Prefiguring

That’s a low-resolution scan of the Ratzer map of New York. Bernard Ratzer was, as it says in the dedication on the upper left, a lieutenant in the Royal American Regiment, also known as the 60th Regiment, of the British army. The map was made for the governor of the New York province, based on Razter’s surveys of 1766 and 1767, and published in 1770. Relations between Britain and the North American colonies were already deteriorating by then, and it is likely that this map was in use by some portions of the royal army and navy during the 1776 military invasion and occupation of New York and the surrounding areas. Here’s a related map of the central portion:

The red shading indicates the area burned in the Great Fire of September 20, 1776, five days after the British captured New York. The burned areas included the commercial heart of the city (the South Ward) and most of the high-end residential West Ward. The city at that time had a population of about 25,000, and the destruction from the fire made the next seven years, under occupation, significantly worse than they would otherwise have been.

But what draws me to this map is not the fire but how much of the present was there, in one form or another, in that small port city. In no particular order:

• The most noticeable street is broadway, running straight up the spine of the island, in the direction that New Yorkers call north. The star fort at the foot of Broadway is Fort George, formerly Fort Amsterdam. It almost certainly was not quite as regular as shown here; its remains are under the Customs House.
• You can just make out Bowling Green between Broadway and the fort, incorrectly shown as a trapezoid when its surrounding fence was already an oval.
• Whitehall Street and Broad Street, on the west and east sides of the burned portion of the South Ward are unchanged, as are a number of the cross streets a bit further north. The first Trinity Church burned in the fire – the extant building is the third Trinity Church – but the location on the west side of Broadway facing the head of Wall Street hasn’t changed.
• Queen Street, meandering northeast, is Pearl Street. It had been named that by the Dutch for the oysters beds along the riverfront, where the street was in the early seventeenth century; it got the name back after 1783. Further out on landfill, Dock Street and Water Street were eventually combined.
• The triangle to the north where the city splits in two, with parts near each river, is the future City Hall Park. Park Row is not yet named such because there was not yet a park.
• Corlears Hook is another Dutch name still in use now after the British colonial name, Crown Point, was abandoned.
• I could keep this up for another ten pages, but there’s one more item that absolutely has to be pointed out. The “Fresh Water” between Broadway and “Bowery Lane” is the Collect Pond. It was indeed a source of fresh water for the early city, but it did not remain so: if you look just to its south you can see the “Tan Yards” and there is nothing like tanning leather to pollute water. What had been the cleanest water available to the early city gradually became unusable and the pond was eventually drained and filled, becoming Foley Square.