Commissioners' Plan of 1811

A modern redrawing of the 1807 version of the Commissioners' grid plan for Manhattan, a few years before it was adopted in 1811

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 was the original design for the streets of Manhattan above Houston Street, which put in place the rectangular grid plan of streets and lots that has defined Manhattan to this day. It has been called "the single most important document in New York City's development," and the plan has been described as encompassing the "republican predilection for control and balance ... [and] distrust of nature." It was described by the commission that created it as combining "beauty, order and convenience."

The Commissioners were Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father of the United States; the lawyer John Rutherfurd, a former United States Senator; and the state Surveyor General, Simeon De Witt. Their chief surveyor was John Randel Jr., who was 20 years old when he began the job.

The plan originated as a proposal by the New York State Legislature, adopted in 1811 for the orderly development and sale of the land of Manhattan between 14th Street and Washington Heights. The plan is arguably the most famous use of the grid plan or "gridiron" and is considered by most historians to have been far-reaching and visionary. Since its earliest days, the plan has been criticized for its monotony and rigidity, in comparison with irregular street patterns of older cities, but in recent years has been viewed more favorably by urban planners.

Central Park, the massive urban greenspace in Manhattan running from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue and from 59th Street to 110th Street, is not a part of this plan, as it was not envisioned until 1853. There were a few smaller interruptions in the grid, such as the Grand Parade between 23rd Street and 33rd Street, which was the precursor to Madison Square Park, as well as four squares named Bloomingdale, Hamilton, Manhattan, and Harlem, a wholesale market complex, and a reservoir.

History of the gridiron

Beginnings

The gridiron as a concept for the layout of a town or city is not new. Gridirons can be found in the Old and New Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt, and in Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley in 2154 BCE with a population of 40,000 people, where many historians claim it was invented, and from where it may have spread to Ancient Greece. When the Greek city of Miletus was sacked by the Persians in 494 BCE and then liberated by Athens in 476 BCE, over the next three centuries it was rebuilt on the grid plan, with Hippodamus as the local originator of the rectilinear grid system for the city's center, a concept he probably did not invent, but had heard about from elsewhere. Hippodamus went on to spread the grid to Pireaus, Rhodes and other cities in Greece.

The grid plan, or "Hippodamean plan", was also utilized by the Ancient Romans for their fortified military encampments, or castra, many of which evolved into towns and cities; Pompeii is the best-preserved example of Roman urban planning using the gridiron system. Over time, however, and under the pressure of the needs of other cultures, Greek and Roman settlements which had been built using the grid became obliterated or so severely adapted that it is difficult to perceive the remains of the grid. Most Muslim cities, for instance, are not built according to a strict gridiron, although there may be fractured grids within them; Cairo is a notable exception.

In France, England, and Wales, castra evolved into bastides, agricultural communities under a centralized monarchy. This example was followed on the European continent in cities such as New Brandenburg in Germany, which the Teutonic Knights founded in 1248, and in the many town planned and built in the 14th century in the Florentine Republic. The gridiron idea spread with the Renaissance, although in many cities, for instance London, it failed to take root. In some European cities, such as Amsterdam and Paris, destruction of parts of the city by fire, warfare and other calamities offered an opportunity for the grid system to be used to replace more evolutionary street layouts, especially in outlying areas, while the central city, often sheltered behind medieval walls, remained organic and undesigned.

"A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia" (1683) by Thomas Holme, the first map of the city.

In America

In what would become the United States, the gridiron now predominates. In areas that were under Spanish control, the 1753 Laws of the Indies specified the use of the gridiron, and the results can be seen in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Albuquerque, New Mexico; San Diego; San Francisco; and Los Angeles, just as they can in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. By the time of the passage of the federal Land Ordinance of 1785, the grid plan was firmly established. The Ordinance proscribed that newly created states were to have rectilinear boundaries, rather than boundaries shaped by natural features, and within the new areas, beginning in the Northwest Territory, everything was to be divided into rectangles: townships were six miles square (9.66 km), "sections" were one mile square (1.61 km), and individual lots were 60x125 feet (18.29x38.1m). Cities such as Anchorage, Alaska; Erie, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; and Sacremento, California all show the American preference for the grid.

There was significant variation in the size of the grids used. Carson City, Nevada may have the smallest at 180-foot (55 m) square and 60-foot (18 m) streets, while Salt Lake City, Utah is much larger at 600-foot (180 m) square blocks surrounded by 120-foot (37 m) streets. The most popular would appear to be the 300-foot (91 m) square block with streets that are 60 feet (18 m) to 80 feet (24 m) wide. This size grid can be found in Anchorage; Bismarck, North Dakota; Missoula, Montana; Mobile, Alabama; Phoenix, Arizona; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Although some English colonial cities, such as Boston, had streets that adhered more to natural topography and happenstance, others, such as, notably, Philadelphia and Savannah, Georgia, had been built to the gridiron concept from the beginning – in Philadelphia's case, William Penn, specified the city's orthogonal pattern when he founded it in 1682, although its 400-foot (120 m) blocks turned out to be too large, encouraging the creation of intermediate streets, while James Oglethorpe's Savannah, with its significantly smaller blocks, was not conducive to large-scale development, restricting the city's economic influence. New Amsterdam, however, had not been laid out in a grid pattern by the Dutch. The streets of lower Manhattan were more "organic", and incorporated Native American trails, cow paths, and streets that followed the topography and hydrology of the swampy land.

