This version of Robert Yates’s Plan of the City of Albany is the one most often seen by students of Albany history. However, it is not the map made by Yates in 1770 but an engraved and almost identical copy of the more faded and much less distinct manuscript map held in the Gerrit Yates Lansing collection at the New York State Library. This widely distributed engraving was the work of nineteenth century Albany lithographer Richard H. Pease. Printed in a number of historical works over the past 150 years, most people believe that it is the original map. Many of the historical portraits, maps, and cityscapes most often seen in publications are not the original representation but instead a much later rendering that have been made into more viewer-friendly graphics by Victorian lithographers.
first posted: 01/25/02