Old Time Tours: New York City Guidebooks in the Early Republic

This history series on 19th century New York City guidebooks is a companion to our research guide: Old Time Tours: A Guide to 19th Century NYC Guidebooks. For colonial guides to New York City, see our research guide Sea Blazers and Early Scriveners: The First Guidebooks to New York City.

1. New York City Guidebooks in the Early Republic

2. New York City Guidebooks in the Mid-1800s

3. New York City Guidebooks After the Civil War

"The ground on which I trod was hallowed by recollection of the past, and as I slowly wandered through the long alley of poplars, which like so many birch brooms standing on end, diffused a melancholy and lugubrious shade, my imagination drew a contrast between the surrounding scenery, and what it was in the classic days of our forefathers."—Edmund Blunt, The Stranger’s Guide to the City of NY (1817)

Introduction

A survey of nineteenth-century guidebooks to New York City reveals the numerous functions that guidebooks provide for both the reader and the city.  These highly detailed and multi-purpose primary texts yield a comprehensive sense of the city in a particular era, and transcend use as simply sightseeing manuals. They are ripe for historical research purposes—cross-referenced with a photograph and a map, a guidebook is the fuel that might power a researcher’s time machine.

Guidebooks are intended for the ambler: off the tour bus and on foot. The vantage point is from the street, where one finds the real sense of life in any city. Or, at least, it's the quickest way to get to shops and buy stuff.

Hundreds of New York City guidebooks were published between 1786—the year of the first New York city directory —and 1898, the year of the consolidation of the city of New York. These 18th and 19th century NYC guidebooks contain rich typologies of the themes and ideas that form the patterns of New York City history.  An examination of a handful within select decades shows how guides to New York City evolved from civic resources for New York residents in early America, to promotional guides for visitors to the city before and after the Civil War. And by the 1890s emerged the beginnings of a type of “insider’s” guide to the city that today characterizes much of Big Apple tourism literature promising the “best” and “cheapest” places “not for tourists.”  New York City entered the nineteenth century as the former Loyalist capital of Revolutionary War America, and by 1898 was the maritime epicenter of the United States and the second most populated city in the world—surpassed only by London.

City Directories

The first guidebooks to the American city of New York were city directories.  The primary research use of city directories is to find addresses of residents in a certain year. However, late 18th century city directories included much additional information that commonly is associated with types of guidebooks. For details on researching city directories, see our the Milstein division’s Guide to New York City Directories.

A Description of New York in 1786," authored by the lexicographer Noah Webster, serves as the preface to New York's first directory, published three years after the final battle of the Revolutionary War, and three years before George Washington was sworn in as U.S. President on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street. Most of the Dutch architecture is gone, there is one Roman Catholic Church, and Webster is keen to say that “the city is esteemed the most eligible situation for commerce in the United States."

In an era when customs revenue was the chief source of federal finances, the city directory included a detailed section of information about the operations of the U.S. Custom House, including amounts of payable duties on transported goods, export totals, and the certificates required for certain types of cargo.  A researcher of U.S. maritime history might find this section an invaluable catch-all of port data.

The directory touts a richly-illustrated monthly almanac that to a 2020 reader might appear like a sorcerer's book of spells.

Early Republic

The guidebooks of the Early Republic, roughly through the administration of President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), only find precedent in guidebooks to European cities; prior to the American Revolution, travel literature took the form of memoirs, personal narratives, reminiscences, published correspondence, diaries, and journals.  Examples include the journals of Lewis and Clark, or Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains by Washington Irving, who based his narrative of the frontier fur trade on numerous travelogues and journals and first person accounts of the Pacific Northwest. Early authors of NYC guidebooks exhibit a sense of invention; writers Edmund M. Blunt and Samuel Mitchill, who penned guides in the eighteen-aughts and eighteen-tens, are vanguard writers who took first stabs at crafting an identity for the city by describing its civic and cultural institutions, hotels, clubs, churches, public reading rooms, and the rates and timetables of street and waterway transit systems. They also included historical sketches of Manhattan, listings of laws against nuisances, like “Filth and Dirt,” and “Cross Walks,” and while touting the “delightful promenade” of the Battery, also listed and described all the different courts in the city’s judicial system. Most practically, these first guidebooks of antebellum New York are omnibus literary vessels of information that fit conveniently into the pocket of a mens frock coat or ladies drawstring reticule.

Old Days Before the Old Days

In the introduction to the papers of New York State Governor Daniel D. Tompkins, published in 1898, the NY State Historian, Hugh Hastings, provided a historical sketch of New York City in 1813  to round out Tompkins' biographical details.  Though about a third of the chapter is a hagiography of Dewitt Clinton, the State Historian provides an explicative but citationless portrait of NYC at the beginning of the War of 1812.  

"The city of New York was as unlike the city of New York of today as a log hut in the wilderness is unlike a Fifth avenue mansion." Whale oil lanterns placed at intervals of 114 feet and lit using "tinder boxes or flint" illuminated the streets at night. "People were not given to early rising." Shops on Broadway were stocked with "English and Indian goods." The business day ran from 9AM to 9PM, with lunch at 1:30-2:30pm and supper 6-7pm. Sidewalks, swept every Saturday, were made of red brick, and burying grounds in the "heart of the city endangered life and health." Clergymen "declaimed against tight lacing, and sharply criticized young women who compressed their figures between rigid lines of steel, or whalebone and of 'stay tape.'" The “recognized attractions of society” were “bull-baiting, slavery, and lotteries.” For unexplained reasons—though a potential consideration in the origins of the city’s nickname —“prejudice against tomatoes, ‘Love Apples,’ was strong.” It is possible that they were grown in New Jersey. A beer was “two or three cents a glass.” Whiskey had not made it yet to New York taverns. Details are provided about the destitution and bankruptcy caused by the War of 1812, with imports low and exports devalued. A handful of paragraphs are devoted to exalting New York’s farmers markets. And, notably, “there was not a bath tub to be found in any private or public house in this city of nearly 100,000 outside of a public bath on Chambers Street.”