The winter of 1767 was a difficult time to walk the streets of New York City as a British soldier. Though the War of Independence would not officially begin until the spring of 1775, tensions in colonial cities like Boston and New York were already running high. Two years earlier, the Stamp Act Protests had brought the city to the brink of bloodshed. New York’s legislature had also refused to fund and implement the Quartering Act of 1765, which was designed to house and feed soldiers flooding into the city after the French and Indian War.

Yet over the winter of 1766-67, one of those soldiers—Bernard Ratzer, a lieutenant in the 60th Regiment of Foot—traipsed across Manhattan and Brooklyn surveying for what would become the most significant map of the city that had ever been created. Considering the low esteem in which the Redcoats were held that winter, it isn’t hard to imagine Ratzer being met with suspicious glances every time he paused on a corner to get his bearings.

Today, 250 years after Ratzer completed surveying for what would ultimately become two maps—the so-called “Ratzen” Plan and the larger Ratzer Map—his unprecedented explorations give us a unique window into what New York was like on the eve of the Revolution.

This winter, I set out on my own walks through Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn using the two maps as my guide. As I tried to peel back two and a half centuries of history—dodging my own share of suspicious glances—I began to empathize with Ratzer’s monumental mission.

But could I hope to see what he’d seen? Ratzer’s maps, originally sketched by hand, are incredibly precise, but like all maps they also reflect the biases of their maker and audience.

What does this snapshot of 1767 tell us about a city on the brink of war?

The origins of Ratzer’s two maps can be traced to the protests two years earlier surrounding the Stamp Act. Over the space of three days in March 1765, the British government passed two acts designed to raise moneys from the American colonies in the wake of winning the French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years’ War.

The goal of the Stamp Act, the more famous of the two, was to apply “certain stamp duties...in the British colonies and plantations in America, toward further defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same….” Many saw this as a violation of the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which said that the crown could not impose taxes without the consent of Parliament, and since the colonists had no voice in that body, the rallying cry became “no taxation without representation.”

What made the situation worse was the Quartering Act, passed just two days after the Stamp Act, which required the colonists to build barracks to house British soldiers as well as to provide them with “candles, vinegar, and salt, and with small beer or cider, not exceeding five pints, or half a pint of rum mixed with a quart of water, for each man per diem….”

It was little wonder that when the Stamp Act went into effect on November 1, 1765, many New Yorkers—then, as now, concerned with commerce and the bottom line—rebelled, hanging the acting governor of New York, Cadwallader Colden, in effigy, and destroying his valuable winter sleighs.

When Colden’s permanent replacement, Sir Henry Moore, arrived two weeks later, he smoothed things over almost immediately by agreeing to temporarily suspend the Stamp Act; four months later, in March 1766, Parliament repealed the unpopular law. However, it was a hollow victory for the colonists: The same day the Stamp Act was repealed, the Declaratory Act, a broad measure that asserted Parliament’s authority to create and enforce any laws it wanted in America, was passed. It was clearly designed to bring the colonists to heel.

In the wake of the Stamp Act riots, Gen. Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of the British in North America, must have realized that he was in a bind. Born-and-bred New Yorkers knew the lay of the land, and he and his soldiers would be at a grave disadvantage if civil unrest continued. The most recent maps of New York that Gage would have had access to were the Bradford Map of 1730 and the Maerschalck Map of 1755.

The first plan, surveyed by James Lyne, was commissioned during the tenure of Gov. John Montgomerie and issued by William Bradford, the city’s most important colonial printer. Though it was the first accurate survey of the city, the area it covered barely extended beyond John Street. The second plan, by city surveyor Francis Maerschalck, was simply a reprint of the Bradford Map with a few streets added to bring the city’s borders up to the 1745 palisade that had been erected to protect the city in the run-up to the French and Indian War. And though the Maerschalck map was only a decade old, it was already out of date.

Ratzer’s maps, originally sketched by hand, are incredibly precise, but like all maps they also reflect the biases of their maker and audience.

