Daniel K. Wallingford printed this pictorial map in the mid 1930s and small keepsake editions appeared through about 1939. Some versions were tied to fairs and book events.
Wallingford wanted to show that for many New Yorkers the city felt like the whole country. He gave New York overwhelming visual weight because the city was where most public life happened. In the 1930s New York handled the nation’s busiest port traffic, ran major banks and publishing houses, hosted Broadway and other entertainment, and absorbed waves of immigrants who shaped its neighborhoods. When people spent their days inside that economy and culture, streets and boroughs felt larger than distant states. The map turns that lived reality into a single image. It announces in picture form what the printed heading says, that New York was, in its own eyes, a nation within a nation.
