Wish You Were Here: Guidebooks, Viewbooks, Photobooks, and Maps of New York City, 1807-1940
March 6 – May 10, 2025
Second Floor Gallery
New York City has always intrigued me. Born in Brooklyn, and growing up in the suburbs, with a father who worked at Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, I became familiar with Midtown Manhattan, working there several summers. The era of postwar New York was drawing to a close. The elevated railroads came down in Manhattan between 1938 and 1955; Pennsylvania Station was lost in the 1960s, and the old seaport area of small commercial buildings on the outer parts of the Financial District, particularly on the east side, was destined to largely disappear.
On the day before Christmas, 1969, I purchased a copy of King’s Photographic Views of New York/A Souvenir Companion to King’s Handbook of New York City (1895). It had page after page of photos of lower Manhattan commercial buildings (I later discovered that most such photos do not appear in the regular tourist viewbooks). I was fascinated. It started my New York City collecting, documenting the physical growth and development of the City in the 19th and 20th centuries. Guidebooks, viewbooks, photobooks, maps, real estate atlases, directories, building brochures and prospectuses, municipal reports, and a wide variety of ephemera were all items I sought.
The exhibition provides a look at the guidebooks, viewbooks, and some maps that visitors and residents would use to learn about, navigate, and remember the City. There are also some unusual photobooks and specialty volumes, such as Zeisloft’s The New Metropolis, a large commemorative volume celebrating the Consolidation of New York City in 1898, and two street panoramas, Both Sides of Broadway and Fifth Avenue New York from Start to Finish, that add to the story of how New York was depicted. Also in this category is the Guild and Perkins book of 1864, Central Park, a remarkable photographic record of the Park in its earliest days.
The Grolier Club is a most suitable place for exhibitions of New York books, prints, and documents. A number of the early members of the Club were interested in New York City history, foremost of which was William Loring Andrews who published some beautifully printed small volumes on certain aspects of New York City history. The Society of Iconophiles, heavily populated by Grolier members, produced multiple series of small edition historical New York City prints, which are another indication of the interest in New York City history in the early years of the Grolier Club.
Mark D. Tomasko, Curator