Belden's Miniature New York

In 1845-6, Ezekiel Porter Belden and his 150 assistants built a carved wooden model of New York and Brooklyn - featuring every building, every street and landmark, even (in the words of one reviewer) "every shanty" - as far north as 32nd Street.

In Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford UP, 2000, p. 672) , Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace note that the model was twenty feet long and twenty four feet wide with 200,000 tiny buildings over 2 million windows and 150,000 chimneys.

The Model was topped with an 15 foot high Oriental canopy decorated with "gold and brilliant colors." It was"supported by twelve elaborately carved columns...and is mounted with pinnacles forming compartments"* at the top. And in those compartments were nearly a hundred oil paintings of "the leading business establishments and places of note in the city" - all commissioned by the industrious Mr. Belden. It cost $20,000 to build - an incredible sum of money in the 1840s.

Belden's 1849 guidebook New-York: Past, Present and Future (1849) is dedicated to his Carved Model. There are many pages of descriptions of the carvings, and more pages after that with reprinted newspaper reviews (all most complimentary, of course). The Model stood on a huge wooden platform, and included a depiction of the harbor complete with steamers, tow-boats and all "customed shipping."

In Belden's book you can read in great detail about what is in the Model - the description itself is a kind of virtual walking tour, and great fun to read. Belden not only includes the big attractions - the Battery, Castle Garden, Broadway, Barnum's American Museum, City Hall, Washington Market, the Tombs - but also the telegraph wires, the Novelty Works ("an extensive manufactory of steam engines and other machinery" near the East River), and the United States Revenue Boarding Office. I was glad to see that he included the Floating Church, too. The New York Sun pointed out that "every inhabitant of New York will be enabled to recognize his own dwelling."

Broadway and Canal St, 1836 (NYPL)

Ezekiel Porter Belden, of an old Connecticut family (the Porter-Belden House is in Wethersfield), also wrote a book about Yale, and - according to one of the newspaper reviews Belden includes - was "the proprietor of the Model of New Haven" - so this wasn't his first miniature city.

The Model City was built at Belden's rooms in the Granite Building, 360 Broadway. In July 1846 Belden rented the "large hall of the Minerva Rooms, Broadway" for his Model, and opened it to the public on the 4th. The Minerva Rooms were at 406 Broadway (at Canal Street), and were usually a venue for entertainers.

Can you imagine what fun it would be to see this? Another place I want to go in that time machine, certainly. And I'd like to know what happened to the Miniature New York, too. Did it survive? And if so - where is it?

*All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from New-York: Past Present and Future (1849) by Ezekiel Porter Belden.