From 1849, “New York from the steeple of St. Paul’s Church, looking east, south and west.” In other words, looking into the heart of the downtown commercial district from its northern edge.
My first thought in looking at this picture was that in 1849, before industrial technology changed the built environment – even cast iron was rare that early – New York could almost pass for a quaint little town. But that’s a statement of my bias looking back from 2024 and simply not accurate. Look how tightly the buildings are jammed in together. There’s no open space visible except a few rear yards (and the little we can see of the churchyard of St. Paul’s) and it’s clear that a lot of buildings don’t have rear yards. To use an old cliché, there’s a forest of masts visible on the East River (left of the spire of Trinity Church, down Broadway in the right side of the voew) and the foot of the Hudson (right of Trinity).
One stat shows how wrong the “quaint” idea is: a year after this view, the 1850 census showed New York (then Manhattan only) as having a population of 516,000. A city of half a million people can be many things, but it’s not a little town.
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