Two plates, as made
New York
Bird's-eye illustration / lithograph beside street photograph. Do not treat them as the same kind of evidence.
1873·New York
New York — Battery Park and the East River
George Schlegel, artist; George Degen, publisher.
Bird's-eye illustration / lithograph
What this plate shows
A colored lithograph looking north from the harbor: Battery Park in the foreground, Manhattan’s dense blocks, the East River, and a completed-looking Brooklyn Bridge at right. The bridge opened in 1883. Record the sheet as printed in 1873/74 — a drawn overview that includes a span the camera could not yet have as finished.
- Image type
- Bird's-eye illustration / lithograph
- Source
- Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, PGA. Restored scan on Wikimedia Commons.
- License
- Public domain (filed 1873; LOC also dates a state 1874).
1902·New York
Flatiron Building, Fifth Avenue and Broadway
Detroit Photographic Co.
Street photograph · Surviving
What this plate shows
The completed Flatiron photographed from the street: the prow at Twenty-third, carriages, a clock, the new tower filling the view. A camera at ground level, 1902. Not the 1873 harbor lithograph. Early steel-frame construction as a physical object, not as a skyline argument.
- Image type
- Street photograph
- Structure
- Flatiron Building (Fuller Building)
- Region
- North America
- Documented completion
- 1902
- Architect
- Daniel Burnham; D. H. Burnham & Co.
- Present status
- Surviving — The building still stands. Steel frame, stone and terracotta skin.
- Source
- New York Public Library, Image ID 804860. Gelatin silver print issued 1902.
- License
- Public domain.