B
ird's-eye views of America-
from an imaginary or a real
perspective-grew out of the need to impose order on the chaotic, sprawling, and rapidly changing nineteenth-century American environment. The earliest bird's-eye
lithographs of American cities
Often idealized city-booster visions of urban order and economic opportumty, bird's-eye views captured the rapid growth of the nineteenth-century city. At first made only to astound, aerial views evolved into important tools for urban planning.
and towns during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Chicago, more than eighty different ground-level and bird's-eye lithographic views appeared between 1849 and 1916. The
views were landscapes. Between
techniques employed by artists,
1825 and 1860, a group of Ameri-
lithographers, and printers to cre-
can painters, including Thomas Cole,
.
111tA,
ate these images made different
Asher B. Durand, Frederic E. Church,
cities across the nation seem
and Albert Bierstadt, enthralled the
strikingly similar. Publishers used
public with spellbinding, majestic
aggressive sales techniques to
visions of nature. These panor-
market their products. Sales repre-
amas of natural beauty served as realistic depictions of the landscape and as romantic expressions of beauty and lofty cosmic truth .
George R. Lawrence's balloon Zenith, from which he made aerial photographs, being prepared for launching at the Union Stock Yards. Photograph by George R. Lawrence, c. 1901. CHS, ICHi-11099.
The rise of the city as a new
sentatives promoted them as tools that city boosters could use to advertise their town's attractions, enhance its prestige, and thereby contribute to its growth and pros-
feature on the landscape demanded
dissent. But from his elevated point
perity. Thus was an otherwise rag-
its own romanticized depiction. As
of view, the artist could gloss over
ged frontier town transformed into
populations migrated westward,
the negative aspects of city life
a picturesque village nestled in a
towns sprouted from unincor-
and instead portray the grandeur
sweeping landscape.
porated settlements on the prairie;
of urban growth .
the towns soon became cities.
Recognizing a lucrative market
As the rapid growth of cities made accurate artistic represen-
Urbanization and industrialization
in the public's demand for attrac-
tations too expensive and time-
intensified chronic social problems:
tive, well-drawn panoramas, pub-
consuming, photographs replaced
crime, poverty, working-class
lishers produced thousands of
lithographs as the dominant