Blog Posts by Subject: History of North America

Over the years, as we push more and more of our maps onto the web, such as Pieter Goos' Zee-Atlas, 1672, from which the below image was taken, we ask… ...what do we do with all this stuff? ...how do we make digital maps meaningful?

One approach is through our blog, where we highlight various places and themes depicted. Often there is much more to read between the contours, about, among other things the social, geographic and cultural mix from where the maps were generated; something we, in future posts, will take the time to illuminate.

Staff of the New York Public Library recently hand picked a set of nearly 500 images, collected from across our Digital Gallery, composing them as a curated set of images at the Commons on Flickr. They represent the Hudson River Valley through several hundred years of history and complement Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, now up in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

Have you visited the High Line yet? I haven’t but I am looking forward to making the trip in the near future. The High Line is an elevated train track which fell out of use during the 1950s due to the increased use of interstate highways for freight deliveries. In the late nineties, two New Yorkers came together to start Friends of the High Line, a group whose mission was to keep the historic structure from being demolished. Ultimately, the group partnered with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to reinvent the High Line as a public space. Just a couple of weeks ago the first section of the High Line opened up to the public and the city's response has been very 

View Literary Pride March in a larger map

As I have mentioned in the past, part of my work entails handling some wonderful photographs. One collection I processed last year was the Photographic Views of the United States, comprised of photographs from locations across the continental U.S., Hawaii and Alaska. While its layout is intuitively alphabetized by state, Matt Knutzen, from the Map Division decided to provide an alternative visual interface, connecting the images with their locations on a map of the United States. To view open the attachment below in Google Earth. Pretty cool, huh? We’re hoping this is just the beginning of our collaboration. I’ll write again about any new ideas or developments.

Just last week, the New York Public Library updated their Flickr Commons photostream. The newest images are from the Milstein Division and include construction photographs of the Woolworth Building as well as block by block street views of both Fifth Avenue (1911) and Broadway (1899).

People are surprised that the Hudson Park Library is not landmarked nor is it in a historic district.

The line of townhouses just across the street are most definitely landmarked. Afterall, one of New York's most famous mayors lived there. But, no, Hudson Park has not been so designated. True, the building is 103 years old and was designed by Carrere and Hastings, the architects of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (aka the library with the Lions out front). It is a Carnegie Library, one of dozens in the city, so called because it was funded by Andrew Carnegie. Shouldn't it be landmarked? Or, at least, in a historic district?

Well, now, progress is being made in 

Fashion held an uneasy place in the war years of the North-South conflict in America. The Union and Confederate armies, uninterested in flashy uniforms, chose practical wear, while women remained ensconced in thick petticoats and triangular-shaped gowns. Some fashion textbooks call this the “crinoline period”. Hoops, or the cage crinoline, made women’s dresses billow as they did, and also made mobility more problematic.

Since the North controlled ports and shipping, and therefore received whatever fashion plate publishing there was, women in the South had a harder time keeping up with the modes. Southern ingenuity in refurbishing clothes made skirts and blouses 

After 165 years things are bound to change, even in the Village. Maps are a great way to see that change, and fortunately The New York Public Library has one of the world's great map collections. Here's a map of lower Manhattan when Edgar Allen Poe roamed the Village:For fun, compare it to my Google map:

Want to breakfast with Theodore Dreiser? Grab a cup of coffee at Grey Dog Coffee or Out of the Kitchen and mosey on down to 16 St. Lukes Place.

Hey, you’re right across from the Hudson Park Library! And just down the street at 14 and 12 St. Lukes Place are the former homes of Marianne Moore and Sherwood Anderson. They all lived here in the 1920s.

Use this map (I'll continue to add to it) to create your own coffee jaunt or late night crawl. You’ll be inspired by walking the streets of the literary greats. You might even write something! Or at least, stop by the Hudson Park Branch and take out one of their books, grab that coffee, and relax knowing that 

Poets named for hospitals is a very short list.

In fact, Edna St. Vincent Millay is probably the only major poet who would be on such a list. Frankly, I can't think of anyone else named for a hospital, let alone a poet, and if you know of one, please let us all know in a comment.

Edna's uncle's life was saved by the staff of St. Vincent Hospital shortly before Edna's birth in Rockland, Maine -- consequently, Edna's middle name. Somehow this still seems odd. What if her uncle had been saved at Mt. Sinai? Columbia-Presbyterian?

Appropriately, Edna, or Vincent, as she liked to be called, came into her own in the Village, living in the famous narrowest house of the city 

Many people in the New York and New Jersey areas today probably don’t realize how much history there is about the American Revolution right at their doorstep. The key early parts of the war were enacted right here. The battles of Trenton and Princeton have to be the most popular and covered aspects of the Rev War. So any recent book on these well worn topics should offer something new. For the most part, Washington's Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), does, but the author still allows himself to get carried away by the ever present Spirit of 76 Syndrome.

There is a lot of background information provided on the American army, the British 

I suppose April is National Poetry Month because it's the cruellest month. I don't know if that's true but I've planted some seeds and hope to have flowers for summer. Am I deluded by this into believing in a spring resurrection? Perhaps, but what's the alternative? I'll take my morning glories and moon flowers and if they smell sweet I'll try not to think of funerals.

April is a great time to drop by the Hudson Park Library and take out some poetry. Take your book, walk a couple of blocks to the Hudson River and doze off in the sun between lines by such great Village poets as Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Stanley Kunitz. April will not seem cruel.

Marianne 

What do William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson and Kahlil Gibran have in common?

The all lived in the Village!

They may be the native sons of Mississippi, Ohio and Lebanon respectively, but for a time each of them called a piece of rarified Manhattan real estate south of 14th and north of Canal Street home.

This post is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared in The Staten Island Historian, Winter-Spring 2002, Volume 19, New Series 2 published by the Staten Island Historical Society.

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The Port Richmond Branch of The New York Public Library is rich with stories. It stands at 75 Bennett Street on the North Shore of Staten Island, N.Y., two blocks from the Kill Van Kull. A gift from the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the historic red brick building faces Veterans’ Park and P.S. 20 in the Port Richmond neighborhood. The library’s history and its service to the people of Port Richmond mirror 

The NYPL Photography Collection has one of the largest collections of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs outside of the Library of Congress. I’m not sure what it is about these images—though given the economic times I’d say they are due for a resurgence—but they continue be some of the most popular and to present some of the most iconic images in American history: Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Okies newly arrived to their hardscrabble yet hopeful life in the interior valleys of California being perhaps the most prominent example.

 The photograph on the left is of High Island, an 8 acre spit of land between the Pelham Bay and the Long Island Sound, as seen from its more well-known neighbor, City Island. After researching High Island it remains somewhat of a mystery to me. Artifacts have been found on its shores, alluding to a time prior to the arrival of Europeans, but its Siwanoy name is still unknown. Even the origin of its present day name is uncertain. Some would guess that its name describes its physical location in the Northern reach of the city, or perhaps describing the profile of the island which is comparatively high. John McNamara, in History in Asphalt, states that it could be a Dutch name, Haai 

We've updated the Map Division's Google Earth index to digitized NYC map collections to include more than 2000 maps from 32 titles, organized chronologically and geographically (by borough), all published between 1852 and 1923. The map index (download .kmz file) requires installation of Google Earth on your computer. There are three recommended ways to search for maps using this tool.