It ’s hard for us Google Earth - dependent modern - day humans to conceive of , but there was once a metre when we had to imagine what our town and urban center depend like from the sky . In fact , there were famous artists who specialized in creating these bird’s-eye views of Earth , though today , it ’s a lost art .
They were called panoramic or aero view , and theLibrary of Congress actually has a collectiondevoted to almost 2,000 of these Google Earth - style maps , each drawn by hand without help from a plane or artificial satellite . Even though the bird ’s oculus horizon had live for centuries , panoramic maps were all the craze with Americans of the late 19th 100 . After all , the state was just emerging out of the wreckage of the Civil War . Their city were climbing upwards and outwards at an incredible charge per unit .
The idea of seeing all this change at once — from the sky — was implausibly alluring .
The maker of these map took the truth of their creations very gravely . InPanoramic map of Cities in the United States and Canada , the historian John R. Hébert and Patrick E. Dempsey excuse the mathematical function extensively , including how they were made . They say the artist would walk through the street of his subject , noting every detail available , from the localisation of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree to how many window each building had . They would create a kind of proxy mathematical function using their note , and only take off absorb once they had a all over survey .
Newark - New Jersey in 1916 , draw by T. J. Shepherd Landis . Salt Lake City , Utah in 1891 by Henry Wellge , published by American Publishing Co. Birds oculus sight of Virginia City , Storey County , Nevada , by Augustus Koch in 1840 .
The curiousness of these maps speak to people — and in some cases , it even made them suspicious .
The grandpa of panoramic maps , a man named Thaddeus M. Fowler , was thrown in jail during World War I after residents of Allentown , Pennsylvania , mistrust the alien sketching their town was actually a German spy . Dempsey and Hébert saythat Fowler includedtwo airplanes and a zeppelinto give mass the false impression that the map had been drawn with help from the technical wonders of the twenty-four hour period , which probably did n’t facilitate his casing .
Boston bird’s - center view from the north by John Bachmann , issue by L. Prang & Co. , circa 1877 . New York drawn by John Bachmann and George Schlegel in 1874 . The city of New Orleans , and the Mississippi River Lake Pontchartrain in distance , by Currier & Ives in 1885 .
The United States was on its way to becoming a superpower , and these terrific , wholesale visions of its cities were the best way to show them off .
“ The citizen could view with superbia his straightaway environment and point out his own place to guests , since the map artist , for a suited fee , accommodatingly include illustrations of individual homes as inset to the main city plan , ” say Dempsey and Hébert . “ No other graphical form of this era so in effect capture the vitality of America ’s urban centers . ”
San Francisco , formerly Yerba Buena , in 1846 - 7 , “ before the discovery of amber . ” suck by Bosqui Eng . & Print . Co. and published in 1884 . Birds - eye - persuasion of Seattle and environs King County , Wash. , drawn by Augustus Koch in 1891 . Pikes Peak panorama by Henry Wellge , write by American Publishing Co. in 1890 .
On a single-valued function of Denver , dark heater clouds bluster from trains that run alongside a gridwork of empty game , just waiting for enterpriser to photograph them up . A map of Newark shows the untested city in the foreground , punctuate the many roadways that lead to New York City , outstanding in the background . Chicago ’s already heavy rat ’s nest of railways and terminals are highlighted in fire locomotive red as they snake from Lake Michigan out into the Midwest .
Everywhere , there ’s growth and construction , half - finished streets that fade into the distance , just waiting to be extended . At the same , these artist clear wanted to include evidence of the unbelievable lifelike beauty around them — pink and yellow swarm surge on the horizon , green , rolling battleground seem to extend for day , even the busy lakes and river glimmer below the thickets of ships .
Terminals of the Chicago and North - Western Railway at Chicago by Geo . H. Walker & Co. , put out in 1902 . Wauwatosa and the western suburbs of Milwaukee 1892 , by Marr & Richards Engraving Co. in 1892 . Depew , New York , by Matthews - Northrup Company in circa 1898 .
It ’s really , really easy to lose yourself in these maps . And once you ’ve looked at them for long enough , you part to understand just how dissimilar America must have seemed to the people who poured over them . The promise of dateless emergence , dateless industry — the lifelike resource at manus seemed like they would last constantly .
look at some of the contingent today , it ’s easy to see the urban patterns that would rear their ugly heads a century later , as some cities regress and emptied out , allow for the power grid empty again . In a weird way , these maps are like archaeological document — a geological photo of our city , frozen in ink and paint instead of rock .
We know what will happen as the cities continue to sprawl and grow . It was n’t pretty . These map are a coup d’oeil to an imagined , and deplorably very amiss , future where both growth and resources would last forever .
Check out the fullLibrary of Congress collection , or study the entire essay by Dempsey and Héberthere .
extend image : Bird’s - eye view of Washington , D.C. , by H. H. Green and publish by Matthews Northrup Works in 1916 . All image from the Library of Congress , Geography and Maps Division .
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