Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  In this section, as in all aspects of the Iconography, Newton combined the pinpointing of landmarks with an effort to convey a human story. On a wide lot fronting on Pearl Street, we are told, once appeared the “palatial residence” of Robert Livingston, with a “high roof and two stacks of chimneys.” (This is the same Livingston house from which Saint-Mémin created his view.) Captain William Kidd, whose relations with Livingston were “very close,” had transferred the mansion to Livingston in 1693, when times were tough for the pirate. The Iconography exhaustively documents every house that can be identified in “A South Prospect of ye Flourishing City.”

  In spring 1911, at the recommendation of the preeminent historian J. Franklin Jameson, Newton hired a courtly older gentleman named Victor Paltsits to research and write material for another growing section of the book, referred to simply as the Chronology. Paltsits served as New York’s state historian, but his term was coming to an end. Newton had decided that he needed “some thoroughly trained and experienced person who will take, with such help and guidance as I am able to give, the whole responsibility for completing the Chronology during the next few months.”

  In much the same way as the Iconography burst its bounds, the Chronology itself would explode over the years, to become a minutely detailed account of New York from 1500 on, drawn at Newton’s insistence almost exclusively from primary sources. This was history red in tooth and claw, a priceless, tireless record of the life of the greatest city in the world.

  The work required dogged research. There were, Stokes reported to Jameson, “some gaps which it will require ingenuity, as well as perseverance, to fill.” Paltsits commuted to Philadelphia, Washington, Worcester, Boston and Providence to unearth documents and otherwise do Newton’s obsessive bidding. Soon he would venture farther afield, on a mission worthy of the finest spy tale.

  A brother-and-sister team, Jennie and Clinton Macarthy, who made their home together in Hackensack, New Jersey, started their engagement with Newton as employees of the Title, Guarantee and Trust Company. They researched Manhattan property transfers going back to the 1640s in order to assemble a section of the Iconography called the Land Grant Map. Among its other services, the Book would provide a detailed record of the morphing of Manhattan’s human (or at least European) footprint. As a matter of course, that map would include the plots of land acquired and passed down, over the generations, by some familiar names: Minturn to Minturn, Phelps to Phelps, and Stokes to Stokes.

  The office brimmed with index cards, arranged “for easy reference,” in Helen Young’s words—color-coded in white, salmon, buff and blue, separated into numbered categories, stored in pasteboard boxes and fastened together with straight pins. When the home office overflowed with paper, Newton requisitioned more space at another location, Susanna Minturn’s residence at 118 East 22nd Street.

  From whatever office Newton’s correspondence originated, it bore the same gentlemanly closing:

  With kind regards, believe me,

  Yours sincerely,

  I. N. Phelps Stokes

  The longest-lasting iconophile, and the member of the team most integral to the project, was a Princeton graduate named Thomas Hotchkiss, hired at first for a probationary month, on the recommendation of Paltsits. Hotchkiss introduced himself to potential business associates as “Author, Editor, Literary Advisor, Statistician.” He didn’t necessarily see himself acting as handmaid to another man’s plans. Having studied art and architecture at college, where he was first in his class in mechanical drawing, he had also earned a law degree at Columbia, studying around the time Newton attended the school.

  Hotchkiss was the same age as his employer when he arrived on the project, and had already established himself as a writer and editor of Town and Country magazine, with a special commitment to women’s rights. It is a measure of the lure of the Book that, despite Hotchkiss’s personal interests and accomplishments, this new work quickly seduced him. A few weeks after Newton hired him, Hotchkiss wrote in a note to a coworker, Zula Zeibach, that he was “at present absorbed in the Iconography entirely.” He confessed to Newton, “I have found your Iconography the most interesting subject I have ever studied.”

  Constantly late with the office paychecks, forever demanding longer hours of his subordinates, tormenting them with his exactitude, a stern taskmaster when errors were found, at the same time as generous as a boss could be, Newton lavished praise in a way that drove his associates onward when the piles of index cards threatened to bury them. He sent Helen Young a bonus he hoped she would apply to “a richly deserved week’s holiday,” but accompanied the money with a ticket to a lecture on “The Arms of New Netherland,” assuming that his employee’s fascination with Old New York would extend to her leisure hours.