Prior to the Commissioners' Plan

A portion of a map of the city from 1776; De Lancey Square and the grid around it can be seen on the right

Private developments

The first efforts at putting a grid onto Manhattan in some form came from private developers. In the early 1750s, Trinity Church laid out a small neighborhood around the new King's College – which would later become Columbia University – in rectangular blocks. However, because the plan required landfill in the Hudson River, which wouldn't happen until much later, the streets were never laid down. The second instance came when the powerful De Lancey family decided to break up part of their vast estate in the 1760s, and laid out of grid of streets centered on "De Lancey Square". As royalists, their holdings were confiscated after the American Revolution, but the streets remained – although a new street, Grand Street, was laid through the central square. The north-south streets of the De Lancey grid become the core north-south streets of the Lower East Side: Chrystie, Forsyth, Eldridge, Allen, Orchard and Ludlow Streets, and the grid became the pattern for additional streets laid out in the area.

The third instance of a privately developed grid in New York City came in 1788, when the long-established Bayard family, relatives of Peter Stuyvesant, hired surveyor Casimir Goerck to lay out streets in the portion of their estate west of Broadway, so the land could be sold in lots. About 100 acres (40 ha) accommodated 7 east-west and 8 north-south streets, all 50 feet (15 m) wide, making up 35 whole or partial rectilinear blocks of 200 feet (61 m) width from east to west, and between 350 feet (110 m) and 500 feet (150 m) long north to south – although near the edges of the estate the grid broke down in order to connect up with existing streets. The Bayard streets still exist as the core of SoHo and part of Greenwich Village: Mercer, Greene, and Wooster Streets, LaGuardia Place/West Broadway (originally Laurens Street), and Thompson, Sullivan, MacDougal, and Hancock Streets, although the last has been subsumed by the extension of Sixth Avenue.

At about the same time as the Bayards, Petrus Stuyvesant, the great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant, intended to lay out a small grid of streets, nine by four, to create a village on his estate. The orientation of the streets was to be true north-south and east-west, not shifted, as Manhattan Island is, 20 degrees east of true north. The only street to actually be laid was the grid's central east-west axis, Stuyvesant Street, which remains the one street in Manhattan oriented closely to true east and west.

The surveying of the Commons

Goerck's first survey

Despite the fact that the city's charters over the decades – the Dongan Charter (1686), the Cornbury Charter (1708) and the Montgomerie Charter (1731) – supported by specific laws passed by the province or state in 1741, 1751, 1754, 1764, 1774 and 1787, gave the city's Common Council full powers over the creation of new streets, the Council rarely did so, independent of the actions of the various landowners who developed their property and ran streets through their projects as they saw fit, which were approved after the fact by the Council. Its first effort to do so came in June 1785 as part of the Council's attempt to raise money by selling property.

The Council owned a great deal of land, primarily in the middle of the island, away from the Hudson and East Rivers, as a result of grants by the Dutch provincial government to the colony of New Amsterdam. Although originally more extensive, by 1785 the council held approximately 1,300 acres (530 ha), or about 9% of the island. Unfortunately, the land was not only of such poor quality – being either rocky and elevated or swampy and low-lying – that it was not suitable for farming or residential estates, and was also difficult to get to because of both the lack of roads and access to waterways.

To divide the Common Lands, as they were called, into sellable lots, and to lay out roads to service them, the Council hired Goerck, one of a handful of officially-approved "city surveyors", to survey them. Goerck, who was related to the Roosevelt family by marriage, was instructed to make lots of about 5 acres (2.0 ha) each – precision in such matters was not to be expected with the available surveying tools, given the topography and ground cover of the Common Lands – and to lay out roads to access the lots. He completed his task in December, only six months later, creating 140 lots of varying sizes. Although not laid out in a gridiron patter – Goerck was not instructed to do so – most of the lots were organized into two columns of 45 lots with a 65-foot (20 m) road between the columns. The lots were oriented as the lots of the future Commissioners' Plan would be, with the east-west axis longer than the north-south axis; their five acre size would become the template for the Commissioners' five acre blocks; and Goerck's middle road would eventually reappear on the Commissioners' Plan, without acknowledgment, as the 100-foot (30 m) wide Fifth Avenue.

