What a difference 161 years makes.
This charming old farmhouse isn’t in rural Vermont but on what is now the Upper West Side. And the rutted dirt path in front of the white picket fence, which once was called Bloomingdale Road, is now better known as Broadway.
The half-plate daguerreotype dating from 1848 is the oldest known photographic image of uptown Manhattan. It’s expected to fetch as much as $70,000 at a Sotheby’s auction on Monday.
A handful of street-scene photos from lower Manhattan from the same period do exist, but this is the only one known to depict the sparsely populated countryside north of 42nd Street before the Civil War era.
“These were country homes,” said Denise Bethel, Sotheby’s photo director. “You might have had your business in the city, you might have your row house in the city, but you might have your estate up in the cool breezes of the river.”
While its exact location is unknown, experts were able to put the house in Manhattan by a note in the frame describing the country road as “a continuation of Broadway.”
At the time, 14th Street was considered the upper limits of Manhattan, but the island was rapidly filling up.
“The city is moving uptown. There is development as high as 42nd Street around this time,” said historian Kenneth Jackson, a Columbia professor and editor of “The Encyclopedia of New York City.”
“While there would have been very little up that way, the wealthy were beginning to move uptown.”
The house itself was probably built in the 1770s or 1780s, Bethel said, but given the northward expansion of the city, it “may not have had many more years to go before it was mowed down.”
The year of the photo, 1848, was also when tycoon John Jacob Astor said on his deathbed that had he known earlier in life what was to happen, he would have “bought every square inch of Manhattan.”
Gotham had already surpassed Philadelphia as the most important city in the United States, and the first great wave of immigration Irish peasants fleeing the potato famine was pouring in.