New York City Map 1873 City Plan - Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City

O.W. Gray, a Philadelphia atlas publishing firm that later operated as O.W. Gray & Son, issued this gorgeous, hand-colored map of New York City in 1873 as part of the true first edition of Gray's Atlas, one of the most successful commercial atlas ventures of the decade and among the last major American atlases to rely on hand coloring for its maps. Gray's National Atlas built a strong reputation through the 1870s for exactly this kind of richly finished city and state cartography, and the New York sheet stands as one of the firm's more elaborate single-city productions. The map extends to Brooklyn, Hunter's Point, Williamsburgh, Greenpoint, Jersey City and Hoboken, and reaches north to take in most of Central Park up to about East 83rd Street, capturing the still-new park just over a decade after its initial construction began. Streets, roads, rail lines, buildings, parks, wharfs and bridges are all shown across the full sweep of the harbor's connected cities.

Ward-by-ward hand coloring across the map gives it a civic administrative dimension typical of the finest commercial city maps of the period, distinguishing individual municipal districts within both New York and Brooklyn at a glance. The map's reach to include most of Central Park reflects how central the still-developing park had already become to the city's northward growth by 1873, even as the park itself remained incomplete north of 83rd Street. Hunter's Point, Williamsburgh and Greenpoint, all distinct communities across the East River in what would become Brooklyn and Queens, anchor the map's eastern coverage, while Jersey City and Hoboken do the same across the Hudson to the west. Together this breadth of coverage makes the map a genuinely comprehensive single-sheet reference to the entire New York harbor region as it stood in the early 1870s.

A well-suited gift for a New York family with roots spanning the harbor's several connected cities in the early 1870s, or for a collector drawn to the last generation of fully hand-colored American commercial atlas maps. Its inclusion of Central Park up to 83rd Street gives it a useful dating marker distinct from either earlier or later New York sheets in our collection. It's available unframed, in the full range of sizes from a compact print through to a large-format piece for a bigger wall.