Galveston in 1871
The bird’s-eye-view phenomenon began in Texas when the editor of the Galveston Daily News announced in his March 10, 1871, edition that “Mr. C. Drie exhibited to us some drawings that he is making for a map of Galveston, which will exhibit the buildings on every lot within the city. It is an isometric projection, and promises to be a fine picture of the Island City, and will be invaluable to all property holders.”[1] Through a series of newspaper ads, Drie offered Galvestonians an opportunity to purchase his print for $3 per copy.[2] When he had secured a sufficient number of subscribers, he sent his drawing to Chicago, where the Chicago Lithographing Company printed it, and returned with the finished prints several weeks later.
Galveston was the commercial center of Texas during most of the nineteenth century and attracted more artists than any other Texas city, with the exception of San Antonio. Located on the north side of Galveston Island, the city occupied less than one-eighth of the small land mass, but its residents had grand dreams of it becoming the Manhattan of the Gulf of Mexico. When he first saw the city in 1841, Josiah Gregg found it to be “handsome though too monotonous in appearance.” By the time artist C. O. B?hr visited, probably during 1858, the city was in the midst of an “astonishing” building boom, “speculation in real estate” was “astronomical,” and the city had begun to take on more of the characteristics that its citizens envisioned. Several three-story brick buildings with handsome iron fronts had gone up, and Clusky & Moore had begun construction of the new federal Customs House in 1857 [3] A reporter for Harper’s Weekly had concluded in 1866 that there were “few towns in the South where so much Northern energy and the effects of Northern capital are as visible as in Galveston.”[4]
Drie began his work on Galveston in the same manner as other bird’s-eye-view artists—by choosing the perspective from which the city would be depicted, making liberal use of any maps that might have been available to him, or perhaps making his own, and going around town sketching individual buildings from his chosen perspective. What the Galveston editor called an “isometrical projection” made it appear that the perspective had been taken from a 45-degree angle above the city. In fact, Drie’s technique more nearly resembles an axonometric projection, because he did not employ vanishing points in his composition—the streets run parallel to each other—suggesting that he was probably more familiar with the principles of mechanical drawing than landscape painting.[5] Most city-view artists laid out the grid with two vanishing points, one for the vertical axis and one for the horizontal. There are distant vanishing points in Drie’s work, but other characteristics of an axonometric projection are present as well, such as the lack of foreshortening; houses in the distance are virtually the same size as those in the foreground.[6]
Nevertheless, there are some characteristics of landscape painting in the view, as Drie included a farmer plowing a field in the cartouche in the lower center of the picture and a self-portrait in the right-hand side of the cartouche. Drie pictured the eastern end of the island, the main part of the city, from the northwest, with the bay in the foreground and the Gulf of Mexico in the background. The business district, which by 1871 featured several blocks of brick and iron-fronted buildings, is pictured adjacent to the wharves on the bay, while the residential area stretches in a semicircle on the eastern, southern, and western sides of the island. The fundamental elements of John D. Groesbeck’s 1838 plan are evident in the view: Twenty-fifth Street (or Bath Avenue) is the main north-south axis, and Broadway is the cross axis. Groesbeck surveyed both of them to be 150 feet wide and planned them as grand avenues.[7]
There are no legends on the view to identify various structures, but a resident of Galveston would not have needed them, for Drie produced a detailed and accurate representation of the city, including portraits of some of the key buildings, such as churches, post office, and courthouse and jail, in the margins. Using contemporary maps, photographs, city directories, and present-day architectural guides, it is possible to identify significant businesses, civic and government buildings, churches, some historic spots, and many of the island’s impressive homes. While the finished lithograph seems to focus on the city as a seaport, the careful observer will note the large and busy Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railroad yard in the lower right-hand corner of the print—important because it connected the island city with the mainland. The railroad would soon enable the businessmen of Galveston to be the middlemen between the farmers in the cotton-rich interior of Texas and the world at large.
Galveston is Drie’s only Texas view, but despite the clumsiness of this effort, he went on to produce the most ambitious work of all American city views, a 110-sheet view of St. Louis, Missouri, in 1875.[8]