Goerck's second survey

Unfortunately for the Common Council, the disadvantages of the plots in the Common Lands worked against their sale, and there was no run on the market to buy them. Still, sales continued at a steady, if not spectacular, pace. By 1794, with the city growing ever more populated and the inhabited area constantly moving north towards the Common Lands, the Council decided to try again, hiring Goerck once more to re-survey and map the area. He was instructed to make the lots more uniform and rectangular and to lay out roads to the west and east of the middle road, as well as to lay out east-west streets of 60 feet (18 m) each. Later, the Commissioners would use Goerck's East and West Roads for their Fourth and Sixth Avenues, again without acknowledging their debt. Goerck's cross streets would become the numbered east-west streets of the later plan. Goerck took two years to survey the 212 lots which encompassed the entire Common Lands. Again, impeded by tools and topography, Goerck's work was somewhat less than precise. In 1808, John Hunn, the city's street commissioner would comment that "The Surveys made by Mr. Goerck upon the Commons were effected through thickets and swamps, and over rocks and hills where it was almost impossible to produce accuracy of mensuration." Often the streets intended to intersect at right angles would not quite do so.

Still, Goerck's work in surveying the Common Lands was the basis for the Commissioners' Plan, as explained by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission: "The Commissioner's Plan borrowed heavily from Goerck's earlier surveys and essentially expanded his scheme beyond the common lands to encompass the entire island." Historian Gerard Koeppel comments "In fact, the great grid is not much more than the Goerck plan writ large. The Goerck plan is modern Manhattan's Rosetta Stone..."

The Mangin-Goerck Plan

The Mangin-Goerck Plan of 1801; the "warning label" can be seen at the bottom under "Plan of the City of New York"

In 1797, the Council commissioned Goerck and Joseph-François Mangin, another city surveyor, to survey Manhattan's streets; Goerck and Mangin had each submitted individual proposals to the Council, but then decided to team up. Goerck died of yellow fever during the course of the project, but Mangin completed it and delivered the draft of the Mangin-Goerck Plan to the Council in 1799 for correction of street names; the final engraved version – made by engraver Peter Maverick, who would also go on to engrave the published map of the Commissioners' Plan – would be presented to the Council in 1803. However, Mangin had gone well beyond the terms of the commission, and the map not only showed the existing streets of the city, as instructed, but was also, in Mangin's words, "the Plan of the City ... such as it is to be..."

In other words, the Magnin-Goerck Plan was a guide to where Mangin believed future streets should be laid out. It called for enlarging the tip of the island and using landfill to regularize its waterfront. He placed a number of street grids on land that was, at the time, agricultural or undeveloped. The grids, which had different baselines, met up, and there Mangin placed parks and public spaces. He extended the Bayard grid northward, and the De Lancey grid to the east and north, and created a new grid of true north-south/east-west streets, among other inventions. As Gerard Koppel comments:

In sum, Magnin's plan of the city "such as it is to be" was a synthesizing of patterns already establishing themselves at the suburban fringes of the city and, in the city proper, an orderly filling in east and west with linear streets out to continuous roads along the waterfronts. The city government hadn't asked for it, but it seemed to be just what it wanted.

The Council apparently accepted the plan as "the new Map of the City" for four years, even publishing it by subscription, until political machinations perhaps engineered by Aaron Burr acting through the city's street commissioner, Joseph Browne Jr., brought it into disrepute. Burr – the political enemy of Mangin's mentor Alexander Hamilton – may have been upset that the design of New York's City Hall had gone to Mangin and his partner John McComb Jr., and not to Burr's candidate, Benjamin Henry Latrobe Jr., but for whatever reason, the plan was disavowed by the Council, and was no longer to be considered "the new Map of the City." The Council ordered that copies which had already been sold be bought back if possible, and that a label warning of inaccuracies be placed on any additional copies sold. They stopped short at totally destroying the plan, but, still, neglect may have had the same effect: the original 6-foot (1.8 m) square engraved map has disappeared, and of the smaller versions only less then a dozen are extant, none in good condition.

Nevertheless, despite the Council's official disavowal of Mangin's layout of future streets, as the city grew the Mangin-Goerck Plan became the de facto reference for where new streets were built, and when the Commissioners' Plan was revealed in 1811, the area of the plan which the public had been warned was inaccurate and speculative had been accepted wholesale by the Commission, their plan being almost identical to Mangin's in that area.

The Commissioners' Plan

Genesis

Politics may have caused the Common Council to officially decertify Magnin's plan for the future expansion of the city, but the episode nonetheless was a step forward in the development of the city's future. In the "warning label" the Council caused to have placed on copies of Mangin's map was the statement that expansion of the city, such as shown on the map, was "subject to such future arrangements as the Corporation may deem best calculated to promote the health, introduce regularity, and conduce to the convenience of the City." Here the Council was showing its willingness to consider actively planning for how the city would develop.

