Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [336]
There was nothing new about grids. City planners had relied on them for thousands of years, and they were deployed throughout the American colonies, from small New England towns to larger urban centers like Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans. When Lady Deborah Moody founded Gravesend in the midseventeenth century, she laid out a grid adapted from the town plan of New Haven. What was new about the Manhattan grid was its ruthless utilitarianism.
In 1803 Joseph François Mangin and Casimir Goerck had come up with a plan for the future of Manhattan that served varying needs (health, recreation, commerce, community) with variable means: small blocks with streets close together in commercial areas, spacious and more separated blocks in residential districts, and plenty of parks. But the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 would have none of this. Like the proposed Erie Canal, it was an “internal improvement” that gloried in the supremacy of technique over topography. Manhattan’s ancient hills, dales, swamps, springs, streams, ponds, forests, and meadows—none would be permitted to interrupt its fearful symmetry. The commissioners admitted that it “may be a matter of surprise that so few vacant spaces have been left, and those so small, for the benefit of fresh air and consequent preservation of health.” Certainly, if New York had been situated alongside a small stream, “such as the Seine or Thames,” it might have needed more ample public places. “But those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan Island render its situation, in regard to health and pleasure, as well as to the convenience of commerce, peculiarly felicitous.”
The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
The commissioners hastened to add that they had indeed incorporated some open spaces into the grid. A huge 240-acre tract bounded by Third Avenue, Seventh Avenue, 23rd Street, and 34th Street was set aside for a “Grand Parade”—big enough, they said, “for Military Exercise, as also to assemble, in case of need, the force destined to defend the City.” Above the Grand Parade, four smaller squares—Harlem, Hamilton, Bloomingdale, and Manhattan—afforded further relief from the grid’s rectilinear monotony. Two final squares were set aside, one for a reservoir on an elevated bluff, another for a fifty-four-acre wholesale “Market Place” between 7th and 10th Streets from First Avenue to the East River.
Of “circles, ovals, and stars” there were to be none, however. Such “supposed improvements,” the commissioners argued—sniping at features incorporated by L’Enfant in his plan for Washington—not only obstructed traffic but violated “the principles of economy.” Cities are “composed principally of the habitations of men,” and it is self-evident that “strait-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build, and the most convenient to live in.” Carving Manhattan up to 155th Street into roughly two thousand long, narrow blocks, each further subdivided into standardized lots (usually twenty-five by one hundred feet), each of which was easily located in reference to numbered streets and avenues, would also make land easier to market: Randel later pointed with pride to the way his handiwork heightened opportunities for “buying, selling, and improving real estate.”
The grid enshrined republican as well as realtor values, in its refusal to privilege particular places or parcels. All plots were equal under the commissioners’ regime, and the network of parallels and perpendiculars provided a democratic alternative to the royalist avenues of Baroque European cities. The shift from naming streets to numbering them, beyond promoting efficiency, also embodied a lexicographical leveling; no longer would families of rank or fortune memorialize themselves