Laass, Julius Caesar (sold)

Julius Caesar Laass (June 1, 1828 - November 22, 1896) was a German-American civil engineer and draughtsman active in the Albany, New York area in the second half of the 19th century. Laass was born in Sachsen, Germany. He arrived in New York from Hamburg with his brother Leopold, in September of 1847, not exactly a Forty-Eighter, but possibly anticipating the troubles that would erupt just months later. Like many Germans relocating to the United States between 1847 and 1849, Laass was highly educated, a trained engineer, master draughtsman, skilled engraver, and lithographer. He registered for the draft for the American Civil War in 1863, but there is no record he served. After the war, in 1865, he settled in Syracuse, where, working with his brother, the architect Leopold Laass (July 1, 1829 - December 5, 1870), he operated a drafting workshop. A notice in the Syracuse Daily Courier and Union in June of 1865, states that he was in the process of preparing a massive 6.5 x 4.5 foot Bird's Eye View of Syracuse. This ambitious masterpiece was published in 1868 and is one of the most remarkable views ever published. Only a single example, at the Library of Congress, survives. The pursuit of this view underscores the temperament of Laass, a man given to grandiose projects with little prospect of remuneration. A view of this caliber was never before published even for major metropolises, like Boston and New York, mostly because it was not economically viable. Certainly, it was not so with Syracuse. At some point he settled in Albany where he worked for the city. He also issued a view of the 'Greenway’s Brewing and Malting Establishment' of Syracuse, Later in 1868 Laass took work with the State of New York Canal Commission, for home he produced a remarkable chromolithograph view of the lands to the west of Albany. By 1885 he relocated to Marion, Iowa, where he died in 1896.