Two views to New York from the countryside of Brooklyn Heights

Imagine Brooklyn Heights with a sandy beach, a smattering of spaced-apart houses, and rocky bluffs providing a peaceful, unobstructed view of the sailing ships and side-by-side buildings of booming Manhattan.

“New York From Brooklyn Heights,” by Thomas Kelah Wharton

You’d have to go all the way back to the early 19th century to experience these in Brooklyn Heights, which even then was becoming something of a suburb to New York: a residential district with laid-out streets and ferry service for commuters. Plenty of land also awaited wealthy Gothamites looking for a place to put up a summer estate.

The first painting, “New York From Brooklyn Heights,” is by English-born artist Thomas Kelah Wharton, according to Bruce Weber’s The Paintings of New York, 1800-1950. It’s not clear when Wharton completed his view from the Heights, but the engraving was done in 1834, per Weber.

“New York From Near the Heights of Brooklyn,” by William Guy Wall

“New York From Near the Heights of Brooklyn” was painted by William Guy Wall around 1820, estimates the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (It’s one of two watercolors Wall collaborated on with another painter, John Hill, with the other showing the view of the city from Weehawken.)

Wall, from Ireland, gives us “the eastern face of New York City from the former ‘Bergen’s Hill’ in what is now Brooklyn Heights, looking west-northwest across the East River,” according to the Met.

The population of Brooklyn came to about 11,000 in 1820—practically a country hamlet compared to New York City’s 123,000 residents. Who could have predicted at the time that Brooklyn would became a major city that rivaled New York, and that by the end of the century the two would join forces as part of one united metropolis?