New York City Map 1860 City Plan - Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr. issued this early state of his plan of the City of New York around 1860, the same year he acquired his father's former business from DeSilver and relaunched what would become a successful atlas publishing house lasting another two decades. The map details Manhattan alongside parts of Brooklyn, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Hoboken and Jersey City, showing the dense network of ferry lines that stitched the harbor's separate municipalities together before any bridge crossed the East River. Mitchell's steel-engraving standard, inherited from his father's decades in the trade, gives the plan a crispness typical of the firm's city maps from this transitional period just after the younger Mitchell took the reins. The map captures New York on the eve of the Civil War, still a city of independent wards and ferry-linked boroughs rather than the consolidated metropolis it would become in 1898.

The Academy of Music, then the city's premier opera house, appears at what is now the site of the Consolidated Edison building, marking one of the map's more historically resonant landmarks. The Orphan Asylum, also known as the Colored Orphan Asylum, is shown between 44th and 45th Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues, an institution that would burn down just three years after this map's publication during the 1863 Draft Riots, one of the era's darkest chapters. Multiple ferry lines cross the map's harbor waters, connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Hoboken and Jersey City, the essential transportation network of a city not yet linked by any fixed bridge crossing. Together these details preserve New York at a moment of real transition, its ferry-dependent geography still intact just years before rail and bridge infrastructure began to reshape the harbor.

This early Mitchell plan makes a fitting gift for a New York family with roots on either side of the harbor before consolidation, or for a Brooklyn or Jersey City transplant curious to see their neighborhood in its ferry-linked, pre-bridge era. We also carry Mitchell's updated 1865 edition of this same plan, which adds ward numbers and color delineation; this earlier circa-1860 state predates that revision and captures the Orphan Asylum still standing before the 1863 fire. It's available unframed, in the full range of sizes from a compact print through to a large-format piece for a study or office wall.