The Bloomingdale Road and the Earliest Known Photograph of New York City

CNN is reporting that the earliest known photograph of New York City has just sold for $62,500 at Sotheby's. A daguerreotype, it dates from 1848 and shows a house perched above an oval white-fenced piece of land overlooking the Bloomingdale Road.

The Bloomingdale Road, built in 1703, joined Broadway, the main thoroughfare of the urbanized southern tip of Manhattan, at Union Square (23rd Street) and ran the length of Manhattan through Harlem and then into Westchester County.

I didn't think that Sotheby's would want me to use their photograph, so the illustration above is of another, similar house on the Bloomingdale Road, in 1847 - the year before the daguerreotype was taken. This is the Abbey Hotel, not the single-story home of the photograph - but the circular fenced-in front area, and rural atmosphere, is similar.

'Bloemendaal' was an area around 100th Street, named by Dutch settlers, presumably for the flowery meadows there. It was heavily wooded, though by the early eighteenth century the land had been cleared sufficiently for tobacco to be grown in significant quantities. As Jessica Lynn O'Brien points out in her excellent article on the area's history (see below for citation and link), the tobacco was brought down to the city via the Bloomingdale Road. For most of the nineteenth century, the Bloomingdale Road north of Central Park was a country road, along which lay farms, clusters of squatters' shacks, and large public asylums.

Bloomingdale village was situated roughly between Morningside Heights to the south and Manhattanville to the north (it is now known as Manhattan Valley). As late as 1888, the Atlantic Monthly noted: The Bloomingdale Road is a continuation of Broadway, taking its rural name at the point where the great city thoroughfare touches the southwestern triangle of Central Park. It is Broadway run out in the country, in fact, to enjoy a breath of fresh air. Right under the steep, woody bank that slopes to the west from this road runs the Hudson River Railway, and much of the intervening ground is occupied by market-gardens.

In the late 1840s and for decades after, Bloomingdale was a farming area, with a few riverside mansions and hotels. It was also home to a several asylums. The most famous of those was the Bloomingdale Asylum which opened in 1821, the first public asylum in New York State. In 1896 Columbia University moved from its 49th Street campus to the grounds of the old Bloomingdale Asylum, which was moved to White Plains in Westchester County.

Note: The famous New York department store of the same name was not named for the village or the road, but for its two founders, brothers Joseph and Lyman Bloomingdale, whose father was Bavarian.

Here is the enlarged version of the 1848 photograph over at CNN.
Image of Abbey Hotel in Bloomingdale from NYPL Digital Gallery.
Image of Bloomingdale Asylum from NYPL Digital Gallery.
Modern map of the Bloomingdale/Manhattan Valley area in northern Manhattan, is from Geocities; it shows a small area still called Bloomingdale.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES

Dolkart, Andrew S. Morningside Heights. (Columbia UP, 2001), p. 13.
Haskel, Daniel and John Calvin Smith, A Complete Descriptive and Statistical Gazetteer of the United States of America (Sherman and Smith, 1843), p. 469.
O'Brien, Jessica Lynn. "Unearthing Bloemendaal," The Cooperator (Sept 2002), link here.
Thaxter, Celia, Sarah Orne Jewett et al. The Atlantic Monthly (v. 22, 1868), p.iv.
Watson, Edward B. and Edmund Vincent Gillon. New York Then and Now (Dover, 1976), p. 34.

Forgotten NY on Manhattanville and the Bloomingdale Road.
A photograph of the Bloomingdale Road about 1895 is here.
Modern map of the Bloomindale/ManhattanValley area in northern Manhattan, which shows a small area still called Bloomingdale.
Bloomingdale Asylum in an 1892 photograph.
There is still one asylum building on the Columbia campus, see here.
The 104th Street Block Assocation has a site called Bloomingdale.org, with some good photos.
Bllomingdale village chronology here.