New York City Map 1770 City Plan - Manhattan, Kip's Bay, Murray Hill

Lieutenant Bernard Ratzer, a British Army officer and surveyor who worked alongside contemporaries Claude J. Sauthier, Samuel Holland and Thomas Jefferys, produced the map generally considered the most important eighteenth-century printed plan of New York City, first issued in 1770 and commonly called the Ratzer map. Ratzer had been commissioned to survey the city at the direction of Sir Henry Moore, following the Stamp Act Riots of 1765, which left British authorities fearing New York might become a battleground much as it nearly had during the recently concluded French and Indian War. This example is an annotated copy, marked up in 1810 by Anthony Bleecker, a founding member of the New York Historical Society and prominent figure in the city's real estate and literary circles, who used the map to illustrate property boundaries in a Court of Chancery land dispute. Cohen and Augustyn describe the Ratzer map's combination of geographical precision and artistic engraving as unsurpassed in eighteenth-century urban cartography.

The map identifies several early Manhattan estates by name and color, including Rose Hill, highlighted in orange and named by John Watts for his father's Scottish estate, a 130-acre farm stretching along the East River between what became 21st and 30th Streets. Kip's Bay, highlighted in blue, takes its name from Dutch settler Jacobus Hendrickson Kip, whose farm and 1655 brick house, the last surviving farmhouse from the New Amsterdam era, stood until its 1851 demolition; the area was also the site of the British Army's September 1776 landing that forced Washington's retreat north. Bridgen's Farm, highlighted in red, belonged to Thomas Bridgen Atwood and extended along the Eastern Post Road near Kip's property. Murray Hill, further inland, takes its name from prominent merchant John R. Murray, whose extensive Manhattan landholdings shaped the neighborhood that still carries his family's name today.

This annotated Ratzer map makes an extraordinary gift for a New York family with deep roots in Manhattan's colonial-era land history, or for a collector of the most significant early American city maps generally. We also carry Ratzer's earlier 1769 first-state "Ratzen Plan," covering only lower Manhattan; this 1770 second map expanded Ratzer's survey to the wider city and its environs, and a segmented example in full original color sold at Christie's in 2022 for $625,000, underscoring the rarity of the underlying design even in unmarked form. It's supplied unframed and available across our full range of sizes, from a small desk print to a large-format piece for a bigger wall.