That is a rather insanely-detailed engraving titled “Bird’s-eye view of lower Manhattan” from 1915. Even at the reduced scale I can post here, its accuracy is good, from Castle Clinton at the front of Battery Park, looking vaguely like a railroad roundhouse, to One Broadway (the dark high-rise near the center of the image) with its oddly-undersized cupola, to the liner steaming down the Hudson (either the Mauretania or the sister-ship Lusitania, as this engraving was probably created before the Lusitania was sunk), to Pier A (the last pier at the bottom right of the row along the Hudson), to the Whitehall Building(s) at the foot of West Street. I would say there’s some lousy seamanship and piloting being demonstrated, but this kind of image almost always exaggerates the size of ships and boats relative to everything else, so it probably wasn’t that bad in real life.
But 1915 is awfully late for such an image to be published.
“Bird’s eye” is a literal description of what was meant by such pictures, and they’ve been around a long time. By a combination of using high vantage points, maps, and imagination, artists have always been able to show us what our world looks like to birds flying far above us. This type of engraving was quite popular in mid- and late-1800s America, as a way to show off rapidly-growing cities and transportation infrastructure. By that time, both the use of drawings or engravings and the need to imagine the scene from above were technically no longer true, as hot-air balloons pre-date the nineteenth century and the use of photography was in full swing by the middle of the century. Old photographs took some time, but in broad daylight, reasonably short exposures could be made. So the technology for something more accurate was theoretically available, but it took time for the change to occur.
According to the New York Public Library, the first aerial photograph of New York was taken from a balloon in 1906:
The flight was a stunt by Collier’s and published in their August 4, 1906 issue with a length description of the trip. Apparently the artistic blurring of the photo comes, in part, from dropping the negative in salt water. In any case, this balloon flight took place after the true game-changer: the first Wright flight was two years earlier. In 1909, the Wrights did demonstration flights over New York Harbor; in 1910, Glenn Curtiss flew from Albany to New York; and aerial photography of the area followed shortly after.
A generational change in technology can be seen in many ways, but it often shows up in language. “Bird’s eye views” gave way to “aerial photography”.
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