50545259 (1 results)

Good. Laid down on fresh linen. Small areas of infill. Blank on verso. Size 32.5 x 29.5 Inches. This is a John Bute Holmes 1874 cadastral map of Midtown Manhattan. The map depicts the region from Seventh Avenue to Third Avenue and from 59th Street to 42nd Street. A somewhat-confusing jumble of solid and dashed lines appears throughout the neighborhood, allowing the viewer to trace its development, particularly with regard to streets. Entire blocks were shifted between 1796, when Goerck first surveyed this part of Manhattan, and 1874, when Holmes created this work. Street angles changed, as did the width of both the streets and the avenues. Albany Avenue, Steuben Street Cross Road, and the Eastern Post Road (also known as the Boston Post Road) were erased when the grid system was implemented. Bloomingdale Road, in the lower left corner, is known as Broadway today, thus illustrating the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway, Times Square. At some point after Goerck's initial survey, both Madison Avenue and Lexington Avenue were cut down the middle of the blocks between Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue, and Fourth and Third Avenue, respectively, evident by how Holmes identifies each block by only one number and not two. Common Lands Settlement on Manhattan Island began at the southern tip, where Battery Park is today. One of the easiest indicators for modern-day visitors is the lack of an organized street-grid in this part of the city. Growth farther north on Manhattan Island was slow, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then, even when people decided they wanted to live outside of the organized settlement, they elected to purchase land along either the Hudson River or the East River so they could easily travel into the city either by boat along the river or one of the two main roads that traveled north up the island. These roads, the Bloomindale Road (now Broadway), which led up the west side of the island, and the East Post Road, which ran along the island's east side, were built along ancient Native American hunting paths which allowed for easy development. The Common Lands stretched from the intersection of these two roads north in an irregular fashion to Harlem's boundary with the Commons. These two phenomena created a lack of interest in settling the land in the central part of the island. Traveling there was difficult, and the land either consisted of rocky outcroppings or low-lying overgrown marshland. All of this 'vast wasteland' was thus given to the government of New Amsterdam by the Dutch administrators in 1685 and reaffirmed by the English twice after they acquired the colony. Almost no one bought or rented the land from the colony, and it remained that way until the infancy of the United States, when the government of New York City inherited what had become known as the Common Lands. At that time, New York City had little tax income, and so leveraged the Common Lands, which the Common Council, the city's governing body, believed could be developed. They contracted Casimir Theodor Goerck, a city surveyor, to survey the Common Lands and divide it into five acre lots that would then be sold at auction. Goerck, for his part, did the best he could with a massive task. By the December 1785, he had laid out a middle street, a rough estimation of today's Fifth Avenue, but almost none of the lots were of equal size. A handful of lots sold the following summer, but not many, most of which were in the extreme southern reaches of the Common Lands near the established city. In 1794, the Common Council again contracted Goerck to survey five-acre lots, but this time he was to also survey a road parallel to and on either side of the middle road. He was also to survey sixty-six-foot-wide east-west streets to allow for easier access. These roads would closely mirror Fourth and Sixth Avenues in the Commissioners plan of about a decade later, as would the east-west streets, although the Commissioners gave almost no credit to.