In 1807, they acted. Optimists at that time expected the city's population, then around 95,000 people, to expand to 400,000 by 1860, when, in fact, it reached 800,000 before the beginning of the Civil War. Faced with opposition and conflict from property owners and various political factions, the city asked the state legislature for help. The Council said its goal was "laying out Streets... 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] a free and abundant circulation of air" to stave off disease. (At the time, foul air was thought to be the cause of many diseases.)

In March 1807, the state legislature responded by appointing as a commission the three man suggested by the Common Council to establish a comprehensive street plan for Manhattan: Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father of the United States; the lawyer John Rutherfurd, a former United States Senator representing New Jersey and a relative to Morris by marriage; and the state Surveyor General, Simeon De Witt, a cousin of De Witt Clinton, who was the Mayor of New York City, a State Senator, and the most powerful politician in New York.

A month later, the legislature gave the commissioners "exclusive power to lay out streets, roads, and public squares, of such width, extent, and direction, as to them shall seem most conducive to public good, and to shut up, or direct to be shut up, any streets or parts thereof which have been heretofore laid out... [but] not accepted by the Common Council." The jurisdiction of the commission was all of Manhattan north of Houston Street, and into the Hudson and East Rivers 600 feet beyond the low water mark. They were given 4 years to have the island surveyed, and then to produce a map showing the placement of future streets. There were few specifications given to them about those streets, except that streets were to be at least 50 feet (15 m) wide, while "leading streets" and "great avenues" were to be at least 60 feet (18 m) wide.

Morris was not named the president of the commission, but acted as such. A majority of commissioners, i.e. two of them, was required to make decisions. The commissioners were authorized to be paid $4 a day for their work (equivalent to $65 in 2021) – although Morris and Rutherfurd, both rich men, waived their fees – and were empowered to enter onto private property in the daytime to undertake their duties; this was greeted with widespread hostility from property owners, but the commission's authority was explicit. They held, for instance, the "exclusive power" to close streets that interfered with their plan, a plan which landowners as well as the mayor, the Common Council and all other citizens of the city had no choice but to accept.

At the meetings of the commission, which were infrequent and usually not attended by all three men, their primary concern was what kind of layout the new area of the city should have, a rectilinear grid such as was used in Philadelphia; New Orleans; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina, or a more complex system utilizing circles, arcs or other patterns, such as plan Pierre Charles L'Enfant had used in laying out Washington, D.C. In the end, the commission decided on the gridiron as being the most practical and cost-effective, as "straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in."

Surveying the island

False start

In order for the Commissioners to determine what the future of New York City's streets would be, they needed to know the precise location of the current streets, which meant that most of the four years they were given for their task would be taken up with surveying Manhattan island.

The commission's first chief surveyor was Charles Frederick Loss, who, like Mangin and the deceased Goerck, was an officially recognized city surveyor, a position he received contingent on becoming a naturalized American citizen. Unfortunately Loss did not appear to be a very competent surveyor, as several of his commissions had serious errors, which eventually resulted in his being relieved of his position in 1811. Loss exhibited the same lack of ability as the chief surveyor for the commission, and finally the commission made an agreement with Loss that he would do only the first task that had been assigned to him: to make a map of Manhattan island, and get accurate measurements for the location of certain streets which would provide a framework for the plan of future streets. For this, Loss would receive no wages but a simple fee of $500. (equivalent to $8,081 in 2021). Loss was to deliver the map by May 1808.

Randel joins the project

The commissioners' replacement as chief engineer and surveyor, John Randel Jr., took over the position in June 1808; the project would occupy him for most of the best 13 years. Randel had been apprenticed to De Witt, and had been an assistant on several surveys as well as measuring the road from Albany to Schenectady, New York. When he was hired by the commission – on De Witt's suggestion and with Morris' approval – he was a relatively inexperienced 20 year old.

Randel's surveying in 1808 had nothing to do with laying out the grid, which had not yet been determined as the final result of the commission's work. Instead, he was determining the topography and ground cover of the land and the placement of natural features such as hills, rocks, swamps, marshes, streams, and ponds, as well as man-made features such as houses, barns, stables, fences, foot paths, cleared fields and gardens. He was also carefully noting the locations of the three north-south roads that Goerck had laid down as part of his survey of the Common Lands. Goerck had not placed the lots and roads in the Common Lands in the context of the overall island, and this Randel did, thus allowing the commissioners to know where, exactly, Goerck's Common Lands grid was. This was important, because it could serve as a template for a grid for the entire island, should the commission decide to go in that direction.

