A Dip Into New York City’s Most Valued but Least Understood Real Estate — NYC Department of Records & Information Services

The collection includes a diverse set of drawings and related materials, but the core materials are hand-inked maps measuring approximately 27” x 40”, drawn to a scale of 1”:50’, with annotations linking them to a collection of surveyor’s notebooks. Many of the maps (which have all been physically conserved) show evidence of heavy use. The maps’ margins have in some cases literally crumbled away—alarming to the archivist, but evidence of the heavy use to which they were put.

The collection has not been analyzed to determine exactly how much of New York’s 500 miles of waterfront is represented.  Some of the most heavily industrialized neighborhoods, such as Newtown Creek on the Queens/Brooklyn border, appear in numerous maps.  An interactive map that locates each map in the collection on a contemporary digital map, as has been done(4) for the Municipal Archives’ collection of 1940s tax photos,(5) would be very helpful (interns, take note!)

To illustrate the extraordinary detail in these maps and their potential value, let’s look at a stretch of waterfront that is perhaps not the first that come to mind as one of the city’s most active or interesting shorelines: the Hudson River shore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, starting around 59th Street and extending eight miles uptown to the northern tip of the island.

Ever since this stretch was reconfigured by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in the late 1930s as part of his West Side Improvement Project using 25 million Depression-Era dollars secured from the Roosevelt Administration, as vividly recounted by Robert Caro in The Power Broker, the Upper West Side has worked to regain access to its waterfront.  Moses doesn’t deserve all the blame—the Hudson River Railroad built tracks that hugged the river in 1849,(6) removing access to the water except for a handful of pedestrian bridges and dangerous grade-level crossings. The result was a mashup of industrial and recreational establishments that waxed and waned until Moses imperiously put an end to them all in 1934, reconfiguring Riverside Park, burying the railroad tracks under the park, and constructing the West Side Highway to facilitate access by car and truck to midtown and downtown Manhattan from the outer boroughs and suburbs. The Waterfront Survey Maps collection includes an overlapping series of drawings that span this stretch of Manhattan and reveal a fascinating set of long-forgotten features.

For example, the Hudson River Park and Greenway that now grace the shoreline starting at West 60th Street lie on top of an extraordinary feat of engineering: at least half a dozen piers and dozens of train tracks fanning out from an enormous railroad roundhouse near 72nd Street that distributed train cars arriving from upstate as well as those that were floated across the river from New Jersey and hoisted off their barges at the Transfer Bridges whose ruined remains can still be seen in the water off 69th Street. Only vestiges of this industrial complex have been preserved, but the Survey Maps shows it in exquisite detail.