Descended from Benjamin Valentine, who emigrated from Holland or France during the mid-17th century, David T. Valentine was appointed Chief Clerk of the Common Council of New York in 1842. Subsequently, he devoted much of his time to researching and writing the Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York. These were annual compendiums of data about the city: lists of real estate transactions, pawnbrokers, fires, government officials, marriages, ordinances, and so forth.
The Valentine’s Manuals, as the books came to be known, started life in 1801 as informational pamphlets. In 1818, they were renamed the City Directory. That title lasted until Valentine came along and transformed the volumes. “The idea was to make the books interesting to the public as well as to city officials,” he explained in 1865. Armed with new-old material, Valentine enlivened the dry data with excerpts from founding documents, essays about old buildings and parks, and anecdotes about New Amsterdam.
But the books owed their popularity largely to the iconic pictures that Valentine added: scenes of New Netherland by local illustrators who drew on memory, description, and imagination. “Historical accuracy was not required,” observed historian Annette Stott of most images commissioned by Valentine. The public did not mind. It loved the evocative prints, which were available for sale separately.
During the early nineteenth century, nostalgia was defined as “homesickness.” Doctors considered it a medical condition, too. In antebellum New York, many old-timers experienced nostalgia, as we now conceive of it, for the long-ago city. Among younger generations, the feelings stirred up by the Manuals and prints were more like a yearning to know a place in the past where one has never been. During those same years, plenty of New Yorkers wrote personal memoirs and letters about old New York, but few published books. Eventually, anniversary celebrations would bring this history to life through pageants, exhibitions, and lectures. The first such commemoration did not arrive until 1883, however, when New York threw a big party for the centennial of Evacuation Day. In the meantime, the Valentine’s Manuals aroused nostalgia by conjuring the “little red brick two and a half story city that was here yesterday, but is gone today,” in the words of historian Henry Collins Brown.