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1800s NYC Watercolor Captures Life On Greenwich Street
By
Madeleine Viljoen, NYPL
Published Dec 20, 2020
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By
Madeleine Viljoen, NYPL
Published Dec 20, 2020
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To contemporary viewers more familiar with the intersection of Greenwich and Dey Streets as the site of today’s 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the view pictured in this early nineteenth-century drawing may seem virtually unrecognizable.
Created in January 1810 by Anne-Marguérite-Henriette Rouillé de Marigny, Baroness Hyde de Neuville, the drawing offers a lively view of the streets’ low brick buildings against which the quotidian experiences of nameless New Yorkers unfold, including the couple we glimpse above a half-swinging Dutch door way attending to their child at play.
Married to royalist Jean Guillaume, Baron Hyde de Neuville, the Baroness fled France with her husband after the French Revolution, settling in the United States from 1807 through 1820 where they lived variously in New York City, New Jersey and Washington D.C. Largely self-taught, the Baroness produced a singular body of drawings of the peoples and sights she experienced in the early American republic.
As part of our month-long Dear NYC series, we're looking at New York City gems hidden away at the New York Public Library. The NYPL’s four research centers offer the public access to over 55 million items, including rare books, manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs, prints, maps, ephemera, and more. Integral to these robust collections is the Library’s extensive material related to New York City, and as NY works to come together, cope, heal and recover from the 2020 pandemic, economic uncertainty, and the many issues that divide us, it is important to look at that history and remember: New York is resilient. New York is strong. New York has seen its share of hard times. And, as always, with Patience and Fortitude (the names given to the Library’s beloved lions in 1933 by Mayor LaGuardia for the virtues New Yorkers needed to get through the Great Depression) we will get through it, together.
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Dear NYC
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Madeleine Viljoen, NYPL
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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