Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  Newton knew, before ever seeing the Castello map in person, that this was the genuine article, and that he would do whatever was necessary to bring it to the attention of the world.

  With the help of Yzerman, and a boost from letters Newton begged from the U.S. ambassador to Italy and from George Herbert Putnam, the U.S. librarian of Congress, Cavaliere D. E. Modigliani, an Italian culture minister, had been persuaded to grant Wieder permission to study the Manhattan map at Villa Castello, as well as other charts in the collection. Modigliani would also, he told Wieder, procure the services of Fratelli Alinari, the premier photography firm in Florence, to render an image for use for the Iconography’s photogravures.

  Out of his genuine interest in the project, Modigliani himself would convey the photographer to the villa for the photographs. Il cavaliere would very politely expect a copy of the Iconography in return, of course. Unfortunately, however, there could be only a single opportunity to photograph the maps. He hoped the American eminence would understand.

  The result of that solitary foray was, fortunately, magnificent. Alinari’s photograph in hand, Newton immediately assigned his American crew, in conjunction with Wieder in Amsterdam, to research the topographical features of the map now christened the Castello Plan. Since it had the watermarks to prove it, Newton and Wieder concluded that the map originated in the same period as the other pieces in the portfolio at The Hague. But the map was unsigned. Who had drawn it, who had commissioned it, and for what purpose? Answers to these questions were difficult to locate, and required a thorough sifting of other documents of the time.

  It turned out that in 1660, on the orders of his employer, the West India Company, the New Netherland surveyor-general Jacques Cortelyou completed the map. As immigrants began to pour into Manhattan, the company’s directors had a keen awareness of changes under way in the makeup of New Amsterdam. This influx, they knew, was a good thing. But to monitor the use of their New World property, they demanded from Director-General Peter Stuyvesant a sense of what exactly was going on in the fledgling community, specifically in terms of its real estate.

  Stuyvesant gave Cortelyou four months to execute a map that would provide some answers, then sent the Castello Plan back across the ocean to Holland in October 1660. Cortelyou’s creation, one of the cartographic triumphs of his or any era, provoked more questions than answers in the minds of the directors. They reviewed his bird’s-eye rendering of Broadway, Pearl Street, the Fort, the Wall, and saw in the spacing of the houses, yards and gardens a significant problem for people eager to reap economic gains from a New World colony. The directors’ response to Stuyvesant was stern: too much land had been given over to green space, gardens and orchards. Not enough to residential properties. If the directors had seen the town built to their own liking, it would already be an orderly streetscape of regular townhouses and straight-edge canals, just like the mother ship of Old Amsterdam.

  But a map that so irritated the West India Company’s directors offered an unimaginable wealth of detail two hundred fifty years later. Cortelyou rendered the city in elegant microcosm. His attempt to capture the reality of Manhattan was not only factually clear, it was a beautiful work of art, as great maps can sometimes be.

  Only the deteriorated condition of the Castello Plan inspired less than positive feelings. The centuries-old rendering had become, well, a bit muddy. Still, Newton desperately wanted to print the Castello Plan in color, staying true to its present faded autumnal hues of ocher, olive and brick.

  Wieder advised against that course, stressing that the Italian authorities would never allow the customary restorative work to be done on the map. It would be necessary, however, to correct several problems on a black-and-white photogravure, especially to clean “the deposits left by flies on the original.” Such cleaning was vital, Wieder wrote, because “on a reproduction these occasional spots could be taken for cartographical indications.”

  DETERIORATION, FLYSPECKS AND faded hues aside, Stokes had already put out feelers regarding making some sort of trade for the Castello Plan. It might seem unlikely, he observed to Wieder, that the Italian government would let it go, but he had had “some little success” with various institutions. If “the negotiation is intelligently and tactfully introduced and made, it is often possible by offering something which an institution greatly desires, perhaps something intimately connected with the country or locality in which the institution is situated, in exchange for something in which it has no particular interest.

