The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [6]
So the commissioners straightened out Manhattan’s twisty street plan into a relentless, unvarying grid—twelve avenues, placed at unequal intervals and running on a roughly north–south axis, and 155 streets crossing the avenues from the settled northern border of the city far up into the wilds of Harlem. As there were to be no ovals or stars, so there were to be no plazas, no public gathering spots. The commissioners went on to observe, “It may be, to many, a matter of surprise that so few vacant spaces have been left, and these so small, for the benefit of fresh air, and consequent preservation of health. Certainly, if the city of New York were destined to stand on the side of a small stream, such as the Seine or the Thames, a great number of ample places might be needful.” Pity Paris or London, languishing beside “a small stream,” while in Manhattan the health-giving sea dispelled the vapors attendant upon urban life. And then the commissioners returned to their commercial preoccupations: the very fact that Manhattan was an island, they noted, ensured that the price of land was “uncommonly great”; so “principles of economy” would have to be given more weight than might otherwise have been prudent. Thus, no plazas.
Generations of urban thinkers, from Frederick Law Olmsted to Lewis Mumford, have reeled in horror at a master plan that obliterated topography in favor of the endless multiplication of identical units, and could find no larger rationale for doing so than cost. And yet everything about the plan bears the stamp of this new democratic republic: its simplicity and horror of adornment; its blunt practicality; its faith in the marketplace as a democratic instrument, equally open to all. The grid was a blow against the large landholder with his private streets; even the decision to identify the avenues and streets by number rather than name was an act of “lexicographical leveling,” removing from the great families the privilege of memorializing themselves in the city’s street plan. The grid was an abstraction, but an abstraction placed at the service of the citizen—intended not to thwart the city’s appetites and ambitions, but to facilitate their satisfaction.
The commissioners did permit several interruptions in the pattern. There would be “places,” such as Union Place, formed at the conjunction of various streets and thus “the children of necessity,” and “squares,” large areas to be set aside for parade grounds or marketplaces, though not for strolling or the taking of fresh air. Besides these, only one exception to the relentless principle of the grid would be permitted: Broadway. This boulevard was already the city’s main street, crossing over the canal and running all the way to Grace Church at 10th Street (where it formed the southern boundary of Union Place). The path continued as the Bloomingdale Road; as it slanted northward, this roadway cut at a sharp angle through the avenues, forming triangles which, though children of necessity as well, apparently seemed to the commissioners too unimportant for further comment.
THE “SQUARES” NEVER had a chance before the city’s growth, and before the simple principle—which the commissioners seem to have anticipated—that land would be converted to its most valuable use. Neither the parade ground nor the marketplace was ever built. And as New York became, first, the great port city of the eastern seaboard, and then the nation’s chief source of capital, the city’s boundary pressed out into the numbered streets of the new grid. The grid did not, of course, lend itself to the idea of a “city center”; instead, the center moved steadily