Broadway and City Hall
1818
Baron Axel Klinköwstrom (1775-1847)
Watercolor, 15x22
Inscribed in lower margin: Original watercolor drawing by Baron Klinköwstrom / Broadway-gatan och Radhuset, New York
Bequest of Mrs. J. Insley Blair in memory of Mr. and Mrs. J. Insley Blair, 52.100.8

Swedish Baron Axel Klinköwstrom (alternatively spelled Klinckowström) visited New York City in 1818 as part of a two-year trip to study American steamboats for use in his country. Although he found that some aspects of the city compared poorly with his native Stockholm - dirty streets and rough manners, for example - he came to admire American political ideals.

The Baron, an accomplished amateur watercolorist, recorded views of the places he visited. In 1824 he compiled these in an "atlas publication" accompanied by a book of letters originally written to his friend Admiral Count Claes Cronstedt in Sweden. These two volumes provided his fellow Swedes with abundant information about New York City and the rapidly expanding young nation it represented.

This view looks north along Broadway from St. Paul's Chapel, a narrow segment of which is visible on the extreme left. Vesey Street is just beyond. On the northwest corner of Vesey Street stands a house occupied in 1819 by a merchant named Elijah Secor. Just beyond, 221 Vesey Street housed, on the first floor, another merchant firm, Ryerson and Thompson; in the upper stories Daniel Fraser probably operated a boarding house.¹ John Jacob Astor owned the third house from the corner. On the right, beyond the park named for it, rises City Hall, the architectural masterpiece of Joseph F. Mangin and John McComb, Jr., completed in 1812. Curiously, despite his generally accurate descriptions of the area, the Baron depicted a cross on the City Hall cupola rather than the wooden figure of Justice, designed by John Dixey and installed in 1813.²

Klinköwstrom concentrated on the picturesque qualities of the City Hall neighborhood, enlivening the scene with a diversity of vehicles and portrayals of fashionable promenaders. He described his enthusiasm for the area: "Of all the streets, the one called Broadway is the finest and the widest. & About one-third of the way up from the Battery is a large enclosed triangle planted with magnificent trees. Here is the City Hall, built in a cheerful, attractive style &. You will see the current fashion in clothes and carriages from the useful buggy to the modest wheelbarrow which a licensed porter uses to carry a traveler's baggage to the harbor. Broadway is the most popular promenade where all the new styles are first seen and admired."³

Pigs, whose tendency to roam freely about New York City's streets annoyed Baron Klin-köwstrom, appear in the drawing later engraved for the Baron's atlas. Even cleansed of this evidence of local color, however, Klinköwstrom's watercolor provides valuable physical information about Federal-era New York. He has documented, for example, the lampposts in front of St. Paul's, used only until the 1827 introduction of gaslight. Sidewalks of "flatt Stones" and stretches of unpaved roadway also convey the city's small-town appearance in that early period.⁴

Notes:

 1  I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1918), vol. 3, p. 564.

 2  See ibid., p. 586. According to Margo Gayle and Michelle Cohen, Guide to Manhattan's Outdoor Sculpture (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), pp. 43 -44, this first figure burned in 1858 and was replaced by a second wooden figure in May 1860. That one was removed in 1887, and a new one of bronze, designed by an unknown sculptor and fabricated by William H. Mullins Company, and which remains to this day, was installed on November 3 of that year.

 3  Franklin D. Scott, trans. and ed., Baron Klinköwstrom's America, 1818 -1820 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1952), pp. 60 -61.

 4  Stokes, in The Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1922), vol. 4, p. 1280, quotes from an order of the Common Council to property owners to pave unfinished sidewalks with "Flatt Stones or Bricks."