This Actual Map and Comparative Plans Showing 88 years growth of the City of New York Is inscribed to the Citizens by the Proprietor, David Longworth

This rare plan of New York City, centered on Lower Manhattan below 14th Street, was produced as a celebration of what the city had become, a recognition of what it had been, and a glimpse into its future. The map renders the city’s early-19th-century layout in precise detail and highlights civic improvements through illustrations of City Hall, the Asylum, the New York Hospital, the New York Institution, and the City Hotel. The remarkable growth of the modern city is reinforced by the reproduction at lower left of one of the most recognizable maps of a bucolic early Manhattan, the 1729 Lyne plan of the city. The inclusion of the proposed expansion of the city above 14th Street in the 1817 map reinforces how the growth achieved between the creation of these two maps signified only the beginning of what the city would become.