On December 7, 1765—five weeks after the riot—Gen. Gage ordered John Montresor to create for him a map of “this Province and also to procure him one of this place and Enciente [fortified enclosure] with its environs.” Nine days later, Gage reiterated the order, requesting that Montresor “Sketch him a Plan of this Place on a large Scale with its environs and adjacent country together with its harbour, but particularly to shew the ground to the North and North East of the Town, etc.”

While Montresor began surveying his plan, he noted in his diary almost daily the unrest in the town. On December 17, he wrote that the Sons of Liberty (or “Spawns of Liberty and Inquisition,” as he also called them) had been posting “libellous and rebellious” advertisements all around the town. That night at eight o’clock,

the Effigies of Lord Colville, Mr Grenville, and General Murray were paraded several times through the streets amidst a large concourse of people who halted first where the Governor was in company and gave 3 Huzzas, [after which] they were carried to the Common [today’s City Hall Park] and burnt.

Montresor worked on his plan through the winter, noting on January 7, 1766, that conditions in the city forced him to survey “sub rosa [that is, in secret] as observations might endanger one’s house and effects if not one’s life.”

He presented the plan to Gen. Gage on March 11. This original map, which now hangs at Firle Place, the ancestral home of the Gage family in Sussex, England, is magnificently drawn, but reveals the haste under which Montresor was working. As WP Cumming points out in “The Montresor-Ratzer-Sauthier Sequence of Maps of New York City, 1766-76”:

The streets are not named; the details of the wharf area east of the Battery are simplified; and numerous topographical features are lacking. But north of the city the roads to Greenwich (the northern limit of the plan; about present 14th Street) and to Boston are shown and the hachuring and fortifications are emphasized, as well as wooded areas and open fields.

In October 1766, Montresor sailed for a six-month leave in London, where he had engravers make prints of his plan. However, despite Montresor having followed orders and seemingly delivered the map that Gage had requested, either the general or Gov. Henry Moore wasn’t satisfied.

While he was gone, Montresor was replaced by Lt. Bernard Ratzer, who began what’s been called “perhaps the finest map of an American city and its environs produced in the eighteenth century.”

We know very little about Bernard Ratzer outside of his work as a cartographer. He appears to have come to America during the French and Indian War, and was one of many military engineers in the Sixtieth (or “Royal American”) Regiment. His first known survey was of Passamaquoddy Bay in Maine in 1756; this was followed by “several unpublished surveys of forts and frontier areas done in the early 1760s.” One of the other surveyors in Ratzer’s regiment, Samuel Holland, was with Gen. Wolfe during their daring assault on Quebec during the French and Indian War; perhaps Ratzer was as well, but there’s little record of his military service.

We do know that in 1766, around 1,500 British troops arrived in New York—most veterans of the French and Indian War—and it’s possible that Ratzer arrived with them.

Because we don’t have Ratzer’s diary, we can’t follow the exact chronology of his survey, but it isn’t hard to imagine him in the same position as Montresor, forced to conduct a “sub rosa” mapping of the city. In August 1766, a clash between newly arrived British soldiers (Ratzer himself could have been among them) and the Sons of Liberty over a liberty pole erected in the Commons caused what some consider the first bloodshed of the American Revolution. In The Battle for New York, Barnet Schecter writes that “while no one was killed in the riot that broke out...several people were wounded, and it was the first time American colonists clashed openly with British regulars.”

By the spring of 1767, Ratzer had completed enough of his survey to have a small map of Manhattan—roughly equivalent to the area depicted on the Montresor Plan—engraved, and it was offered for sale in the New York Gazette on August 21, 1769.

After the publication of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811—which laid out the rectilinear street grid of Manhattan up to 145th Street—New York maps immediately began to depict every straight street and avenue, even though many of them would not be graded, or even cut through, for years.

Today, this smaller map is known as the “Ratzen” Plan due to an error made by the engraver. In its upper left corner, it sports a dedication to “Sir Henry Moore, Baronet, Captain General and Governor in Chief” of New York, which makes it probable that Moore commissioned the map, though we don’t know that for certain. We also don’t know if Moore wanted a second map for military or commercial purposes, though it would ultimately be used for both.

What we do know is that while the Ratzen Plan bears a strong similarity to the Montresor Plan, even a cursory examination shows where Ratzer improved upon his predecessor’s work.

