McSpaden described the typical mapping flight as a series of parallel passes over the subject area, with the camera firing at a set interval. The photographer was seated in front, the pilot to the rear. “We have an understanding with the pilot,” McSpaden wrote, “that when we start on a photographic strip and reach the place where the pictures should begin, he will signal by ‘shaking the stick,’ causing the plane to fly upward and downward.” Operating from an open cockpit at 10,000 feet meant wearing “a few sweaters, a fur-lined teddy bear, fleece-lined boots … a muffler, a knitted helmet that comes over the head, covers most of the face and comes down below the shoulders.”
Back in the studio, the thousands of images were developed, sorted, cropped and matched with survey maps to create the immense aerial portrait. The result, delivered to Tuttle and the Board of Estimate on June 30, 1924, was the world’s first complete aerial photographic map of a city — a snapshot of New York City in its Jazz Age glory, a city in full.
“It contains detail no old-fashioned survey can record. Even individual trees and bushes,” McSpaden wrote in Scientific American, with a sense of wonder familiar to anyone who hovered over their neighborhood in Google Maps. “Mrs. Smith’s washing can be seen on the line, so you know Mrs. Smith’s wash day even if you don’t know Mrs. Smith.”
Manhattan’s first-gen skyscrapers — the Singer and Woolworth buildings, the Metropolitan Life Insurance tower — push for the clouds. Tugs and ferries scuttle about the Hudson and East River like water beetles on a pond. The sprawling street grid races down Brooklyn to the sea, churning the city’s last tilled farmland into tidy blocks of Tudor homes. The fabric of the great metropolis is whole; Harlem, the Lower East Side and downtown Brooklyn are all intact, not yet rent asunder by the expressways and urban renewal projects of the postwar era. The motorcar is gestational still, not the machine that will soon wreck entire neighborhoods in its way.
But to natives of New York City, the city Fairchild revealed is still recognizably the one we know and hate and love today. There is Nona’s birthplace on Chrystie Street, where Sammy’s Roumanian used to be; there, on Jamaica Bay, is where we drank Budweisers and fished for snappers. Our homes, our schools; our blocks and streets and temples and churches, boardrooms, bars and burial grounds — all mapped out like the lines on our collective urban face.