Panoramas

A Pictorial Description of Broadway.
New York: The Evening Mail and Express, [1899].

A chromolithographic panorama of Broadway, from Bowling Green to 59th Street. Panoramas offer a view of everything on a street or avenue, not just famous or prominent buildings as most viewbooks do. And lithography makes color reasonable, even if the details and features of the buildings are not as precise as photography would be. The contrast of this volume with Both Sides of Broadway shows the tradeoff. Unfortunately the book was not printed on quality paper, and has a long oblong size, two factors that negatively affect its long-term survival.

[Burton F. Welles]. Fifth Avenue New York from Start to Finish 1911.
New York: Welles & Co. 1 W. 34th St., 1911

Fifth Avenue in 1911 was a street entering a transition. While it was still predominantly townhouses in the 50s northward, there were empty lots in a number of places, and apartment buildings were starting to appear.

Fifth Avenue was published a year after Both Sides of Broadway. The two volumes are quite different in size and arrangement. In Fifth Avenue everything is shown landscape style, but many of the buildings have the tops cut off, with only the ﬁrst or ﬁrst several ﬂoors visible. Broadway has some pages portrait style and others landscape, which is a challenge, but results in better photographs. There is no advertising in Fifth Avenue. Both merchants and residents are noted at the bottom of each page, and there is an alphabetical listing of merchants and residents (with addresses) at the end.

Both Sides of Broadway.
New York: The De Leeuw Riehl Publishing Company, 19 Union Square, n.d. [c. 1910].

This remarkable panorama offered the possibility of documenting New York’s major avenues. It provides good photographs of every block on Broadway from Bowling Green to Columbus Circle, 504 pages, for 50 cents. There are many advertisements, including for the book itself, and De Leeuw Riehl’s plans to do similar volumes for other main avenues. The fact that the book is very scarce today and that no other De Leeuw Riehl street panoramas were produced suggests that it was not a success. In parts of Broadway, such as the area in Soho, buildings are little changed today from what appears in the book. Other areas, especially in Midtown, are completely changed. Broadway in the high 40s to the high 50s was the automobile district in the early years of the 20th century, and many of the pioneer automotive companies’ establishments can be seen in the book. Hardly anything of that heritage, except for the Studebaker building, survives. Such auto showrooms as exist in Manhattan are mostly on 11th Avenue now.