How New York's oldest maps blaze a path to our past and future

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:01]Central Park would be all this.

[00:00:03]>> Yeah, around this part.

[00:00:04]>> Yeah.

[00:00:05]>> Inside the map room >> So then you have the Albany Road >> of the New York Public Library, you'll find the city's oldest blueprints.

[00:00:12]>> And for maps of New York City, we are second to none.

[00:00:14]>> Each one tells a story.

[00:00:15]>> What was there before and what can that tell us about where we could go in the future?

[00:00:19]>> A lot of these maps can unlock those questions.

[00:00:22]>> From one of the oldest maps of Dutch-controlled New Amsterdam in the 1600s >> The Dutch really have a trading colony, right? So they have the >> canal, which is Canal Street. Uh they go up to the wall, which is Wall Street.

[00:00:34]>> can see how accurate it is.

[00:00:35]>> To a British-made [music] map from the 1760s >> We have the original British names.

[00:00:40]>> The map included a drawing of the British war plan to invade the city.

[00:00:43][music] >> But you also get every building as it existed in New York City.

[00:00:47]>> But after the Great Fire of 1776 and the Revolution >> Now it's time to start thinking about rebuilding. What we do first is we rename the streets. So you have King Street [music] >> King Street on one map soon became Pine Street on another just a few years later, just a block above Wall Street.

[00:01:04]>> But Wall Street remains.

[00:01:06]>> Wall Street remains. And so what they did is they surveyed the entire island.

[00:01:10]>> Other historic maps show what the island used to look like before development.

[00:01:13]>> And if we look up, you can see these are all hills. Uh this deep shading here >> full of hills and streams.

[00:01:20]>> So as they built north, they basically just flattened it all.

[00:01:24]>> That was part of the plan.

[00:01:25]>> Map scientists still use today.

[00:01:28]>> And I'm looking at the areas that it flood a lot today and there used to be water there in a lot of these areas.

[00:01:34]>> 100% >> The maps aren't just analyzed by researchers to understand current climate problems, [music] but they're also used by developers.

[00:01:41]>> That's about where the island is now and then going around on this side.

[00:01:44]>> The century-old map also shows how thin the island used to be.

[00:01:48]>> While we were building out the island, especially after the revolution, we took a lot of that rubble and a lot of oyster shells and we put that in the East River and the Hudson River and then in the tip of Manhattan and then we built it out.

[00:02:00]>> It's amazing that so much development is where water used to be, you know.

[00:02:04]>> Right? And where is that going to be in the future?

[00:02:06]>> And what's on the maps from so long ago is just as important as what's not on them.

[00:02:12]>> What's interesting is the depiction of the lands and the depiction of the native people. The French portray them more prevalently while still from a colonial lens while the British more aggressive in their mapping and more they delete more native peoples and more native places.

[00:02:27]>> We're looking at some of the city's oldest maps. What do you think the maps will show 250 years from now?

[00:02:33]>> Ooh. I think 250 years from now, I think it'll be such a different city that these will look even more antiquated than they do now.

[00:02:44]>> There are more than 400,000 maps housed here at the New York Public Library.

[00:02:48]Some of them will be on display next month part of a special exhibit celebrating the 250th anniversary of America. Dan Krauth, Channel 7, Eyewitness News.