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Forget the rule of ten years’ residency, or getting mugged or any other such nonsense qualifying one as a New Yorker. It is simply a test of abject fealty; if you believe NYC to be the greatest city there ever was or will be, you’re One Of Us. Civic pride is a common sin, but New York has cultivated it to an exceptional degree, in part because new residents are in constant supply. The booms of the past — the population nearly doubled between 1790 and 1800 — have given way to still significant population gains in the modern era; between 2010 and 2020 NYC gained 442,241 new residents, more than the population of Miami.

      

New York is at present in a period of turmoil, with resignations and investigations raining from the skyscrapers, but the historical view shows this to be a fairly ordinary state of affairs. The potential of New York City has long been a temptation to greed and power-grabbing, as detailed in the first history of the province of New York (essentially New York City, within the broader colony) written by William Smith in 1757. The Ratzer map is the ultimate depiction of Colonial New York: the tip of a narrow island, control of which was essential to the project of Independence. Finally in this first section are two legal documents — the Montgomerie Charter of New York (essentially its Constitution well into the XIXc) and Richard Varick’s Laws and ordinances from the eighth year of his 11 consecutive 1-year mayoral terms (still Bloomberg prevails!).

      

 

A second phase might be called image-building — the era of self-mythologizing. There’s no better place to start than the 1809 History of New York by “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” i.e., Washington Irving. The nascent independent city of New York was still dominated by the (Anglo-)Dutch families that had settled New Amsterdam in the XVIIc. Irving confected the Dutch historian Knickerbocker, even reporting him missing in New York papers. “Knickerbocker” came to refer to New Yorkers in general, was eventually shortened to “Knick” and, I’ve read, adopted by a basketball sporting team.

      

Although the passion for city views never took hold in America as it did in Europe, New York threw its hat in the ring with the Peabody views (1831–1834), promulgated by the New-York Mirror as an act of recognition that the city had buildings and vistas of historical import. We have a rare complete set, as well as the first 7 (of 8) parts never bound and still in the publisher’s printed wrappers.

      

Among my favorite works in the gallery is Frederick William Billing’s 1856 graphite drawing of the burgeoning city, taken from the shores of Jersey City. Billing emigrated from Germany in time to fight for the Union and then settled as a Wall Street broker. Finally in the 1860’s he returned to his great love of landscapes and studied with Carmienke, finally exhibiting at the Brooklyn Academy of Painting. The subtle rendering of the church steeples and the tall ships in the river belies the limitless possibilities for an immigrant such as Billing.

 

 

It is difficult to determine when the antiquarian spirit settled into New Yorkers’ robust self-regard, but the 1860’s would be my suggestion. Leading the way is Charles B. Hall’s 1870 Old New York Views and Portraits, our example one of five printed on Japan paper, each of the fifty captioned and signed by Hall in graphite. Here New Yorkers concede not that New York was greater in the past, but that its past greatness only enhances its current greatness.

          

The pinnacle of this may be our extra-illustrated set of William L. Stone’s 1872 History of New York City from the discovery to the present day with 186 insertions, including the signature of the aforementioned Mayor Varick, dozens of engravings and lithographs, as well as photographs. From the collection of the venerable New Yorker Elizabeth Willets Lambert, who contributed significantly to the library of the New York Academy of Medicine.

           

 

Finally we might dip our toes into the “modern era:” the Gilded Age through Robert Moses. A richly-illustrated manuscript ledger (ca. 1885-1894) from the firm of Maclay and Davies (Major Maclay was one of the men who carried Lincoln’s body from Ford’s Theater; he would later be chief engineer of the Long Island Railroad) shows how one could amass enormous wealth through property in New York City and its environs. Parcels of land that would now sell for hundreds of millions (if they could even be assembled) are traced through the hands of the principals’ wives and on through generations of owners, landlords and tenants.

           

The fine draughtsmanship of the ledger reaches an even higher peak in the original Angelo Magnanti drawing for the stationmaster’s office mural in Penn Station as renovated by McKim, Mead and White (1946). The destruction of the station in 1963 is perhaps the most regrettable loss in the city’s architectural history, and the Magnanti sketch captures the last gasp of glittering optimism and modernity in the city’s transit terminals.

 

Given that our neighbors across the park at the New-York Historical Society (a building designed by York & Sawyer, who happened also to design our 1016 Madison; you didn’t think chauvinism skipped us, did you?) are celebrating the 50^th anniversary of The Power Broker, it seems fitting to end with a Robert Moses item. Moses held various commissions as well as the powerful chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, and few would contest that no man shaped the modern city more. Our Expanding New York Waterfront (1964) is the robust answer to a simple question: how much land was added (by land-fill or other means) to New York City in Moses’s time? By way of illustration of the staggering result (some 15,000 acres!), our example has a suite of a dozen aerial photographs taken by the Port Authority to illustrate exactly where the man made his mark.

           

Whatever happens to our current elected officials, we lovers of New York have much to proud of, and more still to collect (to say nothing of our splendid turn-of-the-century ink sketches by Charles Huard!). Please write for more details, or stop by our historic beaux-arts mansion on storied Madison Avenue for a welcome that will be the finest New York City has to offer — which is pretty damn fine.