New Reference Map & Guide to New York City. Executed by Brooks Bank Note Co. Boston. Embodying a Brief History of New York. Compliments of the Broadway Central Hotel.
Boston: Brooks Bank Note Co, Ca. 1890. Chromolithograph folding map of Manhattan, an advertising piece compliments of the historic Broadway Central Hotel, famous for being the site at which 8 professional American baseball clubs assembled to form the National League (1876).
The hotel, originally called the Grand Central Hotel, opened in 1870; it was an elegant 8 story building in French Second Empire style, and the largest hotel in the US. The historic building ended its days as a welfare hotel, with clients paying $5 per night in the late 1960s. The building literally collapsed due to illegal alterations on a basement wall in 1973.
To focus the map reader's attention, the map is overprinted in larger printed text with "Wanamaker's, Formerly A. T. S. Stewart & Co's Great Dry Goods House", as well as overprinted in large text for the "Broadway Central Hotel". The map extends as far north as 96th Street. It shows the "Croton Reservoir" in two sections at the north end of Central Park, the Metropolitan as "The Art Museum", the Central Park zoo at East 64th Street as the "Museum & Menagery (sic)", and it notes the location to the north of Grant's Tomb. It shows parts of Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, Queens, Governor's Island, and all of Blackwells Island.
The map printed in color, with the elevated railroads, Broadway Cable and Electric Roads and Street Car Lines all indicated in red. Subtitled, "From the latest Surveys showing all the Ferries and Steamship Docks, Elevated, Cable and Cross Town Car Lines.
Below the map is text describing the Broadway Central Hotel: "... now under an entire new management, after an expenditure of over Two Hundred Thousand Dollars .... Tilly Haynes, Proprietor". 14 x 22", printed text at verso. The Library of Congress dates the map to 1890 (Library of Congress Control Number 2003630444). OCLC: 84198997 locates 2 copies. Very good condition. Item #23279
Sold