Artist/Maker Carl Fredrik Akrell (Swedish, 1779–1868)

Brodway gatan och Radhuset i New York

1824

Etching and aquatint

Image: 8 × 15 in. (20.3 × 38.1 cm)
Plate mark: 11 3/4 × 18 1/2 in. (29.8 × 47 cm)
Sheet: 13 3/8 × 19 1/2 in. (34 × 49.5 cm)

New-York Historical Society Library, Gift of the H. Dunscombe Colt Estate, 1982

PPAC.2020.1.11

Based on a captivating rendering by a Swedish aristocrat executed on his tour of the United States, this rare and masterful print ranks among the most splendid views of the city in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. By 1819, New York boasted a population of over 123,000, making it the largest city in America. This genteel stretch of Broadway, completed some seven years earlier, characterized the well-to-do city, with its handsome buildings (John Jacob Astor's house is the second on the left), nicely paved streets with distinctive pre-gas street lamps (left), elegantly landscaped squares, and a stately City Hall (right background). The latter, a synthesis of Federal and French Renaissance styles orchestrated by Joseph F. Mangin and John McComb, Jr., (1803-1812), is rendered accurately apart from the inclusion of the cross, which in fact never graced the building's cupola. In addition to featuring New Yorkers going about their daily business, Klinckowström also included the roaming dogs and free-ranging pigs that shared the streets with the city's more refined inhabitants.

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