Randel wrote afterwards that in the course of his work he "was arrested by the Sheriff, on numerous suits instituted...for trespass and damage by...workmen, in passing over grounds, cutting off branches of trees. &c., to make surveys under instructions from the Commissioners." In August 1808, Randel was sued by a landowner in August 2008 for trespass and causing damage to the landowner's property, such as cutting down trees and trampling on crops; $5000 was requested in damages, but the landowner received only $150. Nonetheless, the potential for future problems was real. Gouvernor Morris asked the Common Council for a means of protecting the necessary actions of the surveyors, but, for political reasons, the council could not aqree on a solution, and passed the buck, again, to the state legislature. It acted in 1809 with a law providing that if the needed actions to perform the survey could not be performed "without cuting trees or doing damages ... reasonable notice" was to be provided by the commission or the surveyors to the landowner, and they were to view the property together to access the situation. The landowner was to present a bill for "reasonable damages", which the city was to pay within 30 days; any disagreement among the parties as to what was reasonable would, of course, end up in court. The new law did not completely stop lawsuits, but it cut down their number, and allowed Randel to go about his business with a degree of immunity from legal entanglements.

In 1809, Randel's surveying again seems to have been focused on positioning the Common Lands, and Goerck's lots and streets in it, to the rest of the island. Goerck had shown their relationship to the Bloomingdale Road to the west, much of which would become part of Broadway, and the Eastern Post Road to the east, a road which would be demapped by the Commissioners Plan'. Little is known about Randel's surveying in 1810.

And in the meantime, the Commissioners were, generally speaking, distracted by various other personal and political business; although they met – infrequently – there is no record of what they discussed, or if they were getting closer to a decision about what their plan would entail. Finally, on November 29, 1810, with the surveying season for that season over and only four months left before they were to report out their plan, they seemed to have arrived at a decision. On that date, Morris informed the Common Council that although more work was left to be done "on the ground", the Commission itself had "completed their work" and would be able to make a report that would "compl[y] substantially, if not literally within the law, shewing [sic] all the streets which to be laid out..." Randel then spent a considerable amount of time in December meeting with Morris and perhaps the other Commissioners at Morsis' estate in the Bronx, during which time it appears that the grid plan was born. At Morris' suggestion, the Common Council hired Randel to actually do the extensive work involved in making the grid a physical reality, and Randel began this work even before the grid plan was announced publicly.

Randel's survey of the entire island – 11,400 acres (4,600 ha) – was begun in 1808 and completed in 1810, and he now prepared the drafts of the new grid without regard to the topography of the land. The three maps were large, almost nine feet in length when connected together. Commissioner Simeon De Witt said of Randel's work that it was made "with an accuracy not exceeded by any work of the kind in America." Randel himself would later write that "The time within which the Commissioners were limited by the Statute to make their Plan of the streets, avenues, and public places on Manhattan [was] barely sufficient to enable them to comply with the letter, although not fully with the spirit, of the Statute." (italics in original)

"If it should be asked why was the present plan adopted in preference to any other, the answer is, because, after taking all circumstances into consideration, it appeared to be the best; or, in other and more proper terms, attended with the least inconvenience."

— The Commission, from their "Remarks"

The plan

Streets and avenues

The commissioners published their plan in March 1811 in the form of an eight-foot map – redrawn by the otherwise little known William Bridges from Randel's original, and engraved by Peter Maverick – with an accompanying 54-page pamphlet. The grid had 12 primary north-south avenues and numerous cross streets arranged in a regular right-angled grid tilted 29 degrees west of true north to roughly replicate the angle of Manhattan island. The commission chose not to use circles and ovals such as Pierre L'Enfant had used in his design of Washington D.C., convinced that simple rectangles were best, the most convenient and easiest to build on, and therefore the most conducive to the orderly development of the city. The combination of north-south avenues and east-west streets at the specified dimensions was the creation of approximately 2000 long, narrow blocks.

Except in the north and south ends of the island, the avenues would begin with First Avenue on the east side and run through Twelfth Avenue in the west. In addition, where the island was wider, there would be four additional lettered avenues running from Avenue A eastward to Avenue D. Some of the avenues, such as Twelfth Avenue, ran through land that did not as yet exist, but the state legislation which created the commission also authorized the city to extend its boundaries 400 feet into the Hudson and East Rivers, so the land required for these new streets would eventually be created. Broadway, an existing road, was not included in the 1811 plan, and was added to the grid later.

The plan also called for 155 orthogonal cross streets. The location of the cross streets was fixed at the boundaries of 5-acre (2.0 ha) parcels into which the land had previously been divided. The basepoint for the cross streets was First Street: this was a short and inconspicuous street, which still exists, and originally ran from the intersection of Avenue B and Houston Street to the intersection of the Bowery and Bleecker Street. Peretz Square, a small, narrow triangular park bounded by Houston Street, 1st Street, and First Avenue, is the grid's cornerstone.

The numbered streets running east-west are 60 feet (18 m) wide, with about 200 feet (61 m) between each pair of streets, resulting in a grid of approximately 2,000 long, narrow blocks. With each combined street and block adding up to about 260 feet (79 m), there are almost exactly 20 blocks per mile. Fifteen crosstown streets were designated as 100 feet (30 m) wide: 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, 72nd, 79th, 86th, 96th, 106th, 116th, 125th, 135th, 145th and 155th Streets.

