City Hotel, Broadway, New York

This bustling urban scene features the City Hotel (Gardner & Packer being the proud proprietors, as the print proclaims), which was located on the west side of Broadway in lower Manhattan. The City Hotel (begun in 1794) was the first building erected specifically for use as a hotel in the United States; this lithograph obviously helped to advertise the hotel as a well-situated establishment where visitors could stay. In 1849, it was demolished so that more commercial shops could be built on its site. The image also shows a street filled with a crowd watching a marching band parading near horse-drawn trolleys (one identified as the Bleecker & Broadway Knickerbocker Line, and the other marked "Union Place 14th Street"). At the far left is Trinity Church, located at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street; this view shows its third building (designed by Richard Upjohn, architect, and consecrated in 1846) with its tall elegant steeple rising above trees and the five-story hotel building. For national and international audiences, this print helped to promote New York City as an energetic, enterprising and prosperous city where businesses and religious freedom thrived.


Nathaniel Currier, who established a successful New York-based lithography firm in 1835, produced thousands of prints in various sizes that together create a vivid panorama of mid-to-late nineteenth century American life and its history. This is a fine example of a lithograph featuring a scene in lower Manhattan in the 1840s. Later, Nathaniel included his brother Charles in the business, and in 1857, Currier made James Merritt Ives (Charles's brother-in-law) a business partner to handle financial matters. People eagerly acquired Currier & Ives lithographs of city views, picturesque scenery, rural life, ships, railroads, portraits, hunting and fishing scenes, domestic life and numerous other subjects, as an inexpensive way to decorate their homes or business establishments. While most of lithographs produced by Currier & Ives were printed in black ink and then hand-colored by by women who worked for the company, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Currier & Ives began to print in color.




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