the distinction of introducing full steel skeleton, or skyscraper, construction to the city. By the 1890s, the word "skyscraper" came into common usage, as the first generation of steel skeleton buildings sprang up downtown: Manhattan Life Building (1893–95) at 66 Broadway, American Surety Building (1894–96) at 100 Broadway, Bowling Green Offices (1895–98), Empire Building (1897–98), south of Trinity at Broadway and Rector, and the Park Row Building (1896–99), which set the record at 30 stories.


Wall Street in 1899

Julius F. Gayler (American [architect], active late 1890s–1930s)
Watercolor
Print Collection, gift of the artist

Trinity Church was one of the few buildings in the Wall Street area that had not changed by the end of the century. Though its spire had dominated the downtown, it soon would be dwarfed by other buildings. One contemporary commented that Trinity and the adjacent old graveyard seemed to stare down into Wall Street, "and offer a bitter commentary upon the struggles and anxieties of the money kings."