New York Map 1935 Pictorial Print - New York City, Albany, Adirondack Mountains

Ruth Taylor White, trained at the Pratt Institute of Art and the Art Students League, drew New York's page for Our U.S.A. A Gay Geography, the pictorial atlas Little, Brown and Company of Boston published in 1935 with narrative text by Frank J. Taylor. Each of the atlas's forty-eight state pages was packed with small drawings of local industries, landmarks, and pastimes, and New York's is built around a detailed inset of New York City showing its five boroughs, set alongside skiers in the Adirondacks, sailors on Lake Ontario, and vignettes of the state's vineyards and fishing grounds. New York sits at the hinge of the industrial Northeast, and in 1935 its identity was still split between the financial and manufacturing weight of the city and the farm, forest, and lake country upstate that the Depression had hit just as hard.

The map's New York City inset draws attention to the state's outsized urban core, while the Adirondack Mountains anchor the northern wilderness with illustrations of skiing and mountain recreation. Lake Ontario and Lake Erie run along the state's northern and western edges, each marked with sailing scenes that point to their role in trade and leisure alike. Elsewhere the page turns to agriculture and wine making, industries long associated with the Finger Lakes and Hudson Valley districts, and to fishing communities working the state's waterways. Together these scenes sketch a state defined as much by its lakes and mountains as by its famous metropolis.

Whether it's going up for a New Yorker who still keeps a place upstate, a transplant who left the Empire State but never really did, or the next addition to a collector's full run of this 1935 series, the map earns its wall space. Its whimsical, densely illustrated style makes it as much a piece of Depression-era design history as a map, a fond snapshot of New York before the war changed the state again. It is available unframed in a range of sizes, from a small study print to a larger piece for a hallway or office wall.