Brooklyn Map 1869 City Plan - Brooklyn, Greenpoint, Bushwick

A. Brown & Co., lithographers based at 47 Nassau Street in New York, produced this extremely rare pocket map of the City of Brooklyn in 1869, included in William G. Bishop's rare Manual of the Common Council of the City of Brooklyn. The map documents a period of rapid urban growth and transformation, arriving just fourteen years after the New York State legislature officially consolidated the communities of Brooklyn, Greenpoint, Bushwick and Williamsburg into a single city in 1855. By 1865 Brooklyn had become the third largest city in the United States, trailing only New York City and Philadelphia, and this map captures the city in the midst of that remarkable development. The mid-nineteenth-century advent of steam ferries had revolutionized transportation across the East River, making it far easier for both wealthy and working-class New Yorkers to relocate from crowded Manhattan to the more suburban areas of Kings County.

The map highlights Brooklyn's newly developed street grid, modeled closely after Manhattan's own, alongside important public spaces including Prospect Park, only recently laid out by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and Greenwood Cemetery, shown with detailed internal pathways. Public buildings and lands including the Lunatic Asylum, the Marine Hospital, the Navy Yard and the Military Parade Grounds are all prominently marked, evidence of the city's rapidly expanding civic infrastructure at this stage of its growth. Bridges, ferry crossings, train lines and plank roads, the critical transportation arteries of the period, are carefully noted, underscoring how vital connectivity with Manhattan had become to Brooklyn's continued development. The map builds on an earlier 1846 survey of Brooklyn by Richard Butt and draws from earlier variants of the Brown map used in McCloskey's Brooklyn Manual, expanding on those older works with updated details reflecting the city's rapid infrastructural changes.

This scarce pocket map makes a fitting gift for a Brooklyn family with roots in Greenpoint or Bushwick from the years just after the 1855 consolidation, or for a collector drawn to the civic manuals and reference documents produced for Brooklyn's own Common Council. We also carry a later 1873 map of Brooklyn showing Prospect Park fully complete and the Brooklyn Bridge already under construction; this 1869 sheet captures the earlier moment, with the park newly laid out and the bridge still years from breaking ground. 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.