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Thomas Nast (1840-1902) was an extraordinary talent who
created the politically/socially influential political cartoon. He worked tirelessly for Harper’s Weekly, joining the weekly illustrated newspaper in 1858
at the age of 19, contributing at least one large (usually front cover) political
statement and two smaller cartoons every week, for 26 years.
He wielded an enormous social influence,
electing a president (Hayes) and toppling Boss Tweed. He was a staunch Republican who endlessly
fought for balanced budgets, free education, and equal rights for Indians and
Blacks, fair economic play to the working classes, and was viciously anti
Klan. He also created the popular images
of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, the Republican elephant Democrat donkey, and the
Tammany tiger. The man got a lot of things right1.
Another bit of the future that came to a pretty accurate
light under his pen was this view of New
York City.
Printed in 1881, “New York
in a Few Years from Now, View from the Bay”, shows a NYC skyline that—if the
scale was returned to normal—would’ve looked pretty accurate at the turn of the
century. Nast drew a grouping of large skyscrapers rising from around the battery
(a ferry terminal visible at front-center), reaching about 30 stories or
so. Since he was a caricaturist/cartoonist,
the buildings are drawn out of scale to enhance the vision—given the other
available details (including the way too tall Trinity Church
lurking in the shadows), the skyline would’ve been about half the size if drawn
for accuracy’s sake. But Nast wasn’t
looking for accuracy, but a vision. If
everything were scaled to a more accurate perspective, he would’ve been pretty
close to the skyline in 1900.
It was a very commendable job by Nast, who produced the
drawing at the very dawn of the modern skyscraper age, just at the very
beginning of the building and design practices tat would make it possible to
build structures that were dozens of stories tall. The greatest advance was the
introduction of cage frame construction, which started to appear ten years
earlier, but most of the other stuff necessary to have tall structures—heating and
cooling capacities, electrical lighting, plumbing [with appropriate, siphon jet
toilets], elevators with dependable brakes—weren’t really introduced until just
after this cartoon appeared. As a matter
of fact, Nast’s work even preceded the great building boom that would occur
just after publication, which was a response of sorts to the depression and malaise
of the middle/.late 1870’s. The greatest
of these early tall buildings, the Joseph Pulitzer New York World building, looked quite like one
of these Nast structures—and was built in 1889/90, rising 300 feet or so into
the air.
Nast’s buildings even preceded the invention of the word “skyscraper”,
which would appear in his own Harper’s
Weekly in 1893.
Given his workload, Nast’s drawing was undoubtedly a quick
work. Greater, grander, more
science-fiction-y views o the future of NYC were to come, but generally these
were almost entirely post-airplane/automobile.
Works like King’s Views of New York 2(1911) featured colossal structures with roads
connecting the tops of buildings, perilously airplane-congested skies, and so
on—but generally appeared after the necessary technologically-based innovations
supplied more necessary imaginative/creative tools to create more incredible
cities. But that’s another story. As I said, I think Nast did a marvelous job
with the materials on hand.
Notes:
1. "The
Historic Elephant and Donkey; It Was Thomas Nast "Father of the American
Cartoon," Who Brought Them Into Politics." (PDF). New York Times.
2. See Edison Effect blog, here, for a nice post on King's Views.
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