Introduction

During the second half of the nineteenth century two important new ways of visually communicating information became widespread. Lithography allowed for the inexpensive reproduction of images, and detailed atlases recorded the changing city with a new level of accuracy and consistency. Cheap prints spread visual images to a far wider audience than could be reached via painting or engraving, and they created a demand for new kinds of images. New York was both a center for the creation of these images and a common subject in them. The variety of New York scenes helped define how New Yorkers saw themselves and how they understood the city in which they lived. Bird's eye views and images of significant civic or cultural buildings such as City Hall or the Post Office are common, and demonstrate the pride with which New Yorkers perceived their rapidly expanding civic infrastructure. There are also many views that depict a wide variety of private houses, apartment buildings, and squatters camps which also helped define the way that New Yorkers understood their city. While lithographs spread new kinds of images, map-makers were recording the changing landscape of the city with unprecedented detail. Insurance companies demanded to know precisely what they were insuring and new kinds of maps were developed to supply that information. In the early twenty-first century, visual culture is being transformed as well, due in part to the explosion of visual communication that the internet allows. The easy and inexpensive creation and distribution of visual images has generated new types of images and spread existing types further. Maps have also undergone dramatic transformations and become ubiquitous in the early twenty-first century, moving from paper to digital representations. Tools such as Google Maps have promoted an easy familiarity with looking at cities as maps. By combining these nineteenth-century images and maps in the versatile medium of the web, we can see the relationship between the two in ways never before possible, and we can use the dominant communication medium of the twenty-first century to better understand those of the nineteenth.