About this atlas
Twenty years of looking
at one city.
This map was drawn by hand, one label at a time. Every coloured box marks a building, a business, a church, a firehouse or a wharf that stood in Lower Manhattan before 1900 — with the years it was there, and often the street number. Behind it sits a written history of the same ground, running to roughly nine hundred pages.
Nothing here has been rewritten. The words, the dates, the colour code and the occasional note-to-self are all his. Where the map says “Look for Jacob St at the edge of Beekman Swamp — swamp had ice skating in the Winter in 1790s”, that is a message he left for himself, and it has been left where he put it.
He drew the city four times
The map file contains four separate layers. Only one of them was switched on. The others are complete alternate drawings of the same ground in earlier centuries — a city he built and then set aside.
| Layer | Labels | Drawn |
|---|
You can switch between them on the map.
How it was made
The two source files are an Adobe Illustrator drawing and an Apple Pages document, both last revised in June 2022. Neither program was needed to read them: the map's geometry and lettering were taken directly out of the file's vector paths, and the manuscript out of its compressed text streams. What you pan around on the map page is not a picture of his drawing — it is his actual paths, redrawn in the browser.
A note on language
His sources are eighteenth and nineteenth century documents — newspapers, court records, city directories, designation reports and memoirs — and he copied them out as they were written. The language of those sources is the language of their time, and some of it is offensive today. It has been left as quoted. A record that has been tidied up is no longer a record, and the terms people used are part of what the documents show.
The same applies to proper names. The First Colored Presbyterian Church on Elizabeth Street was called that; so was the Black Free School on Cliff Street. Those are the institutions’ own names and they appear on the map as he drew them.
Where the wording is his rather than a source’s, one dated racial term has been updated to current usage throughout — the only edit made to his words anywhere on this site.