Broadway and City Hall in New York (Brodway-Gatan Och Rådhuset i New York)

Carl Fredrik Akrell

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Duncan Phyfe's furniture workshop and warehouse stood on Fulton Street, a major east-west thoroughfare in nineteenth-century Manhattan. Constructed in 1816 and named in honor of Robert Fulton, the pioneer of steamboat transportation, Fulton Street connected three small, previously disjointed roads into a major commercial avenue. In this print, the viewer looks north from the intersection of Broadway and Fulton toward City Hall (built 1813). By 1820, this area had become a shopping destination for New York's fashionable and sophisticated elite. To the far left of the image is the northernmost column of Saint Paul's pedimented facade.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art