Manhattan in Maps explores the island's urban and social history through rare and beautiful maps produced during the last four hundred years and collected from archives throughout the world. Each color plate accompanies an essay on the changing and social contours of New York as read in the map's details and origin. Included are early Italian and Spanish maps, maps of the city under Dutch and British rule, New York as capital of the United States, the development of the Manhattan grid in the 19th century and unusual 20th century mappings of vice areas and ethnic groups. Here then is the story of Manhattan as it was, as it is, and even as it might have been.
Maps tell the story.
All the output of all the journalists who have written about Manhattan does not succeed half as well.