Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [337]
In a remarkable assertion of public authority over large estate owners, moreover, the city decided to shut up any previously laid-out streets that were not retroactively accepted by the Common Council. Petrus Stuyvesant’s Bowery Village grid, devised twenty-odd years before, ran afoul of the Commissioners’ Plan, as it had been laid out on a true north-to-south and east-to-west basis, rather than adopting Manhattan’s skewed axis. When the city began opening streets and avenues in the area—Third Avenue was cut through Stuyvesant property as early as 1812—the old roads were closed and the houses on them demolished or moved. After much bitter fighting with city officials, the powerful family was able to salvage several residences on Stuyvesant Street; it still survives, cutting diagonally between Second and Third avenues, a ghost of defunct ambitions.
Yet it was really the commissioners who were most ambitious of all. Their system of streets, which started at ist and swept grandly and numerically up-island, was an implicitly imperial blueprint with no logical stopping point. Indeed the commissioners felt compelled to apologize for having halted at 155th Street. The reason “the whole island has not been laid out as a city,” they explained, was not from any lack of expansionary will; they had, after all, already provided space enough “for a greater population than is collected at any spot on this side of China.” Going farther would simply have been pointless for the time being, both because “it is improbable that (for centuries to come) the grounds north of Harlem Flat will be covered with houses,” and because extending the grid higher “might have furnished materials for the pernicious spirit of speculation.” For—like the Erie Canal in yet another sense—their grid was intended to hasten the real development of the city’s hinterlands, not to encourage unproductive shenanigans. And no sooner were map and plan approved than Randel and his crew were set to work on staking out the actual landscape. Over the next decade they would place 1,549 yard-high white-marble markers at imagined intersections, each engraved with the number of its street-to-be, and wherever rocks barred the way, half-foot iron bolts, ninety-eight in all, were driven in to mark the spot.
New York’s dominant commercial classes thus engraved their vision on the city, reshaping it to meet their evolving needs, unhindered by the presence of powerful national or state officials who, following a different urbanist calculus, might have imposed corridors of power and display. In Manhattan—a city of capital, not a capital city—considerations of efficiency and economy came first.1
THE MAYOR WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT
In the spring of 1811, while the streets commissioners staked out the Manhattan grid, President Madison’s fumbling attempts to protect the rights of neutral carriers moved the United States and Great Britain ever closer to open conflict. The idea of a second war of independence with the former mother country had become popular in many parts of the country, but not in New York, still reeling from the havoc wrought by the embargo. With a notable lack of enthusiasm, the city prepared for the worst by completing the construction of four forts designed to protect it from naval attack.
The circular West Battery, built on a rocky outcropping about two hundred feet off the tip of Manhattan, had been designed by John J. McComb. Its eight-foot-thick walls were pierced with embrasures for twenty-eight cannon to sweep the Upper Bay and the mouth of the Hudson River. Only a few hundred yards away, on the shore of Governors Island, stood Castle Williams, designed by the Army’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Williams (later the first superintendent of