For one, almost every street on the Ratzen Plan is named, where only a handful of roads on Montresor’s survey are given any designation. Also, while both maps include the Collect Pond (labeled “Fresh Water”) behind the Commons, Ratzer’s survey shows what seem to be accurate boundaries; Montresor’s is much more likely just a rough approximation of where the pond lay. Even though Ratzer’s survey must have followed directly on the heels of Montresor’s, he includes full-fledged roads (such as Mott and Mulberry) that Montresor only hints exist. Similarly, Division Street, which created the boundary between the properties of James Delancey and Henry Rutgers, is absent from Montresor and appears on the Ratzen Plan.

Another anomaly: Nearby, Montresor runs the “Road to Crown Point” east from the Bowery to the property of T. Jones. Ratzer designates that street Grand—as it’s still known today—but has it interrupted in the middle by a large rectangle called the “Great Square.” (In the larger Ratzer Plan this will later be relabeled “Delancey’s Square.”)

Here’s where things get tricky. Only a few months—at most a year—had passed between the time Montresor finished his survey and when Ratzer would have been doing his own work. Had so much really changed in that time?

There are at least three possible explanations. The first is that because Montresor was more concerned with topographical features than with roads, he didn’t get that section of the city right. This seems the least plausible theory, as he’d been specifically charged by Gen. Gage with mapping the northeastern part of the town.

The second possibility is that the roads had been built between the time Montresor and Ratzer completed their surveys. For example, the path of Division Street was agreed upon by Delancey and Rutgers on October 31, 1765, about six weeks before Montresor began his survey. It is certainly possible that when Montresor mapped that part of the city, Division Street didn’t yet exist and by the time Ratzer was there about a year later, it did.

However, that wouldn’t explain all the additions and changes in the Ratzen Plan, which leaves a plausible third choice: Some of the roads on the Ratzen Plan didn’t exist yet at all.

Ratzer may simply have been planning for the future. Cartography was a time-consuming and infrequent undertaking; if these were roads that the Delanceys planned to put in soon, there’s a chance Ratzer was hoping to make his map useful for future generations. (And to curry favor with the powerful Delancey family.) In fact, it’s possible some of the roads did exist as private streets and Montresor didn’t bother to include them, since they were not public thoroughfares.

That, however, doesn’t explain the missing “Great Square.” Since we have no evidence this square actually ever came to fruition, it seems more like it’s a planner’s rendering: the centerpiece of a Delancey family development that never happened, in part because the Delanceys ended up on the losing side of the American Revolution.

Similarly, there’s a spot on the map—near where the Alfred E. Smith houses now stand on the Lower East Side—where the defunct Rutgers Street runs straight through a swampy body of water. Montresor marks this as “overflow… constantly filling up in order to build on.” While Ratzer includes the road, he also shows the outlines of the swamp; as with Delancey’s Square, he’s definitely projecting into the future.

This isn’t that uncommon in mapmaking. After the publication of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811—which laid out the rectilinear street grid of Manhattan up to 145th Street—New York maps immediately began to depict every straight street and avenue, even though many of them would not be graded, or even cut through, for years.

This doesn’t make these maps wrong, but it does mean that the farther Ratzer’s maps stray from densely populated areas, the more skeptical a modern reader needs to be when consulting them.

At the same time that he was working on the smaller Ratzen Plan, Lt. Ratzer was engaged in his much larger project, what we today call the Ratzer Map. Also surveyed in 1767, but first published in 1770, it is simultaneously “the most accurate and reliable which we have of New York at this period” and a remarkable work of art. (And don’t take my word for it; when a 1776 print of the map came up for sale at Christie’s, it was estimated to fetch $3,000 to $4,000, but sold for $106,250.)

Four copies of the original 1770 printing are known to exist: one, hand colored, is in the collection of the British Library and may have been a presentation copy to King George III. Three are housed at the New-York Historical Society, and a fourth—only recently discovered and restored—is at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Even keeping in mind that Ratzer may have included some things on the map that didn’t yet exist, the work is still remarkable for its detail. As I.N. Phelps Stokes points out in The Iconography of Manhattan Island, the Ratzer Map not only covers a much larger area, it also corrects a number of small errors in the Ratzen Plan (changing Beekman Street to Beekman, for example, and Clist to Cliff).