The width of the crosstown blocks was irregular. The distance between First and Second Avenues was 650 feet (200 m), while the block between Second and Third Avenues was 610 feet (190 m). The blocks between Third and Sixth Avenues were 920 feet (280 m), while the blocks between the avenues from Sixth to Twelfth were 800 feet (240 m). Lexington and Madison Avenues were added after the original plan. The shorter blocks near the Hudson and East River waterfronts was purposeful, as the commissioners' expected that there would be more development there at a time when water-based transportation was still significant. The commission expected that street frontage near the piers would be more valuable than the landlocked interior, the waterfront being the location of commerce and industry of the time, and so it would be to everyone's benefit to place avenues closer together at the island's edges.

A curiosity about the grid plan the Commissioners chose for New York City is that while many other cities used a square grid, they did not. Perhaps influenced by the dimensions of the island, which is longer north-south than it is east-west, Manhattan's blocks are long rectangles, with the east-west dimension, while varied, larger than the big grid of Salt Lake City, while the north-south dimension, at 200 feet (61 m), just 20 feet (6.1 m) longer than the small grid of Carson City. Historian Gerard Koeppel remarks that "while the grid brought order to the place, it also made it a place of extremes."

In implementing the grid, existing buildings were allowed to remain where they were if at all possible, but if removal was necessary the owners would receive compensation from the city, although appeal was available to a special panel appointed by the state's highest court. In 2011, it was estimated that almost 40% of the buildings north of Houston Street which were standing in 1811 (721 out of 1,825) had to be moved. On the other hand, if the plan improved the accessibility of a property, the city was authorized to levy an assessment on the owner for the improvement, a method previously used by the city after building public amenities, such as wells.

Public spaces

Conspicuous by their relative absence from the plan were amenities for the city's population, including parks and plazas. The legislature which had created the commission called for it to provide public areas but, perhaps because they underestimated the growth potential of the city, they laid out very few of these. The primary one was the Grand Parade of 275 acres (111 ha) between 23rd and 33rd Streea and between Third and Seventh Avenues, which was thought might become the basis for a central park. Smaller squares were placed at 53rd to 57th Street between Eighth to Ninth Avenues (Bloomingdale Square), 66th to 68th Street from Third to Fifth Avenue (Hamilton Square), 77th to 81st Streets between Eighth and Ninth Avenues (Manhattan Square), and 117th to 121st Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues (Harlem Square). Observatory Place, 26 acres (11 ha) intended for a reservoir, stood at 89th to 94th Streets between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, and there was a large 54-acre (22 ha) space in what became the Lower East Side, from 7th to 10th Streets and from First Avenue to the East River, intended as a wholesale market complex.

Of the public spaces created by the commission, only Manhattan Square has survived, as Theodore Roosevelt Park, the grounds around the American Museum of Natural History. The park is official a part of Central Park as of 1874. The Grand Parade was first reduced from 240 acres (97 ha) to 90 acres (36 ha) by 1815, and then demapped altogether, except for 7 acres (2.8 ha) which survives as Madison Square Park. The market on the Lower East Side was whittled down from 51 acres (21 ha) to 16 acres (6.5 ha), then finally became the 10.5 acres (4.2 ha) Tompkins Square Park.

Randel and William Bridges

There was a private controversy regarding the publication of the map of the Commissioners' Plan. Randel had begin to prepare a map to go to the engraver, using his original papers, when he found out that the council had given William Bridges, another of the handful of city-recognized surveyors, the right to do so. Bridges simply copied one of Randel's previously published maps, which were in the public domain, introducing errors as he did so. Bridges published and copyrighted the resulting map as a private venture, leaving Randel out in the cold.

John Randel's survey bolt marked the location of Sixth Avenue and 65th Street; the location later became part of Central Park

Laying out the grid

Even with the publication of the Commissioners' Plan, the work of gridironing Manhattan was far from done. Randel's map only showed 16 elevation points for the entirety of Manhattan island, and many more would be needed. In addition very few of the streets were actually placed into the physcial landscape of the island; 125th Street, for instance, was the northernmost street for which Randel had an actual phsyical position. These tasks, that of completing the survey with elevations, along with marking the actual positions of the notional streets of the plan, would take Randel another 11 years, until 1821.

To inscribe the grid onto the land, Randel and his staff erected almost 1,600 markers – primarily forty-five-inch (110 cm) marble monuments inscribed with the number of the street, placed at each intersection. Where rocks prevented the use of the marble markers, they pounded in six-inch (15 cm) iron bolts. In all, they positioned 1,549 marble markers and 98 iron bolts to define the pattern of the grid.

As part of his post-plan work, Randel published a detailed series of "Farm Maps" that overlaid Manhattan's natural topography with the intended grid, and made an atlas of the city, filling in with "astounding precision" the details of street locations and elevations which had been left off the official map.

