New York City Map 1838 City Plan - Manhattan, Brooklyn, East River

This detailed city plan of New York comes from Thomas G. Bradford's 1838 An Illustrated Atlas, published by Weeks, Jordan & Co. and Wiley and Putnam and engraved by George W. Boynton at a close scale of about 1:24,000. New York in 1838 was climbing out of the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis triggered partly by speculative lending tied to the very real-estate and canal-building boom that had made the city rich, and even as banks failed and unemployment spiked, immigration and the Erie Canal's trade continued to pull the city's population and its grid of streets steadily northward up Manhattan Island.

Six landmarks are labeled directly on the map, including City Hall, the Merchants Exchange, and the New York Hospital, laid across the city's early street grid with lower Manhattan and Brooklyn both visible — a portrait of the financial and civic core of a city that, crisis or not, was already outgrowing every other American city in size and ambition.

A striking piece for a native New Yorker, someone who's traded the city for elsewhere but still claims it, or a collector of early American city plans specifically. The print ships unframed and in multiple sizes.