{"product_id":"1876-pictorial-st-louis-the-great-metropolis-of-the-mississippi-valley","title":"1876 Pictorial St Louis The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis facsimile reproduces Pictorial St. Louis, the Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley: A Topographical Survey Drawn in Perspective A.D. 1875, by Camille N. Dry, designed and edited by Richard J. Compton, published in St. Louis in 1876 by Compton \u0026amp; Company with engraving by the Western Engraving Co. Pictorial St. Louis is one of the supreme achievements of American bird's-eye view cartography — an extraordinarily ambitious 110-plate panorama that depicts every building, street, wharf, and landmark in the city of St. Louis as seen from an imagined elevated vantage above the Mississippi River. Dry spent the better part of a year sketching the city block by block, and the resulting work is more accurate and more exhaustively detailed than any other nineteenth-century bird's-eye view of an American city. Published in the immediate aftermath of the 1874 opening of the Eads Bridge — the engineering marvel that connected St. Louis to the East and confirmed the city's standing as the great metropolis of the Mississippi Valley — the atlas captures St. Louis at the height of its Gilded Age prominence, when it was the fourth-largest city in the United States and the principal commercial gateway between the eastern industrial centers and the western frontier.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA Note on This Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe original Pictorial St. Louis was issued as an oversized folio in landscape orientation, with each plate printed across a single broad spread. To make this facsimile readable at standard book trim sizes, each original landscape page has been split across two facing pages in this edition, preserving the full detail of Dry's draftsmanship at a legible scale. Please note that surviving copies of the original 1876 edition show staining, foxing, and edge wear consistent with their age, and traces of this condition may appear in the reproduced images.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSummary of Contents\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe atlas presents a continuous perspective view of St. Louis covering more than twelve square miles of the city as it stood in 1875, drawn from an elevated viewpoint that allows every individual building to be rendered in three dimensions with remarkable fidelity. Each plate is keyed to a numbered index identifying churches, schools, hospitals, factories, breweries, hotels, banks, railroad depots, government buildings, residences of prominent citizens, and commercial establishments throughout the city.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA classified index and an extensive directory section identify hundreds of named businesses, institutions, and properties featured in the views, including major firms such as the American Central Insurance Company, the American District Telegraph Company, the American Wine Company, the Belcher Sugar Refinery, the Cotton Compress Company, the Pacific Railroad of Missouri, the St. Louis Cotton Factory, the St. Louis Insurance Company, the Liggett \u0026amp; Myers Tobacco Company, the Lindell Hotel, the Globe-Democrat Office, the Missouri Pacific Railway Company, the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company, the Merchants' Exchange, Planters' House, the Polytechnic Building, the Southern Hotel, Washington University, and many more. Schools, churches, breweries, foundries, mills, public markets, the courthouse, custom house and post office, and the major railroad and steamboat infrastructure that made St. Louis the principal commercial hub of the central United States are all individually identified.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn essential reference for historians of nineteenth-century American urbanism and the Gilded Age West, St. Louis local historians and genealogists, architectural historians documenting buildings lost to a century and a half of redevelopment, scholars of bird's-eye view cartography, and collectors of antiquarian American city portraits.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e8.5\" x 11\". Black and white. Paperback.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSatisfaction guaranteed or you can send it back!\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"ExileBooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49872409821339,"sku":"Publishing 2026 \/ 358597439924","price":49.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0663\/7705\/6411\/files\/s-l1600_adaf4d92-6cb2-4201-998c-73bebbbd1b47.jpg?v=1792531992","url":"https:\/\/tangletownpress.com\/products\/1876-pictorial-st-louis-the-great-metropolis-of-the-mississippi-valley","provider":"Tangletown Press","version":"1.0","type":"link"}