But how “accurate and reliable” is Ratzer’s survey today?

I decide to find out by heading down to the most complete area on the map, Lower Manhattan; in particular, I’m interested in exploring those parts of the survey that don’t have obvious analogues today. After all, it would be easy enough to take a stroll up Broadway or the Bowery and declare the map complete and precise.

In general, the western edge of the Financial District remains intact; some English street names were changed after the Revolution (Crown Street became Liberty, to give the most blatant example), but most of the streets that Ratzer surveyed—when the island didn’t extend any farther west than Greenwich Street—are still there.

One, I discover, exists today only as a street sign.

On the Ratzer Map, a tiny, unnamed street bisects what today is Zuccotti Park. As I walk from the World Trade Center up Liberty Street, I pause where Ratzer had indicated the street would be, and am surprised to see a sign in the park I’ve never noticed before. Though no street runs through anymore, there is a newly installed marker for Temple Street. When Temple Street was first laid out is unclear, but the road remained in existence at least through 1907, if not until the construction of One Liberty Plaza in the late 1960s.

I continue east with the Ratzer Map in hand; I’m interested in finding Golden Hill Street (another candidate for the spot where the first blood of the Revolution was shed) to see if any trace of the hill is still there. I’m also intrigued by a small alley extending from the former site of the Anabaptist Church on Vandercliffe Street (as the section of Gold Street north of John was then called) that Ratzer has on his plan.

When a 1776 print of the map came up for sale at Christie’s, it was estimated to fetch $3,000 to $4,000, but sold for $106,250.

This part of town was once home to the city’s artisan class; as historian Carl Abbott notes, 60 percent of the city’s “retailers and makers of consumer goods, metalworkers, grocers and druggists, printers, skilled construction workers, and the like [lived] in the area bounded by Wall Street, Broadway and Beekman Street.”

Though some of Lower Manhattan’s topography is remarkably intact—notice, for example, how streets bank down toward Maiden Lane, the former site of a streambed—I find no remnant of Golden Hill or nearby Rutgers Hill. But the L-shaped alley on Gold Street is still exactly where Ratzer had placed it 250 years ago. Called Edens Alley on one leg of the L and Ryders Alley on the other, it is known to me only by reputation: It was this alley that journalist Robert Sullivan staked out for his monumental survey of New York’s favorite rodent, Rats. Possibly named for attorney John Rider, who lived in the city in the 1670s, and then renamed for Medcef Eden, a prominent resident a century later, the alley today is a nearly forgotten reminder of the colonial city.

Continuing north on Gold Street, I soon come to the tangle of half-hearted pedestrian paths and dead ends that fester beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. But before venturing into Chinatown, I see that my modern-day map showed a pedestrian extension of Spruce Street wending its way through the Southbridge Towers, a housing development.

Spruce Street was another thoroughfare renamed after the war—it had originally been George Street, named for the king. I locate George Street on my Ratzer Map, and while it originally dead ended at Gold Street, I also see a road labeled “Ferry Street” heading south into the land now occupied by the housing complex. As I walk the vague outline of Spruce Street, it makes a sharp left turn where an unnamed street on the Ratzer Map also turns left—another extremely faint reminder of the colonial era that could easily have been wiped away, but was somehow preserved.

Ferry Street, of course, would have once led to the boat that had been operating since the Dutch era connecting Long Island to Manhattan. I opt for the IRT instead and end up in Brooklyn Heights, one of the oldest settled areas on that side of the river. The Ratzer Map shows a cluster of houses along what today is called Old Fulton Street. That road, now interrupted by Cadman Plaza and thus separated from the original Fulton Street, is the old highway into Long Island.

Near Clark Street, where I exit the subway, Ratzer depicts streets that could easily be major neighborhood thoroughfares, such as Montague Street or older, smaller roads like Love Lane, that some think may date back to the area’s Native American population. Alas, while Ratzer does label some properties—in particular those of wealthy Brooklyn residents like the Livingstons—hardly any streets in the Brooklyn section are named.

