Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [335]
Clinton and Morris went down to Washington to lobby for the plan, but Madison refused: federal aid for “internal improvements,” the president said, was probably unconstitutional. Clinton didn’t lose heart, however, and over the next fifteen years he crusaded so zealously for the canal’s completion that it would come to be known as “Clinton’s ditch.”
Other momentous changes, more local in scope, lay closer to realization. In the spring of 1811, as workmen were finishing the facade of City Hall, New Yorkers got their first glimpse of a remarkable new plan—intricately engraved on an eight-foot-long map—for the city’s future expansion up the island of Manhattan. Some four years in preparation, the plan was the work of a state-appointed Streets Commission made up of Gouverneur Morris, Simeon De Witt (the state surveyor), and John Rutherford (a respected city businessman and former New Jersey senator). After a decade of yellow fever epidemics, the Assembly had charged the commissioners with laying out “streets, roads, and public squares” in such a manner “as to unite regularity and order with the Public convenience and benefit, and in particular to promote the health of the city,” by allowing for the “free and abundant circulation of air.”
The commissioners had hired John Randel Jr., a young man in his early twenties, for the herculean task of surveying all 11,400 acres of Manhattan Island. He began in the spring of 1808, hiking each day from his residence in lower Manhattan to field headquarters at the corner of Christopher and Herring streets (passing Tom Paine’s house, where “frequently in fair weather [I] saw him sitting at the south window”). From there Randel and his men tramped on to distant parts of the island, often so thickly wooded as to be “impassable without the aid of an ax.” Additional obstacles included hostile property owners and squatters, who unleashed dogs on any who approached with measuring instruments, or barraged them with cabbages and artichokes.
Randel had worked (he later said) “with a view to ascertain the most eligible grounds for the intended streets and avenues, with reference to sites least obstructed by rocks, precipices, steep grades, and other obstacles.” But by the time he’d finished, in the fall of 1810, the commissioners had settled on an overlay pattern that brooked no such obstacles. Inasmuch as Morris (like Clinton) was also an active member of the Erie Canal Commission, it comes as no surprise that their vision of the streets of Manhattan had much in common with their vision of a great canal plowing across the state.
Several years before, the Salmagundians had playfully credited the right-angled, logical temperament of Philadelphians to the right-angled, logical pattern of their streets. “Whereas the people of New York—God help them—tossed about over hills and dales, through lanes and alleys, crooked streets—continually mounting and descending, turning and twisting—whisking off at tangents, and left-angle-triangles, just like their own queer, odd, topsyturvy rantipole city, are the most irregular, crazyheaded, quicksilver, eccentric, whim-whamsical set of mortals that ever were jumbled together in this uneven, villainous revolving globe, and are the very antipodeans to the Philadelphians.”
Now all that was about to end. In the Commissioners’ Plan, twelve avenues, each a hundred feet in width, would slice north, canal-like, from the edge of town (then roughly Houston Street), paralleling Manhattan’s central axis. Every two hundred feet, crossing these avenues at right angles, were fifty- or sixty-foot-wide streets (one of which, every half mile or so, widened to one hundred feet). The resulting grid appealed to the same republican predilection for control and balance, the same distrust of sinuous nature, that