  To Sidney Smith, the engraver, Newton wrote that he was “delighted with every one of the proofs, which even exceed in their subtle beauty and delicacy my expectations, which were high.” Around the same time, Newton informed Clinton Macarthy that he had raised his pay: “I think you are quite entitled now to rank as an expert, and that your honorarium should be adjusted accordingly.”

  He presented Clinton’s sister Jennie with a copy of Old New York from the Battery to Bloomingdale, which had been given to him by his aunt, who was a close friend of Eliza Greatorex, who created the book’s etchings. “I have always considered this book, despite its many errors, one of the most delightful reminiscences of New York as I knew it in childhood,” he confided. (The deflationary “despite its many errors” was classic Newton.)

  On another occasion, he sent the Macarthy siblings a letter with a check to express his appreciation for work well done—though, typically, he forgot to include the check. The correspondence that made its way between Newton and his loyal group of iconographers is marked by his strenuous apologies for forgetting their compensation, sometimes for months, and their ever-so-polite insistence that Mr. Stokes must get current.

  As the labors on the Iconography proceeded, Newton remained immersed in its minutiae. He circulated a memo to his crew calling for a “council of war” to consider features of the Land Grant Map that was now being created. Long, typed memos made their way from his home study to Paltsits, urging him to spend a greater part of his time gleaning facts from certain manuscripts and less from others.

  With the hiring of Paltsits, Hotchkiss, the Macarthys, Helen Young and Zula Zeibach, sheer information, brimful and often densely clotted, took over the Iconography. Information exhibited its own kind of poetry. While the mystery of “half-read” messages enmeshed in the plates might exist, mystery would not define the Iconography’s composition so much as its superabundance of solid, inarguable fact.

  16. Something in the Nature of the Marvelous

  Villa Castello is the kind of place tour guides tout as an exquisite example of medieval Florence. Those expecting grandeur in the property will probably find themselves disappointed. A large, severe, pinkish-tan structure with a Tuscan roof and square-eyed windows, Castello does not so much resemble a castle as a vaguely distinguished historic warehouse.

  The gardens on the villa’s grounds are more impressive than the building, although they are also modest. Their most striking feature is a grotto of stone animals adorned not only with sculpted fish, dogs and deer, but a bear, a giraffe and a rhinoceros, the latter certainly the product of myth rather than any close observation. The medicinal herbs, varietal jasmine and espaliered citrus plantings all around give off a sensuous suggestion of the way life was lived five centuries ago.

  Villa Castello stood as one of twenty-seven bastions owned by the Medici family, scattered across the Florentine republic as demonstrations of power, reach and wealth. These were essentially fortified country resorts, each with its attendant farms and hunting lodges, inhabited by Italy’s wealthiest and most influential political dynasty. All twenty-seven were built before the end of the seventeenth century, ranging from Villa del Trebbio in the mid-fourteenth to Villa di Artimino, be
gun in 1596.

  Castello, its name deriving not from “castle” but from the more prosaic castellum, or cistern, was one of the earliest. The Medicis gutted an old farm and erected in its place a thick-walled fortress. Being the Medicis, they installed in it Botticelli’s masterpiece painting, The Birth of Venus, which would grace the villa from 1550 to 1761. At the end of the seventeenth century, the place turned into a pet project of Cosimo III de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, who took over the efforts of his ancestors to renovate a rural water tower.

  The villa compound became known as “Cosimo’s playground,” where the curious and erudite ruler indulged his passion for art. When he was not squabbling with his French wife, who eventually abandoned him to become a nun, Cosimo found time to travel to the Netherlands and meet, among other people, Rembrandt van Rijn. No known portrait resulted. The idiosyncratic Cosimo was more likely to fill Villa Castello with commissioned paintings of the monstrous flowers, fruits and vegetables he favored, so the copious two-dimensional flora inside complemented the outdoor garden’s profusion of blooms.