That doesn’t make the map any less intriguing. Toward the eastern edge of the survey the village of Bedford Corners is shown at the intersection of the “Road to New Town” and the “Road to Jamaica.” Lining up Ratzer’s survey with a contemporary map shows that the road leading out to Jamaica is likely Fulton Street, the same path he depicted leading up from the river’s edge in Brooklyn Heights. The Road to New Town is Bedford Avenue, one of the longest and oldest roads in the borough. Small streets that don’t exactly conform to the neighborhood’s street plan—Spencer Place, Breevoort Place, and Arlington Place, for example—appear to be holdouts from the era when Bedford Corners was a rest stop on the highway out to Long Island.

Ratzer’s survey of Brooklyn would become particularly important in the summer of 1776 when the Revolutionary War moved from Massachusetts to New York. During the Battle of Brooklyn in late August, British general Hugh Earl Percy used his copy of the Ratzer Map to plan the British onslaught. As Barnet Schecter wrote for an exhibition at the Brooklyn Historical Society:

In red ink, Percy marked the positions of American trenches, batteries, and forts protecting Brooklyn Heights, the mouth of the East River, and Gowanus Creek. [Percy dotted a] red circle numbered “24” just north of Gowanus Creek [to indicate] the site that Percy apparently believed to be Cobble Hill Fort. In actuality, the Fort stood further north, at present-day Court Street and Atlantic Avenue…. The red notations on the map suggest the cold calculations of a British general preparing to subdue the positions of a weaker enemy.

And subdue them they did. The Battle of Brooklyn was a stinging defeat for the Americans, and George Washington barely managed to evacuate his troops across the East River to Manhattan under the cover of darkness.

Washington’s headquarters during the battle was the so-called Four Chimneys House, which stood in Brooklyn Heights on a bluff overlooking the East River. I find it on the Ratzer Map clearly marked as “Phil Livingston Esq,” and then find it in person at the foot of Montague Street. Where the street dead-ends into the promenade, a plaque is set into a rock to mark the spot. Livingston was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, but that’s not what interests me about the plaque. And while the controversy that erupted over the plaque’s wording when it was unveiled in 1929 is also entertaining, that’s not what makes me pause, either.

He may have perched at this very spot to look back across the East River toward Manhattan two and a half centuries ago, comparing the bevy of docks and piers there to what he’d already surveyed.

Instead, I’m interested in the rock into which the plaque has been set.

The rock is a glacial erratic, deposited millennia ago when the last Ice Age came to an end. Such boulders, non-native stone that was often too unwieldy to move, are scattered all around the five boroughs. Did this boulder sit on Philip Livingston’s property when the Four Chimneys mansion stood here? If so, it surely would also have been here when Bernard Ratzer traipsed through Brooklyn creating his monumental survey. He may have perched at this very spot to look back across the East River toward Manhattan two and a half centuries ago, comparing the bevy of docks and piers there to what he’d already surveyed.

Outside a few famous relics like Fraunces Tavern (which isn’t even authentic), the Old Stone House (ditto), and a few genuine sites like St. Paul’s Chapel and the Morris-Jumel Mansion, finding the spirit of colonial New York can be hard these days. But, somehow, I find it lives on in this unprepossessing boulder and, more importantly, in the black-and-white engravings of Lt. Ratzer’s startlingly detailed maps.

I take a seat on a bench overlooking Brooklyn Bridge Park, comparing what I see before me with Ratzer’s 250-year-old notations. Though Manhattan has pushed outward into the East River over the last two centuries, the view back toward South Street Seaport isn’t altogether unlike what Ratzer’s map depicts. Turning the other direction, I see Governors Island—now much larger thanks to significant landfilling than the small island that Ratzer shows. Still, I can picture George Washington and his council of war looking out the windows of the Four Chimneys House in the same direction, seeing the massive British fleet anchored out there, and planning their bold escape. Though my view is dotted with skyscrapers, Ratzer’s survey allows me to see past them and focus on what a small town New York would have been.