Calibre 1600·1900

Manhattan Time Machine

One city. Four drawings. Twenty years.

4,216: places set
5,918: vector paths
1,242: written sections
197: plates held

Depth

He drew it four times

Four street plans, stacked. The 1800s in front. Behind it the 1700s, the 1600s, and a sheet marked Holy Grounds. Three sat switched off inside his file and had never been seen.

1800s4,216
1700s930
1600s208
Holy Grounds2

Interlock

The sheet comes apart

Not a fade. These are his own vector paths, so they separate along the grid, and the movement seats itself in the gaps.

Bezel seated

Mainplate indexed

Balance running

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Four thousand standing places

Every coloured box is a building, a business, a church, a firehouse or a wharf. Click one and read what he wrote about it.

Enter the map The collection

My father researched this city for twenty years and did not get to finish.

William Anthony Miecuna, 1953–2026 →

He left two files. One is a drawing of Lower Manhattan with every building he could account for placed on it, colour-coded by what it was, labelled with the years it stood. The other is a history of the same ground, running to roughly nine hundred pages, with the sources copied out underneath.

Everything here comes out of those two files. Nothing has been rewritten. The words, the dates, the colour code and the occasional note-to-self are all his.

From the collection

The whole collection →

He drew the city four times

Eight districts

Manhattan Time Machine — the work of William Anthony Miecuna, 1953–2026. Open the map →