  “Were I to purchase the Castello documents,” he confided to Wieder, “I should have to dispose of a considerable part of my collection of Americana, but I would gladly do this in order to acquire two items of such superlative importance.”

  Newton estimated the Castello Plan’s worth at $10,000— about $230,000 today. At the same time, he noted glumly, with that offer on the table, “if the exchange were to be consummated in the near future,” he would have to pay in installments. Purchasing maps and views had become an expensive passion, and Newton felt the pinch.

  Over the next three years, Wieder conducted protracted negotiations with the Italian government on behalf of Newton, whose hopes rose and fell from month to month. The Italian king, ultimately the owner of the map, waffled and temporized. The Italian government seemed almost to be taunting Newton, letting him know through Wieder and other European intermediaries that it had convened a professor of geography and a director of a museum to assess the benefits of a trade.

  Newton remained so conscious of money woes that when Wieder announced Yzerman’s interest in purchasing one of Stokes’s prized items, a one-of-a-kind globe, for 5,000 florins, Newton agreed. But he told Wieder to use the money from Yzerman to pay his own expenses for the Iconography.

  Finally, in January 1915, two and a half years after those dark, grainy thumbnail photos crossed the Atlantic, Wieder broke the news that the Italian government declined “definitively” the proposed exchange. Newton made his peace with the decision, noting that such trades between countries were “open to many dangers.”

  He was prevented from owning the original. But he would go one better. The problem with the Castello Plan, he had always felt, was its lack of perfect crispness, a result of the pummeling it had taken from moisture and light exposure in the villa, not to mention insect damage from those ubiquitous Italian flies.

  He also still wanted to print it in color, but duplication problems remained. The process would surely prove an expensive proposition, perhaps more than he wanted to take on at this stage of the Iconography project.

  Wieder suggested printing a stand-alone version in color—“many New York people will be eager to have it framed and hanged at the wall.” But even if color were a possibility, Newton was not at all certain it would be a good idea to reproduce what Wieder had termed “the faded and soiled colours of the original.” Newton’s next idea was unorthodox, unprecedented, but strangely logical within the cartographic tradition, where maps were never static, but constantly evolved in new editions according to increased knowledge and improved technique.

  Newton would redraft the Castello Plan. The new plan, as he conceived it, would be just like the original, only better. The Redraft would scrupulously adhere to the topographic measurements of the old map, with every hillock, slough and inlet duplicated exactly. But in the Redraft, Newton would highlight all the available data about the island of Manhattan as it appeared at the moment the map was drawn.

  Newton knew just the person to get the Redraft effort off the ground: Rawson Haddon, a young architectural historian and preservationist with a specialty in early American town planning. Haddon would be the draftsman, assembling a working diagram of the new plan based on archival information he received from staff iconographers Jennie and Clinton Macarthy, and from his own knowledge of Old New York society and culture. From Haddon’s visual “outline,” for example, came the detail that New Amsterdammers customarily faced their property walls with stone.

&n
bsp; As crucial as the accuracy that Haddon brought to the Redraft was the style of the drawing. The Redraft might be said to be draped like beautiful fabric on the bones of the original. Haddon offered expertise, but the job required artistic prowess and a real feeling for the spirit of the place. It had to have soul.

  For the drawing, Newton recruited the artist and illustrator John Wolcott Adams. Quintessentially American—he was a descendant of both John and Quincy Adams—the artist’s captivating illustrations of historical themes were just then drawing notice in magazines like Harper’s Monthly, Scribner’s and the Saturday Evening Post.

  Finally, the color edition of the new plan would get the star treatment of H. A. Hammond Smith, taking a break from the business of restoring Old Masters. Stokes had decided that, unlike the original, this improved Castello Plan deserved reproduction in color for an audience that might not be interested in purchasing a complete, doorstop-sized copy of the Iconography. He authorized the printing of the Redraft apart from the book, at a scale almost twice as large as the original, in either black and white or color (fizzy greens and blues predominated).

