A collection of indelible photographs, maps and ‘intimate guides” from 1807 to 1940 went beyond extolling the virtues of the city.
A collection of indelible photographs, maps and ‘intimate guides” from 1807 to 1940 went beyond extolling the virtues of the city.
A collection of indelible photographs, maps and ‘intimate guides” from 1807 to 1940 went beyond extolling the virtues of the city.
In 1670, Daniel Denton, the son of a Presbyterian minister transplanted from England, painted a pristine portrait of newly named New York as a “terrestrial Canaan” ripe for manifest destiny.
Tourists and settlers in the New World would be safe, he wrote confidently in what is believed to be the first English-language guidebook to the city, because “a Divine Hand makes way for them by removing or cutting off the Indians, either by wars one with the other, or by some raging mortal disease.”
By the 19th century, though, as a new exhibition titled “Wish You Were Here” at the Grolier Club in Midtown Manhattan suggests, guidebooks no longer included disturbing endorsements of wanton Native Americangenocide. In addition to extolling the virtues of the city and its environs, these new Baedeker-style guides featured tips on how to survive among the natives, new New Yorkers and fellow travelers.
Ranging from Samuel Latham Mitchill’s “The Picture of New York” (1807) to a 1940 map of average apartment rents by block (the luxe category is $100-a-month and up), the exhibition includes E. Idell Zeisloft’s “The New Metropolis,” which celebrates the consolidation in 1898 of what became the five boroughs, as well as Moses King’s comprehensive “Handbooks” and charming narratives from the Works Progress Administration’s.
The original German travel publisher, Karl Baedeker, never produced a guide to New York, but the exhibition and an illustrated accompanying catalog include “view books” of indelible photographs and guides devoted to specific buildings, neighborhoods and cuisines.
“Guidebooks are an unparalleled window on the development of the city,” Mark D. Tomasko writes in the accompanying catalog. Tomasko, a historian and researcher who lives in Brooklyn, lent most of the 130 items in the exhibition.