Extensions and modifications

The numbered street and avenue plan was eventually continued north of 155th Street. It was also continued into the Bronx: however, the grids on the east side and west side do not match up exactly, especially in the northern reaches of the borough. North of Washington Square Park in Manhattan, the numbered cross streets are divided into East and West at Fifth Avenue; south of the Park, Broadway is the boundary between East and West numbered cross streets.

Most of the numbered avenues have been officially renamed over parts or all of their routes:

• Fourth Avenue: Union Square East (14th-17th Streets), Park Avenue South (17th-32nd Streets), Park Avenue (32nd-135th Streets)
• Sixth Avenue: Avenue of the Americas (co-named, to Central Park South), Lenox Avenue/Malcolm X Boulevard (co-named, 110th-147th Street)
• Seventh Avenue: Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (110th-153rd Street)
• Eighth Avenue: Central Park West (Columbus Circle to Frederick Douglass Circle), Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Frederick Douglass Circle to Harlem River Drive at 154th Street)
• Ninth Avenue: Columbus Avenue (59th-110th Streets),
• Tenth Avenue: Amsterdam Avenue (59th Street to Fort George Avenue at about 193rd Street)
• Eleventh Avenue: West End Avenue (59th-107th Streets)
• Twelfth Avenue: West Side Highway

Over the years, portions of Avenue A were renamed Sutton Place in Midtown Manhattan, York Avenue in the Upper East Side and Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem. Portions of Avenue B were also renamed East End Avenue in Yorkville.

Of the Commissioners' original avenues, only First, Second, Third, and Fifth Avenues and Avenues C and D have never been renamed, though some of the named avenues, such as Avenue of the Americas (Sixth), are also known by their numbers. Two additional avenues were interpolated amongst the original avenues: Madison Avenue was built between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue (formerly Fourth Avenue), and Lexington Avenue, known south of 20th Street as Irving Place, was built between Park Avenue and Third Avenue. Several other avenues were added to the grid when Upper Manhattan was developed, such as Riverside Drive, Claremont Avenue, and Saint Nicholas Avenue. The old Bloomingdale Road – which is pictured on the original 1811 map, but which was not part of the planned grid – was eventually preserved as part of what is now known as Broadway.

The plan of numbered crosstown streets has survived for two centuries with only minor variations and irregularities, especially below the original 155th Street northern boundary. The most notable irregularities are in Harlem where West 125th and West 126th Streets go off on a diagonal to the north, and in the West Village where a number of streets vary from the original plan. Among them is West 4th Street, which intersects with West 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th Streets.

Because a formal planning commission in support of the Commissioners' Plan was not created, there was no authority outside of the Common Council to protect its integrity. Thus the elimination of the Grand Parade and the wholesale marketplace and the addition of Union, Tompkins, Stuyvestant and Madison Squares came about, as well as the already noted additions of Lexington and Madison Avenues. Fourth and Sixth Avenues were extended downtown, and Broadway uptown. The angled course of Broadway created Herald and Times Squares, among others.

In 1853, in the most significant change to the plan, Central Park was laid out between 59th and 110th Streets and Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenues. Other interruptions of the 1811 plan include the main Columbia University campus in Morningside Heights; the Columbia University Medical Center campus in Washington Heights; Lincoln Center; Morningside Park; Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village; and the City College of New York.

Reaction

Criticism

The plan was vociferously criticized from the start, not the least because it did not take into account the natural topography of the island, but also because it took no notice of classical ideas about beauty. Among the many critics of the plan were Frederick Law Olmstead, who would co-design Central Park; Edgar Allan Poe and Alexis de Toqueville who believed that it fostered "relentless monotony." Walt Whitman, the poet and editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, said of it: "Our perpetual dead flat and streets cutting each other at right angles, are certainly the last thing in the world consistent with beauty of situation."

In 1818, Clement Clarke Moore, whose estate "Chelsea" would be chopped up by the plan, wrote:

The great principle which governs these plans is, to reduce the surface of the earth as nearly as possible to dead level. ... The natural inequities of the ground are destroyed. and the existing water courses disregarded. ... These are men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.

Despite these objections, Moore later made a great deal of money by sub-dividing his estate and developing it section-by-section along the gridded streets. Ironically, it was the landowners like Moore, who fought the grid most insistently, who made the most money from exploiting it.

Edith Wharton bemoaned "...rectangular New York ... this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness," while her friend Henry James called the plan a

...primal topographic curse, her old inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition and distribution, the uncollected labor of minds with no imagination of the future and blind before the opportunity given them by their two magnificant water-fronts.

Architect and historian Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes wrote in The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909 (1915-1918) that the grid was "entirely deficient in sentiment and charm" and denoted "the end of the little old city and the beginning of the great modern metropolis." After the grid, according to Stokes, "scarcely anything remains to remind us of the primitive beauty and the fascinating diversity of natural charms which we know Manhattan once possessed." Archiect Julius Harder wrote in 1898 in The City's Plan:

The street plan ... had only the dubious merit of the most childish regularity and of devoting the maximum proportion of area to building sites. Every consideration of economy of intercommunication, future financial economy, sanitation, healthfulness and aesthetics was absolutely left out of the reckoning.

