• Title : Plan of the City of New York, In North America. Surveyed in the Years 1766 & 1767....For Dt Valentines manual...1854
• Size: 22in x 17in (560mm x 430mm)
• Condition: (A) Very Good Condition
• Date : 1854
• Ref #:  35103

Description:
This beautiful original lithograph antique map & view of New York City was engraved by George Hayward in 1854 - dated - after the famous 1770 map by Bernard Ratzer, was published in the 1854 edition of David Thomas Valentines Manual of the Corporation of The City of New York
The original Ratzer map routinely sells in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. The last complete copy offered publicly was the Ford Foundation example, varnished and laid on board, made more than $100,000 at auction.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: -
Colors used: -
General color appearance: -
Paper size: - 22in x 17in (560mm x 430mm)
Plate size: - 22in x 17in (560mm x 430mm)
Margins: - Min 1/4in (5mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light creasing
Plate area: - Light creasing, map re-joined along left fold, no loss
Verso: - Light creasing, map re-joined along left fold, no loss

Background: 
This map & view of New York city, a re-issue of 1770, shows accurately the distribution of settlement on the south end of Manhattan Island as well as the farms on the island and on Long Island and New Jersey.
The English had renamed the colony the Province of New York, after the kings brother James, Duke of York and on June 12, 1665 and appointed Thomas Willett the first of the Mayors of New York city. The city grew northward and remained the largest and most important city in the Province of New York, becoming the third largest in the British Empire after London and Philadelphia.
The Dutch regained the colony briefly in 1673, then finally lost it permanently to the English in 1674 after the Third Anglo-Dutch War.
Leislers Rebellion, an uprising in which militia captain Jacob Leisler seized control of lower New York from 1689 to 1691, occurred in the midst of England\'s Glorious Revolution. It reflected colonial resentment against King James II, who in the 1680s decreed the formation of the provinces of New York, New Jersey and the Dominion of New England as royal colonies, with New York City designated as the capital. Royal authority was restored in 1691 by English troops sent by James successor, William III.
New York was cosmopolitan from the beginning, established and governed largely as a strategic trading post. One visitor during the early revolutionary period wrote that the inhabitants are in general brisk and lively, the women were handsome, he recorded—as did others new to the city—though, he added, it rather hurts a European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the streets. There were numerous marriages of people from different ethnic groups. Joyce Goodfriends study of colonial New York City, for instance, suggests that many interracial marriages occurred more because of a lack of opportunity to marry within their own group than a desire to marry outside it. ...over 60% of Englishmen in the New York capital in the late 17th century married women of non-English origins. However, by the 1730s over three fourths of the Dutch men and women still married within their own groups, though by this point there was a generation of children of mixed European ancestry. Freedom of worship was part of the citys foundation, and the trial for libel in 1735 of John Peter Zenger, editor of the New-York Weekly Journal established the principle of freedom of the press in the British colonies. Sephardic Jews expelled from Dutch Brazil after Portuguese recapture, were welcome in New York when the governor realized their value and gave them exemptions from restrictions on Jews.
The New York Slave Insurrection of 1741 raised accusations of arson and conspiracy. Many slaves were executed on unclear charges.
The city was the base for British operations in the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years War) from 1754-1763. That conflict united the colonies for the first time in common defense and moreover eliminated the main military threat that the colonists had relied upon Britain to defend them from. When two years after the conclusion of that war in 1765, the British Parliament imposed a Stamp Act to augment local expenditures for defending the colonies, delegates from nine colonies met to protest at what would later be known as Federal Hall on Manhattan for the Stamp Act Congress.
The Sons of Liberty, a secret and sometimes violent patriot group, formed chapters in New York and other cities and frightened the royal officials. The Sons engaged in a running conflict with British authority in the city over the raising of liberty poles in prominent public locations (see Battle of Golden Hill), from the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 until rebel control of the city in 1775. The poles, often when a signal device such as a red cap was placed atop the pole, served as rallying points for public assemblies to protest against the colonial government. The city was the main location of organized political resistance in the form of the Committee of Sixty and then later the New York Provincial Congress. Following the first reading of the Declaration of Independence, the statue of King George III in Bowling Green was torn down and melted into musket balls. The city, however, was a hotbed of Royal fervor and probably held a larger proportion of Tories than any other place in the colonies before hostilities—though likely still short of a majority.
General George Washington and his troops moved in to defend Manhattan and New York Harbor in 1776. Prior to roughly one-third of New York City\'s population fleeing the expected combat, the Continental Army came upon a grand city of wealth, a bustling center of commerce, shipbuilding and maritime trade. The city had been built for seafaring transit and trade, and Manhattan\'s only connection to the mainland was the narrow, wooden King\'s bridge over the Harlem River, nearly 11 miles north of the city and ferries across the North (Hudsons) River. Most of the population of 20,000 was crowded into an area of less than a square mile near the East River wharves and the New York Harbor.
The city\'s traders, stock brokers, and mariners brought with them great wealth. Henry Knox wrote his wife admiring New Yorkers magnificent horse carriages and fine furniture, but condemning their want of principle, pride and conceit, profaneness, and insufferable Toryism. Manhattans free-wheeling ways did create an environment of loose tongues and loose women. A young Presbyterian chaplain worried what the consequences might be to the American cause of so many of all ranks so habitually taking the name of the Lord in vain. But alas, swearing abounds, all classes swear, he lamented.
The abundance of prostitutes in New York City—an estimated at 500 women plying their trade in 1776 —was particularly distressing for many of the Continental soldiers of a Puritan bent, George Washington included. From Lieutenant Isaac Bangs of Massachusetts comes one of the most complete accounts of prostitution in revolutionary America; he had a medical degree from Harvard and took it upon himself to tour the brothel district to inspect the health conditions of the neighborhood and investigate the seedy side of the city that so worried General Washington. He was absolutely appalled by the women of the bawdy houses, who, he thought, nothing could exceed them in impudence and immodesty, but the more I became acquainted with them, the more they excelled in their brutality.
April 22, barely a week after the Continental Army arrived in the city, two soldiers were found dead hidden in a bordello, one corpse castrated in a barbarous manner, Bangs reported. Soldiers went on a rampage in the brothel district in furious retaliation. General Washington condemned all such riotous behavior and ordered military patrols in the district, a strict curfew, and other restrictions. General Washington understood the crucial strategic importance of New York and its waterways to the war effort, but ...had seen enough of New York on prior visits to dislike and distrust the city as the most sinful place in America, a not uncommon view.

