Featured on PDR in the collection Manhattan’s Last Arcadia: Estate Plans from the Index of American Design (1936)

Scattered amongst the 18,257 watercolor, crayon, chalk, charcoal, and color pencil drawings of folk, decorative, and industrial art executed between 1936 and 1942 for the Index of American Design (IAD) are a handful of aerial views of handsome country estates, whose curvilinear drives meander through sweeping lawns, clumps of evergreen trees, and arabesque flowerbeds bordered by neatly cropped topiary and hedgerows. Some of the picturesque landscapes are punctuated with craggy bedrock knolls and steep escarpments. A few of the drawings include close-up views of fountains, gazebos, benches, and lawn ornaments. Mostly labeled “Blackwell’s Survey”, and occasionally bearing the date “1860”, these watercolors depict the semi-rural terrain of northern Manhattan just before it began to urbanize in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.