New York City/ Printing History/ Post Prohibition.  VOORHIES, Stephen Jerome & STONE, Harold F. (artists) / FRANK B. DOLPH PUBLISHER.  [New York: 1938]  Midnight Map of Manhattan. 22 ½ x 17 ½ inches.  Photostat (negative image) on matte photographic paper.  Creasing lower left corner, a few marginal split, else excellent.                                      

A bawdy, Art Deco, and very rare pictorial map depicting the nightlife of New York City in the 1930s as a boozy, risqué playground.  The map survives only in this unique, photostatic example, printed in reverse (see below for an explanation of this process), and in a single, known example of the poster that was eventually published incorporating this image.

With its topless show girls, bibulous plutocrats, and many clever vignettes representing the city’s nighttime fare and neighborhoods, this work exudes the racy energy of post-Prohibition New York City.  Harlem is represented by a snappy zoot-suited figure and swinging dancers.  In Greenwich Village, an artist with a nude model practices his art, and diners are entertained by a topless dancer.  An ingenious compass rose features a show girl standing on a star, with leg upraised pointing north, her standing leg pointing south, and her arms pointing west and east.  Although the black and white image is here in reverse, it is still a very striking of example of Art Deco design.

Offered here is a negative-printed photostat—a very rare survival, as such objects were the first phase in an early photo projection, reproduction process developed at the beginning of the 20^th century.  A photostat was generated when a large camera photographed a document or piece of artwork directly on to a treated sheet of photographic paper, yielding, as here, a negative image.  Functioning similarly to photographic negatives, positive images could then be generated from a photostat.  Since photostats were simply a means by which the final images were printed, they were rarely kept, thus few survived.  On our website, below the image of the photostat is a digitally produced, positive image to give an idea of what the final version would have looked like.  The finished production of the photostat offered here was an advertising poster on which a positive version of this image is surrounded by margins listing the city’s entertainment establishments. It is likely the poster was made with the upcoming 1939 World’s Fair in mind to inform out-of-towners of the city’s opportunities for “adult” entertainment.   We are awar of just a single example of the poster, which is at Columbia University. 

Stephen J. Voorhies was an illustrator, painter, muralist, and pictorial map artist based in the New York City area, who had graduated from Pratt Institute in 1922. He illustrated book covers and texts for major publishers and painted numerous views of Nassau County and Long Island.  Voorhies created three murals for the 1939 World as well as numerous maps of the New York area including parks, campgrounds, the subway system, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. We found no information regarding Harold Stone. The Frank B. Dolph company was an active publisher of maps, first in the northeast, then later in Florida.  It operates to this day as GIS Dolph Maps LLC, specializing in maps of southern Florida.

https://mapcollections.brooklynhistory.org/map/historic-long-island-a-map-showing-its-towns-villages-and-the-outstanding-events-during-its-development-over-a-period-of-more-than-three-hundred-years-designed-by-stephen-j-voorhies/.

https://www.askart.com/artist/Stephen_Voorhies/122470/Stephen_Voorhies.aspx

Sold