This painting depicts John Street, a residential neighborhood of New York City, in 1768, as recalled by the artist Joseph B. Smith early in the nineteenth century. The painting highlights the urbane pleasures of casual encounters and friendly conversations on the street. Unlike many urban streets today, John Street appears quiet. People could talk casually while a horseman rode past and dogs romped. The street also appears safe and secure. Men, women, and children show no sign of caution about theft or assault. People sit on their porches, doors ajar. Modest dwellings adjoin more elaborate homes, suggesting a mix of wealth and taste among John Street residents. Notice that fences separate house yards from the street, rather than houses from one another, hinting of friendly relations among neighbors. Few of the people depicted are alone. Most people accompany one or more other people, suggesting the importance of the street as a place to socialize, to nod to strangers, chat with friends, or even to conduct business.

The large building is the John Street Methodist Church. The church is not set apart from the houses of the neighborhood but mingled among them with a minimum of ostentation or display.

Overall, the street appears orderly and prosperous, not a place of disorder or poverty. People appear to be well dressed and purposeful. Ragged paupers, staggering drunks, or disreputable people appear nowhere. The street is spacious and smooth, not muddy, rutted, or choked with garbage and filth. Broad sidewalks offer room for leisurely strolling. Yet the street itself is portrayed as more of a sidewalk than an avenue for the traffic of wheeled vehicles or horseback riders.

The painting depicts an idealized and sanitized version of mid-eighteenth century urban life. In New York and other cities, streets were typically dirty and unpleasant, dusty when dry and swampy when wet. Sidewalks were often little more than wooden planks plopped unsteadily onto the ground. Households routinely emptied human waste into the street, along with bones, animal carcasses, and rotting vegetable matter. Horses and oxen that carried people and goods through the streets made their own contributions to the stinky muck. The reeking streets often contaminated water supplies (which typically were shallow private wells located in the backs of houses or public wells positioned in the streets), making waterborne diseases common. In sum, the density of housing and human habitation that made mid-eighteenth century cities places of urban pleasures depicted in the painting also made cities unhealthy and even dangerous, compared to life on more isolated rural farms.

SOURCE: John Street United Methodist Church (New York, NY).

Questions for Analysis

Connect to the Big Idea

How did rural life differ from that in cities like New York?