The Iconography of Manhattan Island is a six volume study of the history of New York City by Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, published between 1915 and 1928 by R. H. Dodd in New York. The work comprehensively records and documents key events of the city's chronology from the 16th to the early 20th centuries. Among other things, it shows the evolution of the Manhattan skyline up to the time of publication. [1]
Stokes's worldwide research teams scoured public and private collections of maps, guides and obscure source material to complete his encyclopedic monument to New York City. It describes in detail the growth of a fortified Dutch settlement into a major city, and ultimately included six volumes sold to subscribers and libraries in a limited edition of 360 sets printed on Holland-made paper and 42 on Japanese vellum. The book itself states the paper used for printing the book was of English origin and not from Holland.
The Iconography’s many writers lead the reader through picaresque stories about the humble as well as praising major figures. Source material included accounts from ledgers, accounting books and scraps of paper that the author said had been strewn about in unorganized piles from the floors of far flung academies and international halls of records. Much of this primary source material has been lost to time or destroyed by war. In the rare first edition, there is a one page apology made by Stokes to subscribers of the rare set of works indicating where paper stock was - by necessity of shortage - changed from the original supplier's high grade Holland paper to similar high grade stock due to the exigency of the Great War.
I. N. Phelps Stokes was the scion of a progressive, wealthy turn-of-the century New York family. Leaving Harvard University with a desire to reform housing for the poor, Stokes' first contribution included model housing built not far from the "Five Points" neighborhood of Lower Manhattan: a breeding ground of crime due to over-crowded housing, poverty and disease. His insights into better housing for New York's poor enabled better living conditions through improved sanitation brought by modern building methods, and were shared by reformers such as Jacob Riis, Stanton Coit, Charles B. Stover and Carl Schurz. Stokes' work led to the New York Tenement Housing Law of 1901.
Stokes's three other lasting monuments include St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University; 953 Fifth Avenue – an Italian Renaissance palazzo-style fourteen story apartment building occupying the east side of Fifth Avenue near 76th Street; [2] and 184 Eldridge Street, also by the firm of Stokes and John Mead Howells, which has housed the University Settlement Society of New York since 1898, and is now a landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Stokes's bad real estate investments bankrupted him long after his monumental publishing effort left him in dire straits. Stokes spent his later years working as prints curator at the New York Public Library, specializing in city views.
Manhattan is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the smallest county by geographical area in the U.S. state of New York. Located almost entirely on Manhattan Island near the southern tip of the state, Manhattan constitutes the center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area. Manhattan serves as New York City's economic and administrative center and has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world.
The written history of New York City began with the first European explorer, the Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524. European settlement began with the Dutch in 1608 and New Amsterdam was founded in 1624.
Fort Amsterdam was a fortification on the southern tip of Manhattan Island at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers. The fort and the island were the center of trade and the administrative headquarters for the Dutch and then British/Colonial rule of the colony of New Netherland and thereafter the Province of New York. The fort was the nucleus of the settlement on the island and greater area, which was named New Amsterdam by the first Dutch settlers and eventually renamed New York by the English, and was central to much of New York's early history.
The history of New York City has been influenced by the prehistoric geological formation during the last glacial period of the territory that is today New York City. The area was shortly inhabited by the Lenape; after initial European exploration in the 17th century, the Dutch established New Amsterdam in 1624. In 1664, the British conquered the area and renamed it New York.
The history of New York City (1665–1783) began with the establishment of English rule over Dutch New Amsterdam and New Netherland. As the newly renamed City of New York and surrounding areas developed, there was a growing independent feeling among some, but the area was decidedly split in its loyalties. The site of modern New York City was the theater of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early American Revolutionary War. After that, the city was under British occupation until the end of the war and was the last port British ships evacuated in 1783.
The history of New York City (1784–1854) started with the creation of the city as the capital of the United States under the Congress of the Confederation from January 11, 1785, to Autumn 1788, and then under the United States Constitution from its ratification in 1789 until moving to Philadelphia in 1790. The city grew as an economic center with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825; the growth of its railroads added to its dominance. Tammany Hall began to grow in influence with the support of many Irish immigrants, culminating in the election of the first Tammany mayor, Fernando Wood, in 1854. The city had become the nation's most important port and financial center and competed with Boston as the center of high culture.
The history of New York City (1855–1897) started with the inauguration in 1855 of Fernando Wood as the first mayor from Tammany Hall, an institution that dominated the city throughout this period. Reforms led to the New York City Police Riot of June 1857. There was chaos during the American Civil War, with major rioting in the New York Draft Riots. The Gilded Age brought about prosperity for the city's upper classes amid the further growth of a poor immigrant working class, as well as an increasing consolidation, both economic and municipal, of what would become the five boroughs in 1898.
Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes was an American architect. Stokes was a pioneer in social housing who co-authored the 1901 New York tenement house law. For twenty years he worked on The Iconography of Manhattan Island, a six-volume compilation that became one of the most important research resources about the early development of the city. His designs included St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University and several urban housing projects in New York City. He was also a member of the New York Municipal Arts Commission for twenty-eight years and president for nine of these.
St. Paul's Chapel, on the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University in Manhattan, New York City, is an Episcopal church built in 1903–07 and designed by I. N. Phelps Stokes, of the firm of Howells & Stokes. The exterior is in the Northern Italian Renaissance Revival style while the interior is Byzantine.
Anson Phelps Stokes was a wealthy American merchant, property developer, banker, genealogist and philanthropist. Born in New York City, he was the son of James Boulter Stokes and wife Caroline. His paternal grandfather was London merchant Thomas Stokes, one of the 13 founders of the London Missionary Society. His maternal grandfather, Anson Greene Phelps, was a New York merchant, born in Connecticut and descended from an old Connecticut family.
The Castello Plan – officially entitled Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt – is an early city map of what is now the Financial District of Lower Manhattan from an original of 1660. It was created by Jacques Cortelyou, a surveyor in what was then called New Amsterdam – later renamed by the settlers of the Province of New York settlement as New York City, with its Fort Amsterdam, the center of trade and government. The map that is presently in the New York Public Library is a copy created around 1665 to 1670 by an unknown draughtsman from a lost Cortelyou original.
Jan Evertsz Bout, was an early and prominent Dutch settler in the 17th century colonial province of New Netherland.
The Apthorp Farm occupied the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City between the 18th and early 20th centuries. It straddled the old Bloomingdale Road, laid out in 1728, which was re-surveyed as The "Boulevard" – now Upper Broadway. The Apthorp Farm was the largest block of real estate remaining from the "Bloomingdale District", a rural suburb of 18th-century New York City. Legal disputes between the eventual heirs of the Loyalist Charles Ward Apthorp and purchasers of parcels of real estate held in abeyance the speculative development of the area between 89th and 99th Streets, from Central Park to the Hudson River until final judgment was awarded in July 1910; at that time The New York Times Magazine estimated its worth at US$125 million.
The Sawkill or Saw-kill was the largest hydrological network on Manhattan island in New York City before the Dutch colony of New Netherland was founded in 1624. This 44,980-foot-long (13,710 m) stream began "within four blocks of the Hudson River":
A rill flowing east from the rocky ridge overlooking Bloomingdale Village, which rose near Ninth Avenue and 85th Street, flowed in a southerly direction through Manhattan Square, where it spread into a little pond, and then turned east, crossing Central Park to Fifth Avenue, receiving three tributaries within its limits, two from the north and one from the south. At 75th Street near Third Avenue it was joined by another stream. Near this junction the old Boston Post Road crossed it, and then from this point, the stream ran due east to its outlet near the foot of 75th Street
McGowan's Pass is a topographical feature of Central Park in New York City, just west of Fifth Avenue and north of 102nd Street. It pre-dates the park, and was incorporated into the park's East Drive in the early 1860s, during the park's creation. A steep hill descending into a switchback road, it is a popular training route for competitive bicyclists and runners.
The Land of the Blacks was a village settled by people of African descent north of the wall of New Amsterdam from about 1643 to 1716. It represented an economic, legal and military modus vivendi reached with the Dutch West India Company in the wake of Kieft's War. This buffer area with the native Lenape is sometimes considered the first free African settlement in North America, although the landowners had half-free status. Its name comes from descriptions in 1640s land conveyances of white-owned properties as bordering the hereditament or freehold "of the Blacks".
The land comprising New York City holds approximately 5.2 million trees and 168 different tree species, as of 2020. The New York City government, alongside an assortment of environmental organizations, actively work to plant and maintain the trees. As of 2020, New York City held 44,509 acres of urban tree canopy with 24% of its land covered in trees.
Exchange Place is a street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City. The street runs five blocks between Trinity Place in the west and Hanover Street in the east.
The Manatus Map is a 1639 pictorial map of the New York–New Jersey Harbor Estuary at the time the area was part of the colony of New Netherland. Entitled Manatvs gelegen op de Noort Rivier it shows the geographic features of the region, as well as New Amsterdam and other New Netherland settlements. The map was drafted when Willem Kieft was Director of New Netherland.
Peter Mesier Sr. was an American merchant and politician who served as alderman of New York City's West ward from 1759 to 1763.
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