  By 1912, Villa Castello had long since relinquished its status as a seat of governance and flickered on as a rather faint light in the Italian cultural firmament. That year, Professor F. C. Wieder stepped within its sun-baked portals, traveling at the behest of Newton Stokes. A European adjunct to the Iconography team, Wieder had come on board that August, having worked as assistant librarian at the University of Amsterdam. The new man also served as an associate of the firm of Frederik Muller & Company, a venerable Dutch auction house through which Newton had snared some of his most impressive finds.

  Wieder would prefer, he informed his employer, the title “adjunct-bibliothecaris.” He could devote vacation time to helping locate what Stokes termed the “items of the highest importance,” focusing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cartography of the northeast coast of America, and “especially bearing on the insularity of Manhattan.” Meaning Newton’s preference for maps that rendered Manhattan as an island.

  Any number of maps, charts and globes were known to exist from this crucial time. Newton had examined many of them. A number had entered the growing collection in Newton’s library and been put into the Iconography. But Stokes felt the Book must be comprehensive. Wieder, one of the top experts in the field, was in a position intellectually and geographically to uncover prime specimens in a methodical way. The professor’s task was to locate maps in the files of circumspect private collectors, or perhaps lost in the dusty attics of old Europe. Newton imagined the Continent as studded with secret caches of the prints and maps for which he pined.

  Such rarities did indeed exist, Wieder agreed. It was a question of being in the proper place when they materialized. Wieder’s fishing expedition would be of limited duration, finishing at year’s end. Newton compensated the professor generously, paying him 1,000 guilders for the two or three months it would entail to do the work (about $38,000 today). That was, Newton explained to the professor, “about as much as I should feel able to expend.”

  Wieder began by delving into the records of Holland, the nation whose expansionist voyaging in the golden age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had led to the settlement of New Netherland in 1624. As the likeliest repository for navigational maps, the state archives at The Hague were perhaps a good starting point. Two years before, spelunking in the archives, Wieder happened upon a set of more than one hundred maps. Contained in a cracked calf binding from the seventeenth century, the jumbled collection had gone unnoticed by government experts.

  The maps in the binding were highly distinctive. Drawn on large folio sheets of heavy paper, they were inscribed with vivid, delicate colors and bore in most cases a watermark of a crowned shield with a fleur-de-lis. Alternately, some had the Jesuit monogram “IHS.” All appeared to have been penned in the same hand, or at least in the same workshop.

  As massive as the collection was, further research suggested to Wieder that the portfolio belonged to an even larger trove of maps, plans and views of Dutch settlements in various parts of the globe, an original grouping that had since been dispersed. Two folios had gone to auction in 1885 and ended up scattered among several buyers, while another sheaf was sold off in 1894. Wieder once discovered a few sheets from this same group in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. But it was unclear what had become of the rest of the collection, which he termed “the atlas.”

  In August 1912, Wieder brought in his colleague J. W. Yzerman, president of the Royal Dutch Geographical Society, to view the material at The Hague. Slowly, Yzerman turned a few leaves. Then, with a start, he said, “I have seen the same thing elsewhere.” The year before, Yzerman visited Florence’s Villa Castello on official business with the Geographical Society. There he had seen drawings that very much resembled the ones at The Hague.

  But the fact that the villa’s maps must have come from the same atelier as the drawings in The Hague struck Wieder less forcibly than what Yzerman told him next. Among the manuscript items at Villa Castello, Yzerman reported, he had seen something quite unusual: a large, colored street plan of Manhattan, which from its context seemed also to date from the Dutch period.

  An excited Wieder communicated the news to his patron in New York. Another grail, materializing right before Sir Gawain’s gaze. So far as Newton knew, no street plan of Manhattan in the Dutch period existed.

  EARLY MAPS OF the New Netherland vicinity were extremely valuable and thus extremely well documented among Americana collectors, who paid fastidious attention to dates, editions, watermarks and other details of execution.

