View from Montague Street, Brooklyn
(also exhibited as View of Brooklyn from Montague Street and View of Brooklyn from Pierrpont Street) c. 1850
Artist unknown
Watercolor, 154/5 X 20
The J. Clarence Davies Collection, 29.100.1318

 

Long recorded as an 1830s view of New York Harbor and Manhattan Island from the end of Montague Street in Brooklyn, this scene has been newly identified as depicting the building of a stone arch erected in the early 1850s across Montague by Minard Lafever (quite possibly the elegantly attired gentleman at the right, pointing at the arch).¹ Lafever, designer of Brooklyn's Church of the Saviour, Holy Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church, and Packer Collegiate Institute, and of Manhattan's Old Merchant's House and St. James Roman Catholic Church, died in 1854.² Because the painting shows no evidence of a landing slip for the ferry between Wall Street in Manhattan and Montague Street, established in 1852, this view and the arch it depicts probably were both made slightly earlier, about the time Montague Street took definite form (it had previously been a series of smaller paths crossing private estates).³

In the foreground, a top-hatted, coatless stone-cutter works on one of the large slabs assembled for the arch. Perhaps he is shaping the keystone that will brace the small arch, allowing removal of the temporary wooden support shown in place. Or he may be trimming a stone for the unfinished wall along the right side of the street, where it descends to the shore of the East River. Atop the arch, three men appear to work on some other aspect of the construction.

Beyond the busy harbor can be seen the Manhattan shoreline, along which the identifiable buildings are the large white United States Barge Office (see plate 27) and, at the southernmost tip, Castle Clinton. Further in the distance are the hills of New Jersey along the west shore of the Hudson River.

Notes:

  1  The Costume Department of the Museum has assigned an 1850s date to the clothes of the figure at the right.

  2  Kenneth Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 610 -611. Clay Lancaster, in New York's First Suburb: Old Brooklyn Heights (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1961), p. 135, writes that Lafever built the arch during the mid-1850s, but Lafever's death in 1854 mandates an earlier date.

  3  Lancaster, New York's First Suburb, p. 135.