Is this one of the oldest cityscape photo of New York City? Dating to 1855, according to the New-York Historical Society, it’s definitely in the running. (These photos seem to predate it by a decade or so.)
The photo is a copy of an original photo shot by an unknown photographer looking north from 21st Street and 22nd Street. We’re in antebellum Manhattan, when the avenue is still residential, even country-like. Madison Square had become a city park about a decade earlier; see the bare wintertime trees poking out beyond the high-stooped brownstones.
The church steeple probably belongs to Marble Collegiate Church, opened in 1854 at 29th Street. (The church erected an iron fence to keep livestock off their grounds!) The Fifth Avenue Hotel—mocked for being so far from the rest of the city—is four years away from opening in 1859.
As a child in the 1860s, Edith Wharton lived on 23rd Street just off Fifth Avenue. Her memories of the avenue at that time—which she calls a “placid and uneventful thoroughfare”—offer an idea of what it was like several years earlier:
“The little girl and her father walked up Fifth Avenue; the old Fifth Avenue with its double line of low brown-stone houses, of a desperate uniformity of style, broken only—and surprisingly—by two equally unexpected features: the fenced-in plot of ground where the old Miss Kennedys’ cows were pastured, and the truncated Egyptian pyramid which so strangely served as a reservoir for New York’s water supply,” Wharton wrote in 1934’s A Backward Glance.
What a rare glimpse at pre-Gilded Age New York—before an explosion in population and wealth brought enormous mansions, then a rollicking theater district and shopping emporiums, to this serene section of the city’s most central thoroughfare.
[Photo: New-York Historical Society]
Tags: 1850s Photo Fifth Avenue NYC, 1850s Photo of New York City, Edith Wharton Fifth Avenue 1860s, Oldest Photo Taken in New York City, Oldest Photos of New York City Street Scenes, Photo of New York before Civil War
Ephemeral New York 
January 8, 2024 at 8:38 am |
Hello Esther . . .
What a treasure you have uncovered. It shows the St. Germain Hotel (later the Cumberland Apartments) on the north side of 22nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. That building was put up in 1855 and was the subject of a stereo card that Christopher Gray used to illustrate his article Get Out the Magnifying Glass on 21 September 2014. The building is also shown in a different image in Frederick Lightfootâs Nineteenth Century New York. I wonder what construction work is going on that is blocking Fifth Avenue just south of 23rd Street.
January 8, 2024 at 3:22 pm |
Ah, the St. Germain, I don’t know why I didn’t realize we’re looking at the Flatiron building site from behind. Or the “cowcatcher,” as the site was called in the 1850s, since the plot was shaped like the cowcatcher prod device attached to the front of locomotives:
January 8, 2024 at 9:14 am |
Magnificent and unique! Thank you so much:)
January 8, 2024 at 3:22 pm |
You’re welcome, it’s a treasure of a photo.
January 8, 2024 at 3:45 pm |
I had no idea the Fuller Building was preceded by no less than two not insubstantial buildings.
January 9, 2024 at 3:12 am |
Interesting, easy to forget how undeveloped Manhattan was at that time