Photo Album Documenting an Irish Tourist's Trip to New York City in 1886

Cobh, Ireland; New York City, Jersey City, Pennsylvania, and Niagara Falls, 1886. Single photo album of thirty-two 9 ½ x 11 inch pages, with twenty-nine photographs and four hand-drawn illustrations. Photographs range from 4 ¼ x 7 inch to 7 x 9 inch. Photographs mostly with fine contrast and in near fine to fine condition; illustrations in fine condition; some chipping at the corners of pages; binding of album broken. Overall near fine.. Offered here is an album of photographs belonging to an Irish tourist who visited New York City from April to June 1886, several years before the construction of the city’s first skyscraper, the Tower Building. The photographs are of a nearly unrecognizable city – one shows cows grazing in an open field under an elevated rail line at 110th street in Harlem. Three show various skylines from the recently completed Brooklyn Bridge, including a shot of lower Manhattan from one of the bridge’s towers. Six others are also of lower Manhattan, with one of the widely unpopular City Hall Post Office and Courthouse, which was finished in 1880 and demolished in 1939. Eight show midtown architecture, including the Albemarle Hotel (1860–1915), Hoffman House (1864–1915), Windsor Hotel (1873–1899), and Vanderbilt House (1883–1926). A number of shots show what transit was like at the time; especially the elevated railway lines, but also a ferry in the Hudson River, Grand Central Depot, and the Pennsylvania Railroad’s depot in Jersey City, bridge over the Susquehanna River, and train going around the Horseshoe Curve in Altoona. The illustrations are of what is likely a family crest, American flag designs, and the flag of the White Star Line, a steamer service which the tourist likely took from Cobh to New York and back. Overall an uncommon and visually compelling record of a tourist trip to New York City in an era preceding larger tourism booms.