Ratzer Plan of New York City, 1776

The story of this map

Bernard Ratzer was a British Army officer and surveyor, and the plan of New York he surveyed in 1767 is the one every later map of colonial Manhattan gets measured against. This restored print is made from the Library of Congress copy of the 1776 London issue, engraved by Thomas Kitchin and published by Jefferys & Faden just as the city was about to become the headquarters of the British occupation.

What makes it so good on a wall is the sheer legibility. The little city sits at the tip of the island with its wards outlined, its streets named and its churches and public buildings keyed to a numbered index. Above it the map simply runs out of town: orchards, fenced fields, country lanes and the shorelines of the Hudson and East rivers, drawn at a scale where you can pick out individual farmsteads. The dedication to Governor Sir Henry Moore, engraved in a florid cartouche, anchors one corner.

For anyone who lives in or loves New York this is the “before” picture. Wall Street, Broadway and the Bowery are all there; almost everything else is farmland. It suits a study, a hallway or an apartment entry, and it sits naturally beside our Viele water map of Manhattan or the Currier & Ives bird’s-eye view in our American Cities collection.

Printed to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.