Manhattan.  VIELE, Egbert L. [New York, 1865]  Topographical Map of the City of New York,… 18 x 62 ½ inches. Lithograph with original hand color; flattened & mounted on rice paper, light discoloration & a few reinforcements at some folds, else excellent.  With pamphlet (13 pp) describing the map and its purpose in original green cloth binding with gold lettering, water staining in text, with five ownership signatures inside front cover.                           

One of the most remarkable maps ever produced of Manhattan: a large-scale (1000 feet=1 inch) work providing a virtual cartographic x-ray of Manhattan Island, recreating on paper its pre-development topography, contours, and hydrology. “It delineates the original watercourses, streams (underground and surface), meadows, marshes, ponds, ditches, canals, and the shoreline before landfill expanded the city’s boundaries” (Augustyn/ Cohen).  So accurate was the map in achieving its purpose that it is used to this day by construction companies and public utilities to ascertain where water might still be flowing underground.  Martin Febesh (cited in Augustyn/ Cohen), whose company laid the foundation of the Citicorp Center, said of the map that he had found it “…accurate within feet.”       

As suggested by the map’s title, its original purpose was not related to construction but to an effort to control contagious disease in the city.  Viele argued that the filling in of the city’s watercourses resulted in hindering their natural drainage, thus creating areas of excessive moisture that promoted disease.  His call for the city to allow the free flow of natural watercourses obviously went unheeded.

The map, which was many years in preparation, grew from Viele’s surveys of the lands of Central Park; he was the park’s first engineer-in-chief.  The lower half of the map first appeared in 1859 in a State Senate report.  The map in the form offered here appeared in both 1865 and 1866 with two different titles--as given here and with a slightly different title—Sanitary & Topographical Map of the City Of New York.  Each appeared in different publications.  A slightly enlarged version of the map was published in 1874 under the title, Topographical Atlas of the City of New York…

The text accompanying the map is itself of great interest.  It is impassioned in its plea for the city to take dramatic measures to curb infectious diseases.  Also, the engineer Viele rises to visionary eloquence as he contemplates the city on the verge of dramatic expansion, and with an optimism that is hard to imagine today: 

“Probably there is no spot in the world so well adapted by nature for the purpose of a commercial entrepot as the Island on which the city of New York is built.  Lying upon the upturned edge of a vast primitive formation, whose upheaval has given it a well defined water-shed, combined with every variety of surface; containing twenty-two superficial square miles, every foot of which is adapted to building purposes, its shores crested by noble rivers rolling into the ocean, pregnant with creative energy; projecting into a bay which contains twenty-four square miles of water surface, and connects with an outer roadstead of 100 square miles in extent, and, to crown all, blessed by a climate of unsurpassed salubrity.”

Provenance:  In an unusual occurrence, the pamphlet accompanying the map bears, on the inside of the front cover, the signatures of five previous owners of this work, three of which are dated.  The earliest and presumably original owner was “WP Wainwright,” almost certainly Col. William P. Wainwright (1818-1895), who commanded the Twenty-ninth New York Volunteers and then later the Seventy-sixth New York Regiment during the Civil War.  He was promoted to Brevet Brigadier General in 1865. He distinguished himself in several battles and was forced to retire as a result of wounds he suffered.  The next signature is of C. H. Wainwright, then that John Constable Moore, dated 1810, who was in the real estate business in New York.  The remaining signatures are of Neafie Adams, dated 1935 and Arnold Abrahamson dated 1963.

Augustyn/ Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, pp. 136-39; Haskell, Manhattan Maps, no. 1133, cf. 1135, 1136.

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