  Newton’s Redraft became the spiritual center of the second volume of the Iconography, signaling its importance by its positioning as the book’s foldout frontispiece. With the Redraft of the Castello Plan, there was no need for conjecture about the concrete dimensions of New Amsterdam, the man-made landmarks that embodied its colonial past or its vanished natural charms. They were there for fact. Winding streets and house lots were drawn to scale, along with the bulky step-roofed warehouses and the classic Dutch-colonial triptych of fort, flag and windmill.

  The Castello Plan appeared again inside the Iconography, this time in its original, flyspecked version, given its own dedicated section of the book, accompanied by a 139-page textual trove of information about the year 1660 in Manhattan.

  If loving is in essence the act of paying attention, then the text that accompanied the map surely comprised one of the greatest, most excessive love letters ever written to a city. The copy’s starting point came from a document preserved at the New York Public Library called the De Sille List. At the same time that Jacques Cortelyou had drafted his survey of the town of New Amsterdam, the city’s schout, or administrator, Nicasius De Sille, conducted a census. Naming the occupants of every single house in July 1660 (there were 342 residences), the De Sille List formed the basic text for the Iconography’s Castello Plan chapter. It would be supplemented by official records of every sort, including any relevant sundry fact that Newton’s people were able to unearth.

  With the correlation of West India Company census data from the same year, and with the folding in of every other conceivable archival reference, Newton managed to create a stroke-of-genius portrait of 1660 New Amsterdam. The Iconography’s house-by-house, block-by-block narrative rose above the nuanced proportions of the Castello Plan to uncover the days and ways of the original European inhabitants of Manhattan.

  In a typical entry, for example, we learn that Augustyn Heermans lived on the northeast corner of Broadway and Heere Dwars Street, in a house he bought from Evert Pels; that Heermans, a native of Prague, served in the Thirty Years’ War; that he dealt in furs, tobacco, wines, dry goods and slaves; that he was also a land surveyor; that together with his wife, Judith Verleth of Utrecht, he bore two sons and three daughters; that he was the artist of the sketch of New Amsterdam known as the Visscher View; and that he died on an estate in Maryland in 1686.

  Lesser lights received nearly comparable attention. At 29 Beaver Street lived a French Huguenot named Toussaint Briel, a gentle warehouse porter, who died on the job in the summer of 1671. Anthony Jansen van Salee, also known as “Anthony the Turk,” owned a property in Stone Street. He had come to New Amsterdam before 1638, married a foulmouthed woman and eventually left Manhattan to farm a piece of land at Gravesend, in far-off Brooklyn.

  Meat markets, gibbets, a belfryless church, the dilapidated barracks of “the Company’s negroes,” all received their due. Newton coaxed his illustrator Adams to take liberties that enlivened the sense of place, including a depiction of galleons anchored in the East River Roadstead and wagons lumbering up the central street then called the Brede Wegh. But the rigor of the text counterbalanced the liberties taken in the drawing.

  “The composition would be much less dry if we could imitate the James occasionally,” wrote Jennie Macarthy in a note to Newton. “But we use only facts.” Fact and imagination together supplied what Newton, in his introduction to the Redraft, explained was “as real and as true a picture as possible of New Amsterdam at the close of the Dutch period.”

  Clinton Macarthy and his fellow iconographers were well aware of their work’s achievement. Macarthy wrote Stokes in April 1913: “The manner in which our data correspond with the physical details of the Castello Plan is not merely gratifying: it is something in the nature of the marvelous. To go back 250 years and ascertain exactly the names of the occupants of the houses as shown on the plan is something probably never before attempted for any other city: it will be a remarkable feature of your book, and a matter of the most intense interest.”

  Clinton’s sister Jennie concurred. Still deep in her research, she wrote Newton, “I consider it a privilege to be able to help you to reproduce the City of 1660 for the Citizens of 1915.”

