1. The best account of the population growth during the 1845–60 period is in Rosenwaike, Ira, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. See particularly Chapter 3, “The ‘Foreign City,’” from which I draw my statistics.

2. Excellent general accounts of wealth and poverty in New York during the period are Miller, Douglas T., Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and Spann, Edward K., The New Metropolis: New York City 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. My details are drawn from Miller, , pp. 128–54Google Scholar and Spann, , 205–6.Google Scholar

3. Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. See particularly pp. 17–102. I remain uncomfortable with the term ideologeme because I do not know how I can establish that any particular candidate for the term is in fact the “smallest intelligible unit” of discourse.

4. Links, J. G., Townscape Painting and Drawing (London: B. T. Batsford, 1972)Google Scholar. The quotation about Marco Polo's house is from p. 89.

5. McDermott, John Francis, The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

6. See, for example, the advertisement in the New York Sun for March 15, 1836, for “Hannington's Moving Dioramas of the Great Conflagration [of New York]” to be seen at the American Museum. A picture is included in the advertisement.

7. McDermott, , Lost Panoramas, pp. 8–16.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., passim. Also, Raban, Jonathan, Old Glory: An American Voyage (New York; Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 102.Google Scholar

9. Reps, John W., Views and Viewmakers of Urban America (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1984)Google Scholar, “Part III. The Catalog,” pp. 221–546.Google Scholar

10. Briggs, Asa, Victorian Cities (New York: Harper & Row, 1970 [reprint of 1963]), p. 56Google Scholar. Briggs uses the term to refer to the effect of Manchester in the 1840s. Chicago in the 1890s or Los Angeles in the 1930s are other examples.

11. Kouwenhoven, John A., The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: An Essay in Graphic History (New York: Harper & Row, 1972 [reprint of 1953]), pp. 188–241.Google Scholar

12. I draw my information about landscape conventions from Novak, Barbara's American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar and her Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

13. Beiden, Ezekiel Porter, New York: Past, Present, and Future (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1849)Google Scholar. The other guide mentioned, The Picturesque Tourist, was published (without an author credit) by J. Disturnell in 1849.

14. Bryant, William Cullen, ed., Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, Vol. 2, (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1974 [reprint of 1874]), 545–64.Google Scholar

15. See Kouwenhoven, , Columbia Historical Portrait, p. 194Google Scholar, for a reproduction of the engraving of the model that appears in Belden's book. It shows very little of the detail of the model. Kouwenhoven also reproduces an advertisement for the model that boasts of the numbers of buildings, etc., and is my source for those statistics.

16. For a reasonable reproduction of the Burckhardt pen-and-ink drawing, see Kouwenhoven, , Columbia Historical Portrait, pp. 190–3.Google Scholar

17. It is best to point out here that reproductions of panoramas in articles or books fail to show the great detail of their originals. The artist's intent was always to make each building-each doorway-recognizable. One could find one's own building, and one's own window perhaps. In reproductions one misses as well the color of the paintings and even the tinting of the lithographs.

18. See Kouwenhoven, , Columbia Historical Portrait, pp. 188–241Google Scholar, for more reproductions. The best collections of New York panoramas are at the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, and the Museum of the City of New York. Reps, John W.'s Views and ViewmakersGoogle Scholar contains an important catalog, but it is of lithographed views only.

19. Spann, , The New Metropolis, pp, 103–5.Google Scholar

20. Kouwenhoven, , Columbia Historical Portrait, pp. 242–4Google Scholar. A steam elevator carried the paying customers to the first and second landings of the tower where there were telescopes. The observatory burned down in 1856.

21. Walter Benjamin writes that the Parisian panoramas “declare a revolution in the relation of art to technology” and are an “expression of a new feeling about life.” In the “panorama the city dilates to become landscape.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, translated by Jephcott, Edmund, edited by Demetz, Peter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), p. 150.Google Scholar

22. The Library of Congress has an 1876 Currier and Ives lithographed panorama that seems nearly identical to 1879 and 1883 Currier and Ives panoramas also in the collection. The only differences are that the 1876 lithograph has prominent steamers in the foreground with their names emblazoned on them, the 1879 lithograph shows the south wall of the Rogers Peet building marked with a clear sign reading “Rogers Peet” and a sailboat in the harbor with a sail reading “Rogers Peet,” and the 1883 edition shows the Equitable Life Assurance Society's building with a sign. John W. Reps, in Views and View-makers, is very helpful on how the lithographed urban views were marketed (pp. 1–86).

23. “The greenhorn has everything to lose: his phylacteries, his innate convictions about the nature of human community, even the language in which he thinks and feels. We relish his loss, his poignant sense of displacement. For he is the past we have all somehow survived: and he may tell us, in innocent or naive imitation, who we are now, because our present is his future. So city writing lavishes attention on the newcomer at that point of entrance: the greenhorn, at once the city's hero and its most vulnerable victim, is urban man at the crucial stage of emergence and transformation.” Raban, Jonathan, Soft City (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), p. 37.Google Scholar

24. Benjamin, , Reflections, p. 156Google Scholar: “In the flaneur the intelligentsia pays a visit to the marketplace, ostensibly to look around, yet in reality to find a buyer.”

25. Mathews, Cornelius, Big Abel and the Little Manhattan (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845), p. 79.Google Scholar

26. Cowan, Michael, City of the West: Emerson, America and Urban Metaphor (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 201.Google Scholar

27. Whitman, Walt, New York Dissected, edited by Holloway, Emory and Adimari, Ralph (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936), pp. 119–42.Google Scholar

28. Whitman, Walt, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, edited by Cowley, Malcom (New York: Viking, 1959), 11. 712–14Google Scholar. The line numbers in my text are from this edition.

29. Zweig, Paul, in Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984)Google Scholar, alludes frequently to Whitman's panoramic imagination and connects it with New York experience, if not with New York convention. Zweig is insightful, helpful, and wonderfully clear throughout.

30. Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Man of the Crowd” in Stuart, and Levine, Susan, eds., The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), pp. 283–9Google Scholar. As the Levines note (p. 254), a likely source of Poe's tale is William Maginn's sketch “The Night Walker,” published first in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in November, 1823. That narrative is a tour of the town of London. There are, of course, many other possible sources.

31. For American urban gothic writers see Ehrlich, Heyward's “The ‘Mysteries’ of Philadelphia: Lippard's Quaker City and ‘Urban' Gothic,’” ESQ, 18 (1972), 50–65Google Scholar; and Stout, Janis P., Sodoms in Eden: The City in American Fiction Before 1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 44–66.Google Scholar

32. Foster, George G., New York Naked (New York: Robert M. De Witt, n.d.), p. 25Google Scholar. Also on p. 17: “I do not think it too much to claim that the great movement of illuminating the depths of the moral and social degradation of life in a metropolis, owes something of its momentum to me.”

33. See, for example, Buchanan, Harrison Gray, Asmodeus: or, Legends of New York. Being a Complete Exposé of the Mysteries, Vices and Doings, as Exhibited by the Fashionable Circles of New York. (New York: Munson & Co., 1848)Google Scholar. The Asmodeus figure appears frequently, most often exposing the sins of the rich.

34. Chapin, Edwin H., Humanity in the City (New York: Arno Press, 1974 [reprint of 1854]), p. 29Google Scholar. The quotation about not becoming mere spectators is from p. 35.

35. There are several excellent histories of the charitable work done in New York during the period. See at least Berg, Barbara J., The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America: 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Rosenberg, Carroll Smith, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement 1812–1870 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971).Google Scholar