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Mapping the Health of Manhattan

Egbert Viele's Famous New York City Water Map - Giving a View of the City Before Its Development.

A rare and important color lithograph map of Manhattan fully exhibiting Egbert Viele's novel cartographic methodology.

The map superimposes Manhattan's original topography and hydrography on the city's mid-19th-century street grid. The purpose of this approach was to improve the sewers of New York and thereby reduce the chance of epidemics. Viele's theory on the transmission of disease was formed during his firsthand witnessing of an outbreak that devastated a military camp in Laredo, Texas. 

Viele produced the map a few years after John Snow made his famous map of the Broad Street cholera outbreak in London (1854).

I. N. Phelps Stokes includes an interesting entry on this map in his exhaustive work, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909:

This map, in so far as it relates to portions of the island already built upon, was compiled from old maps filed among the city records. For those portions which were then undeveloped new surveys were made. The map was compiled primarily from a sanitary point of view - to indicate the old water-courses and swamp land that existed before the development of the island, and which existed beneath the surface.

An article published in the New York Herald of November 3, 1865, shows the impact of Viele's pioneering public health-related cartography at the time:

General Egbert L. Viele has published a very interesting work, together with a valuable map, showing the topography and hydrology of the city of New York, and defining the healthy and unhealthy sections of the metropolis. It will prove of great value to persons about purchasing residences and building sites upon which to erect the same. This map shows the water courses, streams, meadows, marshes, ponds, ditches, canals, &c., that existed and now exist upon the site upon which New York is built. General Viele asserts the remarkable fact that when the cholera, yellow fever, intermittent, typhoid and other fevers, fever and ague and all similar complaints have prevailed in the city they have been most general and virulent within or near the lines of these water course districts.

David Rumsey says of the map:

The map shows all the original water courses of Manhattan Island, with the street grid superimposed on top. Also, three different kinds of land are shown: Marsh, Made Land, and Meadow. Sewer lines are indicated. A very beautiful full color map occasioned by a not so beautiful subject. In 1874 Viele reissued the map in larger format as the Topographical Atlas of the City of New York.

Council of Hygiene and Public Health

In 1864 the Council of Hygiene and Public Health undertook a street-by-street sanitary inspection of the city. This survey showed that thousands of New Yorkers were living in conditions of utter degradation. The publication of these findings in the present extensive illustrated report, along with an impending threat of Asiatic cholera, were decisive factors that allowed reformers to push a bill through the New York State Legislature creating a new Metropolitan Board of Health. This new government department, the forerunner of the present Department of Health, became the model for many other American cities in creating their own local health departments.