  How remarkable is it that all this is known, this house-by-house, soul-by-soul breakdown, for the tiny colony that clung to the wintry flanks of Manhattan Island four hundred years ago? With Newton’s conflation of the Castello Plan and the De Sille List, New Amsterdam sprang to life as a fully chronicled settlement, complete, complex, microcosmic. Newton and his staff were fascinated, as if they had constructed a ship in a bottle, finely detailed down to the boatswain’s whistle, which they were free to examine, admire and marvel at each time they came to work. The no-expense-spared approach meant that the Redraft had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. But no matter. It served as an exquisite keyhole into the past.

  As was correct, Newton received billing on the finished Redraft. Beneath the dolphin-flanked cartouche in the upper left-hand corner that framed the words “Redraft of the Castello Plan/New Amsterdam/in 1660,” in a small, elegant font, read the names John Wolcott Adams and I. N. Phelps Stokes. This marvel was his own. He couldn’t buy the Castello Plan, but he could remake it. He created his own wonder, eminently suitable for his own cabinet.

  17. No Other City Will Live in the Future as New York Will

  The book was killing them all. Newton took to bed with exhaustion for weeks and even months at a time, but from his convalescence continued to issue a stream of orders, purchases and directives. Smith, Paltsits, the Macarthys, they were all being consumed like candles. Van Laer, the former state librarian, suffered a “nervous condition” that had kept him out of work for some time, due to “overstrain and irregularity,” as he described it, as well as excruciating insomnia and the “nervous tension of a sedentary life.”

  Newton had to entreat the exhausted Smith with the “fervent prayer” that the engraver undertake a portrait of Edith as a final, unanticipated tailpiece for the third volume. It would be based on a photograph, and would represent the idea of Justice. The shot showed a twenty-four-year-old Edith Minturn posing for the Columbian Exhibition statue, standing stola-draped and bare-shouldered in the 11th Street studio of Daniel Chester French. The artist complied by delivering an image just under four inches high, framed by an ethereal cloud and drawn, at Newton’s request, “as a living model and not as a marble statue,” only a girl, perhaps play-acting for a tableau, in a gown and fancy breastplate, who happened to be holding aloft a globe-sitting eagle in one hand and a lance in the other. In any case, a faultless portrayal of a solemn, stunning muse.

  “Justice is, of course,” Newton wrote in a letter to Smith, “the principle underlying both political and social progress, which are the dominant features in this chapter.” In the piling chaos of the Iconography, perhaps o
nly Newton could perceive such orderly themes. He was like a diver, gone down too far, experiencing the rapture of the deep. Manhattan, the Civil War, justice, Edith. It all made sense to the iconographer. And perhaps to him alone.

  The real Edith appreciated the value of the Iconography and the images her husband obsessed over, as she herself possessed a highly tuned aesthetic sense. But she felt that the family stood in danger of splitting open. She doubted whether any book, no matter how engrossing, was worth jeopardizing her marriage over. Especially since the Book, bogged down as it was in detail, blowing through one deadline after another, seemed constantly in danger of never seeing the light of day.

  It also spelled the demise of the architectural firm of Howells & Stokes. Newton’s partner opened a West Coast office in Seattle, ostensibly as a satellite. But the move presaged not an expansion but an end.

  Howells & Stokes managed to go out not with a whimper but a bang. The firm’s last major commission was also one of its major successes. In 1912, Brown Land Company of Rhode Island hired Howells & Stokes to design what would then be the tallest building in the city of Providence. The firm came up with a distinctive office building that would come to be known as the Turk’s Head. A grand arcade of portals punctuated the street-level façade on all three sides of the cuneate, flatiron-style structure, and sixteen floors in common-bond white brick soared upward in two separate wings.

  For half a decade after it was erected in 1913, the Turk’s Head remained the city’s tallest building, and it is still one of its most distinctive, fronted as it is with the granite visage of a snarling Ottoman warrior. The stone gargoyle copied a wooden one placed by a former tenant, who affixed the figurehead from a ship called the Sultan to the façade above his store.