William Hill’s New York

New York from the Steeple of St. Paul’s Church, Looking East, South, and West

I went looking for an image that could help evoke the atmosphere of New York in the 1840s—something that might quietly situate the viewer in the city Bristow knew. I came across John William Hill’s 1849 view from the steeple of St. Paul’s Church, initially as a reference: a period image meant to serve a practical purpose in the edit.

But I did not pass through it quickly.

The image is rendered with such extraordinary precision and density of detail that, at moments, one forgets it is a hand-colored print and feels instead as though one were looking at a photograph—an impossible photograph, made just before photography could do anything like this.

William Hill’s New York

The architectural detail alone is arresting: structures that predate the cast-iron buildings that would soon redefine the skyline above and below Canal Street, standing shoulder to shoulder in a dense and irregular urban fabric. The corner of Canal and Broadway was thHorses and carriages move through the streets. Laundry hangs from rooftop lines, quietly domestic against the commercial bustle below. Trees catch the light in a way that feels observational rather than illustrative. Smoke rises. Signs announce trades, ambitions, entertainments.

And then, in William Hill’s New York there are the specifics. My favorite: the Daguerreian Gallery of Illustrious Americans, located at 205 Broadway, already present in the city by the mid-1840s. Its inclusion is not incidental. It places this image at the threshold between older forms of representation and the emerging modern world of mechanical reproduction.

This is not a generalized “old New York.”

It is a living city. A city that Bristow new well.

What struck me most is how the image resists summary. Each time the eye returns, something new emerges—a detail previously unnoticed, a relationship between buildings, a human gesture implied rather than declared. It rewards patience. It asks for attention.

In that sense, the image does more than illustrate a period; it recalibrates perspective. It reminds me that navigating the waters of a period documentary is not only about historical accuracy, but about cultivating a way of seeing—slow, curious, and receptive to complexity. This image conditions that way of seeing. It sets a tone.

For a film concerned with a composer moving through this city—listening, working, aspiring—it feels less like background material and more like an invitation: to enter the time, and to stay there long enough for it to begin speaking back.