David Thomas Valentine 1801 - 1869; One of the great New Yorkers of the nineteenth century. Mr. Valentine was a clerk within New York City\'s common council for over thirty years. During the course of that time, Mr. Valentine published annually, a statistical and historical reference book he called the Manual of the Corporation of The City of New York.
A quiet, unobtrusive, apolitical civil servant, he was regarded as the city\'s primary historian of the time.

Ratzer, Bernard 
Bernard Ratzer was a British cartographer, best known for his 18th-century maps of early New York City. Today, his name is invoked as something of a Da Vinci of New York cartography, as his best known work was the 1770 Plan of the City of New York.
Ratzer was a British Army officer who spent his time in America working as a surveyor and draftsman. He was, in particular, assigned to survey Americas eastern coastline during the French and Indian War and later into the early stages of the American Revolution. He worked alongside his more well-known contemporaries Claude J. Sauthier, Samuel Holland and Thomas Jefferys.
One of his earliest drafts of the Plan of the City of New York, which shows in great detail many of the times most famous landmarks in addition to a small illustration of Manhattan as seen from Governors Island, was given to George III, Englands king, as a gesture from the publishers.
A fourth version of Ratzers most famous map was recently found in a Connecticut storage facility and was restored in 2011 for the Brooklyn Historical Society.
A librarian at Harvard University discovered a 1769 Ratzer map showing the disputed border between New York and New Jersey. The Harvard libraries made this map publicly available in early 2016