(NEW YORK CITY) Jacob Barnitz Bacon Pier Map of the City of

Sale 2672 - Lot 98

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Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000

(NEW YORK CITY.) Jacob Barnitz Bacon. Pier Map of the City of New York, Surveyed and Drawn for the New York Corn Exchange. Hand-colored lithographed wall map of lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn coastline with a title vignette of the Corn Exchange building and an extensive directory of institutions, banks, hotels, and public buildings at lower left. 2 sheets joined, 41x60 inches overall; original hand-color; mounted on modern canvas backing with red selvage, scattered cracks and creases with small spots of conservation but in general preserved extremely well. Handsomely float-mounted in a silver-leaf shadowbox frame. New York: Adolphus Ranney, 1857

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An essentially unknown monumental map of mid-nineteenth-century New York City.

Jacob Barnitz Bacon was an accomplished New York civil engineer and city surveyor who contributed to the planning of Central Park and the Staten Island railroad system. His outstanding map of Manhattan below 42nd Street was produced with an investment from the agricultural futures commodity trading partners of the New York Corn Exchange who presumably had an interest in the commercial and mercantile activities throughout the city. The plan is on such a large scale that the detailed docks, ferry lines, streets, parks, markets and merchants, public works, factories, printing offices (including the locations of the map's lithographer V. Keil and publisher A. Ranney's Maps & Bookstore) are all easily digested by the viewer. The map is divided into wards and fire districts and shows a blue-traced outline of the island's original waterline.

Not in Stokes; Haskell, Manhattan Maps, 1032 (citing an 1856 example at the Library of Congress).

OCLC records a single example at the New York Historical Society (again dated 1856 and noted as "engraved by Charles Nolte" while the present map is 1857 and lithographed by V. Keil, William Street).

An edition of 1864 was also produced, with added insets including Central Park, which is also quite rare (one copy located, British Library).