  “The Figurative Map of Adriaen Block,” a Dutch map from 1614, illustrated for the first time Newton’s cherished “insularity of Manhattan,” making the cartographical leap forward that the island was in fact an island. Block, a trader and navigator, had personal knowledge of Manhattan’s insular status. After he reached New York harbor in late summer 1613, his ship caught fire and burned down to its hull, requiring him and his men to winter over in huts built with the help of local Algonquins. He and his company could thus be said to be the first Europeans to take up lodgings on Manhattan, and Block was one of the first to circumnavigate the island.

  Another early map represented the first survey of Manhattan Island proper and the surrounding land areas. Originally inked in Holland in 1639, the Manatus map rendered the infant colony of New Netherland, with highlighted red-roofed farmhouses (labeled “plantages”) flagged with the names of all their owners, along with emblematic windmills and sundry hayricks. The structures dot a green-tinted island within a coastline of soft blue, the whole comprising a somewhat idyllic outline of Manhattan at the beginning of the European incursion.

  The pièce de résistance was a chart that surfaced in 1909 and was known as the Paskaart of 1617.

  The product of Willem Jansz Blaeu, a brilliant cartographer—son of a herring salesman and father of two more mapmakers—the Paskaart delineated the coasts of North and South America, from Newfoundland to Río de la Plata, and the western coasts of Europe and Africa between the same parameters of latitude. It was only the second map, after Block’s, that designated Manhattan as an island.

  A sea chart, the Paskaart was engraved on paper and hand colored. That it was a first edition could be seen from the condition of the print. Experts deemed it one of the earliest impressions made from a pristine copper plate, before the copper was cleaned. So it was not only the single specimen known, it had the cachet of being the first. Before Stokes snapped up Blaeu’s first Paskaart, at a Muller auction in 1910, no one in the collecting world had heard of it. If the Paskaart came out of nowhere, perhaps the rumored Manhattan street plan could also emerge from thin air. The document was, according to Yzerman, rendered in color, in the same delicate blues and reds as the other maps in the portfolio.

  Yzerman warned Wieder that if he wanted to visit Cosimo’s former playground, he must be circumspect. The documents at Villa Castello belonged to the private
collection of the king of Italy. The question of viewing them could “only be approached in a diplomatic way.”

  While awaiting permission to view Castello’s holdings, Wieder sent Yzerman’s sketch of the map to Newton. From the other side of the Atlantic there came a sharp intake of breath. If true, this first New Amsterdam street plan represented an inestimable rarity, a one-of-a-kind discovery. If it was genuine, nothing remotely like it existed.

  Villa Castello finally opened itself to Newton’s emissary, although not without a certain reticent formality. The Italian government was not comfortable with unofficial, unaffiliated guests. Uniformed guards stood watch throughout the villa’s gloomy corridors. They represented only a slight distraction from the marvelous watercolors hung against the damp stone walls, shadings splashed across vellum and framed in sturdy wood. Photography, the guards instructed Wieder, could not be permitted.

  Finally he penetrated the inner sanctum and beheld the grail. Yzerman’s memory proved true. When the guard briefly left the room, Wieder had just enough time to click off two surreptitious exposures with his “pocket-codac.”

  Dark, grainy and each no larger than a thumb, the photographs have remained folded in a sheet of plain yellowed paper for a hundred years. They still evoke the mystery that tantalized Newton when he received them in New York, a week after Wieder’s Castello pilgrimage. Viewing them was like looking at treasure at the bottom of the sea through the glass bubble of a bathyscaphe. Newton noted the slight hump and curl that unmistakably represented the foot of Manhattan Island, its distinctive outline in the mid-seventeenth century.

  A handful of streets crisscrossed the landmass from east to west and north to south. Perhaps most impressive on the tiny snapshots was a foursquare, guard-tower-garnished fort, hugely out of proportion to streets, clearings and other buildings, throbbing like the martial heart of the little Dutch outpost. Newton detected no street names on the dim photographs, although he could read the legend across the top of the image: “Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt.” Picture of the City of Amsterdam in New Netherland.