Stereocard Metropolitan Museum of Art William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum's 150th Anniversary, Accession Number: L.2019.57.617
Benefit concerts, minstrel shows, lectures, and horse races all clamor for attention in this graphic field of broadsides posted in the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan. The stereograph format lends added depth and dimensionality to the layered fragments of text, transporting viewers to a hectic city sidewalk. Published for a national market, the scene indexes a precise moment in the summer of 1863, offering armchair tourists an inadvertent trend report on downtown cultural life.
