Viele Water Map of Manhattan, 1865

The story of this map

Egbert Viele was a civil engineer, the first engineer-in-chief of Central Park, and a man who believed that if you built on a buried stream you would regret it. In 1865 he published this map to prove the point: the street grid of Manhattan printed over the island’s original brooks, ponds, marshes and shorelines, with the tracts of “made land” along the rivers picked out. This restored print is taken from the hand-coloured lithograph in the Library of Congress, with its three cross sections and an inset of the island’s northern tip.

Engineers and architects in New York still reach for the Viele map when they dig a foundation, which is a remarkable afterlife for a nineteenth-century lithograph. On the wall it reads as something between a map and a drawing: blue veins of water threading under the orderly grid, the marshes shaded along the shoreline, the crooked colonial streets of downtown suddenly making sense once you see the water they followed.

The sheet is famously long and thin, more than three times wider than it is tall, so we print it as a single 12x36 inch panel. That shape is a gift for the awkward wall: above a sofa, along a hallway, over a bed or a desk. It belongs in our American Cities collection and looks especially good beside the Ratzer plan, which shows the same island a century earlier.

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 and the hand colouring, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. The sheet is very elongated (about 3.3:1) and will be prepared as a single long panel. 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.