Chatham Square, New York, NY, circa 1898

About this postcard

Chatham Square, where the Bowery meets Park Row and Mott Street in lower Manhattan, appears as a broad commercial corner lined with multi-story brick buildings, shop awnings, and painted signs. Horse-drawn carriages and streetcar tracks fill the roadway. Two signs, "Lewis Daguerreotype Ambrotype 158" and "Feather Beds," mark a portrait studio and a bedding shop of the kind that crowded this part of the city in the mid-nineteenth century, at the edge of the old Five Points district. The City History Club of New York, which promoted the study of local history in the city's schools, issued the view as a postcard around 1900, reproducing an earlier image for students and collectors. Chatham Square stayed a busy transit and shopping crossroads as the nineteenth century closed.