An atlas of Lower Manhattan
Five thousand buildings, businesses, churches, firehouses and wharves — drawn by hand, one label at a time, over twenty years.
New York & Brooklyn, 1850 — from his collection
My father researched this city for twenty years and did not get to finish.
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.