Noted architecture critic Lewis Mumford, a vehement protestor against the plan, complained about the "blank imbecility" of this "civic folly" with its "long monotonous streets that terminated nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses." He wrote in The City in History (1961): "Such plans fitted nothing but a quick parcelling of the land, a quick conversion of farmsteads into real estate, and a quick sale." Urban activist Jane Jacobs also noted "street[s] that go on and on ... dribbling into endless amorphous repetitions ... and finally petering into the utter anonymity of distances," and famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright wrote of its "deadly monotony," calling it a "man trap of gigantic dimensions."

As seen from the vilification in Moore's and James' comments quoted above, the Commissioners came in for as much criticism as the grid itself. Mumford wrote that: "With a T-square and a triangle, finally, the municipal engineer, without the slightest training as either an architect or a sociologist, could "plan" a metropolis..." and Montgomery Schuyler, another architectural critic, claimed that "We all agreed – all of us, that is, who pay attention to such things – that the Commissioners were public malefactors of high degree." Jean Schopfer, writing in The Architectural Record in 1902, said of the them "Men of genius were needed ... Unhappily, they were ... men devoid of all imagination," while historian Thomas Janvier, in his book In Old New York (1894), wrote of the "deplorable results" of "the excellently dull gentlemen", and criticized the plan as only "a grind of money-making." He wrote about it that the commissioners

decided that the forests should be cut away, the hills levelled [sic], the hollows filled in, the streams buried; and upon the flat surface thus created they clamped down a ruler and completed their Bœotian [dull, stupid] programme by creating a city in which all was right angles and straight lines.

Further,

Unfortunately, the promise of this far-sighted undertaking was far from being fulfilled in its performance. The magnificent opportunity which was given to the Commissioners to create a beautiful city simply was wasted and thrown away. ... Thinking only of utility and economy ... in the simplest and dullest way ... their Plan fell so far short of what might have been accomplished by men of genius governed by artistic taste. ... [T]hey were surcharged with the dullness and intense utilitarianism of the people and the period of which they were a part.

Modern urban analysts often have negative comments about the grid, from Vincent Scully's calling it an "implacable gridiron" to the comment of Richard Pluz, an historian of housing, that "Even in 1811, the gridiron did not work well." Urban planner Peter Marcuse wrote that it was "one of the worst city plans of any major city in the developed countries of the world." Urban historian John W. Reps said of it that "As an aid to speculation the commissioners' plan was perhaps unequaled, but only on this ground can it justifiably be called a great achievement." According to Reps, the commissioners were "motivated mainly by narrow considerations of economic gain," and, in fact, facilitating "buying, selling and improving real estate" was, according to chief surveyor John Randel Jr., one of the purposes of instituting the grid.

In his book, City on a Grid: How New York Became New York, historian Gerard Koeppel says of the Commissioners' Plan that it was "simply not something that had been deeply thought out," and quotes a student of the grid as saying that it was "a quick solution to a difficult problem" made by "apathetic authors, who simply overlaid Manhattan with eight miles of uncompromising grid."

Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942) - Piet Mondrian

Praise

From its inception, there have been those who sang the praises of the Commissioners' gridiron plan. James Kent, the jurist and legal scholar, called it "brillant", and wrote in 1896:

The map and plan of the Commissioners laid out the highways on the island upon so magnificent a scale, and with so bold a hand, and with such prophetic views, in respect of the future growth and extension of the city, that it will form an everlasting monument of the stability and wisdom of the measure.

One critic recently pointed out that the wide avenues attract retail and commercial use, among other benefits, Rem Koolhaas comments that it created "undreamed-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy," and called it "the most courageous act of prediction on Western civilization." Modernist architect Le Corbusier gushed that "I insist on right-angled intersections" and Rafael Vinoly, a Uruguayan-born architect, called it "the best manifestation of American pragmatism in the creation of urban form," while artist Piet Mondrian drew inspiration from the vibrancy of the grid, displaying it in paintings such as Broadway Boogie Woogie.

Finally, Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician, wrote in 1959: "This is the purpose of New York's geometry: that each individual should be poetically the owner of the capital of the world."

See also

• Architecture of New York City
• City block
• History of New York City
• Manhattanhenge
• Surveying
• Urban planning

References

Explanatory notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Higgins, Hannah B. (2009) The Grid Book. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51240-4

External links

• The Commissioners' report of 1807, with a modern introduction and an 1811 map
• "Map of the city of New York and island of Manhattan as laid out by the commissioners appointed by the Legislature, April 3, 1807" New York Public Library Digital Collections (zoomable map)
• The Great American Grid, a website devoted to orthogonal planning.