NEW YORK, NY.- A new exhibition at the Grolier Club explores how a developing New York City was described and depicted for visitors and residents. On view in the Club’s second floor gallery from March 6 through May 10, 2025, Wish You Were Here: Guidebooks, Viewbooks, Photobooks, and Maps of New York City, 1807-1940 features more than 100 objects, including guidebooks, viewbooks, photobooks, maps, and pamphlets, curated by Grolier Club member Mark D. Tomasko from his collection. Highlights include some of the very first guidebooks tracing the growth of the city, street panoramas showing buildings in detail, and photobooks capturing notable moments in the history of the city. An accompanying book is published by the Grolier Club.

“New York City has always intrigued me,” writes Tomasko. “On the day before Christmas, 1969, I purchased a copy of King’s Photographic Views of New York (1895). It had page after page of photos of lower Manhattan commercial buildings… I was fascinated.”

Guidebooks

Wish You Were Here showcases the early guides from 1807 to 1830, as well as many later examples, offering an unparalleled window into the evolution and development of the City. Of special note is Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill’s Picture of New York (1807), considered the first guide to New York City, which covers topography, commercial activity, municipal government and regulations, benevolent organizations, literary institutions, and amusements. Its only illustration is an intaglio-engraved map with some inventive street layouts and a shoreline that does not match the actual island.

One of the first significant New York tourist attractions was the Crystal Palace for America’s first World’s Fair in 1853-54. Humphrey Phelps’s The Lions of New York (1853) guide was aimed at out-of-town visitors, with several pages of warnings such as “Beware of Gamblers!,” “Mock Auctions,” and “Pocketbook Droppers.” Lee Mortimer’s New York Behind the Scenes (1939), billed as “The UNofficial Guide Book, The Real Low-Down on the things you want to know,” has subject headers such as “Young Man in Manhattan,” “Young Lady in Manhattan,” “The Family in Manhattan,” “Girls, Beautiful,” and other categories of advice.

The exhibition also spotlights the work of publisher Moses King (1853-1909), whose King’s Handbook of New York City, first published in 1892, is one of the most comprehensive single volumes on the City in the 19th century. His later King’s Views of New York, luxurious volumes with decorated cloth covers and heavyweight paper, were the ultimate in New York viewbooks. On display are many King’s publications, including a 1908 title page drawing of “King’s Dream of New York,” featuring “THE COSMOPOLIS OF THE FUTURE,” with airships filling the sky over the city.

Panoramas & Special Volumes

Panoramas offer a view of everything on a street or avenue—not just famous or prominent buildings—thus capturing a moment in time in an ever-changing city. Fifth Avenue in 1911 was a street in transition; still predominantly townhouses north of the 50s, but empty lots and apartment buildings were starting to appear. Welles & Co.’s rare street panorama Fifth Avenue New York from Start to Finish (1911) features landscape-view images of buildings all along Fifth Avenue.

The Consolidation of the City of New York in 1898 combined Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx with Manhattan to become the City of New York. On view is E. Idell Zeisloft’s The New Metropolis (1899), the ultimate New York City coffee-table book celebrating the Consolidation, that is extensively illustrated with double-page photographic spreads of various sites, including Union Square and the Lower East Side.

Specialty Guides: Outer Boroughs, Food & Drink, Central Park, and Skyscrapers

The exhibition also features many exceptional examples of specialized guides to new and evolving parts of the city, including:

· Pictorial Bronx (c. 1920s), a promotional publication featuring a photograph of Col. Jacob Rupert and his original Yankee Stadium, and Souvenir Views of Coney Island (c. 1910), an early example of color illustration;

· Where and How to Dine in New York (1903), possibly the first guide to New York restaurants;

· Pocket Map and Visitor’s Guide to Central Park (1859), which describes the newly-opened area of the Ramble but nothing else, as so little of the park had been finished; and

· The Chrysler Building (1930), a souvenir brochure with a silver-embossed image of the building on a black velvet cover—but without any mention in the publication of architect William Van Alen, after a major falling out with Walter Chrysler.

Maps

The exhibition concludes with a selection of maps from Tomasko’s vast collection, with both detailed and fantastical examples. Viele’s Topographical map of the city of New York showing original water courses and made land (1865) is one of very few 19th-century maps of the City that is still used today, as construction contractors reference it for underground streams, a crucial piece of information for building foundations in Manhattan. Also on view is a photograph of an intricate drawing of The Dr. John A. Harriss System, American Multiple Highway (1927), a remarkable proposal for the eternal challenge of traffic congestion in New York City. Visionary traffic authority Dr. Harriss—who had developed the city’s traffic light signal system—thought the city could stack primary avenues and a number of cross streets with a complex elevated road system.