1949 A Christmas Map of Manhattan: With All Good Wishes for a Happy Holiday Season
DESCRIPTION
New York becomes one enormous Christmas celebration in this wonderfully colorful pictorial map, filling Manhattan with Santas, shoppers, skaters, Christmas trees, holiday traditions, and some of the city's most recognizable landmarks.
Created by the General Drafting Company as a holiday greeting in 1949, the map presents Manhattan in two sections. The larger view extends from the Battery north through Harlem, while a second map provides a closer look at Lower Manhattan and the Financial District. The city's familiar geography provides the framework for dozens of playful illustrations, with the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, the Empire State Building, Trinity Church, George Washington Bridge, and other landmarks appearing among busy streets filled with Christmas activity.
Christmas Across New York City
Thirty-two numbered illustrations correspond to a detailed legend describing Christmas traditions and seasonal events around the city. Skaters circle Rockefeller Center beneath its famous Christmas tree, shoppers crowd Fifth Avenue, Handel's Messiah is performed at Carnegie Hall, and the Christmas tree in City Hall Park is illuminated for the season. Elsewhere, Christmas trees arrive at Fulton Fish Market, Italian holiday foods are sold in Little Italy, Santas collect donations on street corners, and the city's post offices struggle with the annual flood of Christmas mail. The map also ventures beyond the usual Midtown holiday imagery, depicting celebrations in Harlem, neighborhood churches, parks, markets, and other corners of the city.
The illustrations offer a charming portrait of New York during the first years after World War II. Santa Claus appears throughout Manhattan in an assortment of unlikely roles, riding the subway, shopping, skating, feeding animals, delivering mail, and mingling with New Yorkers. Christmas trees seem to appear everywhere, while ships, buses, automobiles, department stores, churches, restaurants, and theaters recall everyday life in the city. Some scenes are tied to specific places and traditions, while others are included simply for humor, giving the map the character of both a city guide and an illustrated Christmas greeting.
A Holiday Greeting from General Drafting
General Drafting Company was one of the largest commercial map publishers in twentieth-century America, best remembered for the millions of road maps it produced for oil companies and motorists. A Christmas Map of Manhattan allowed its artists to approach their home city very differently. Copyrighted on December 14, 1949, the map replaces the practical information of General Drafting's road maps with bold colors, decorative lettering, humor, and illustration. The dark waters surrounding a snow-white Manhattan, together with its brightly colored figures and festive imagery, make this an especially attractive example of mid-century American pictorial cartography and an unusual record of Christmas in New York nearly eighty years ago.
CONDITION
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