Eight Miles High

Leafing through this lovely collection of 115 bird’s-eye color lithographs of 19th century American cities, I stopped abruptly at a view of Boston in 1899, the year after my father was born on Minot Street in the West End, the few cramped blocks where Boston’s Jewish immigrants, like their Italian counterparts in the North End and the Irish in South Boston, learned, in their separate ways, to be Americans. Boston had hardly changed 29 years later when I was born in Cambridge, across the Charles River, and taken to live on Elm Hill Avenue, the jumping-off place near the city limits where Jews clever enough to have made their way this far began their trek to the suburbs and the world beyond.

The focal point of this bird’s-eye view of Boston is the golden dome of the State House at the foot of Beacon Hill. Here on a cloudless Sunday morning in the early 1930s, my father led me up the State House steps to show me the sacred cod, the symbol of the Bay Colony’s economic origins. On the lithograph, I can trace the route that he and I must then have taken from the State House to the Public Garden, a few hundred yards away. I recall that I was wearing my brown tweed cap and my matching coat with the leather collar and my scuff-proof shoes and that the day was bright and windy, perhaps early spring or late fall since the trees were bare. If I look closely at the Public Garden, I can almost discern the dock from which in warmer weather my father and I would climb aboard a swan boat and be taken for a circuit of the pond, which seems disproportionately large in the lithograph, as it does in my memory. Was it on that Sunday or another that my father took me to the shop on nearby Charles Street, where a cousin sold American antique furniture and sat me in what he called in his bizarre English a windbag chair where I was scolded for sharing my Hershey’s bar with his two white spitz dogs?

With a magnifying glass I can find Rowe’s Wharf, from which we took the side-wheel steamer on summer afternoons to Pemberton, where my paternal grandmother, an irritable woman with ice-blue eyes grotesquely magnified by her perfectly circular tortoise-shell glasses, owned a beach house with mahogany cupboards, behind whose glass doors gleamed cut-glass bowls, where she kept old photographs of my father and his brother and sister and anonymous others in straw boaters and woolen bathing suits with striped sleeves and skirts almost to the knees. It was in this house that I came down one August afternoon with what was called the grippe but what I later learned, when I was examined for induction at the time of the Korean War and was told, to my amazement, that one leg was a bit shorter than the other, had been polio.

A few centimeters to the north of Rowe’s Wharf, I find India Wharf with a ship moored alongside. Could this be the same white steamer that left Boston 40 years later at 5 in the afternoon, passed through the Cape Cod Canal and deposited my parents and me at 8 the next morning on the west side of Manhattan under the World Telegram sign and across the river from the huge Colgate clock in Hoboken, which my father told me was the biggest clock in the world? These trips by boat to New York, where my father had some business to do, were thrilling, but so were the journeys by train from South Station, whose train yards and ribbons of track dominate the lower left-hand quadrant of the bird’s-eye lithograph. From here my father and I would take the Merchants’ Limited, which also left at 5. The Merchants’ was a fast express and, for a while in the 1930s, if it arrived at Grand Central more than a few minutes late, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad would refund the extra fare that passengers paid for the privilege of riding in its gilded parlor cars with plush chairs that swiveled all the way around and where serious men in blue serge suits with polished shoes and Elks’ teeth dangling from gold chains across their bellies smoked cigars on black leather couches in a special compartment with brass cuspidors at the end of each car. This compartment also housed the men’s washroom, where one could, by pressing a lever, hold the flushing mechanism open and look down at the cross ties as they flashed past beneath the speeding train.

But it was North Station, across the Mystic River from the monument on Bunker Hill, clearly visible in the upper right-hand corner of the lithograph, that played an even more important role in my early life. It was from here that we took the Flying Yankee to Portland, where we switched to the interurban, an oversized trolley car that sped through the woods, past the Poland Spring House at Danville Junction, then through Gray and Monmouth to Auburn where my other, nicer, grandmother lived atop Prospect Hill in a large house without central heating, but this is another story. There is no bird’s-eye view of Auburn or its twin city, Lewiston, in John Reps’ collection, but there is a view of nearby Saco and Biddeford engraved in 1855. In the lower right-hand corner, a train emerges from behind a low hill, an ancestor undoubtedly of the Flying Yankee that deposited me 80 years later under the vast shed of the Portland station and then made its way north without me by way of Saco and Biddeford all the way to Bangor.

The 115 panoramic bird’s-eye lithographs in this volume span the continent from Halifax and Montreal to Yerba Buena and Los Angeles. For the innumerable readers who have reason to care how such cities as Davenport, Iowa, or Lexington, Ky., or Hannibal, Mo., or Phoenix in the Arizona Territory looked in their formative years, this book will be a delight. For historians and others interested in how American cities developed, these illustrations, with their clusters of courthouses, banks, hospitals, churches, schools, general stores, theaters and railroad depots forming a central core and their as-yet undeveloped streets laid out in grids and planted with elms awaiting the future, will be an essential reference. Congratulations to Mr. Reps and his publisher for making this fine volume available. I hope they are planning a sequel.