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City on a Grid: 4 of 4: How New York Became New York Hardcover – November 10, 2015.  by Gerard Koeppel (Author)

City on a Grid: 4 of 4: How New York Became New York Hardcover – November 10, 2015. by Gerard Koeppel (Author)

Released Tuesday, 9th April 2019
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City on a Grid: 4 of 4: How New York Became New York Hardcover – November 10, 2015.  by Gerard Koeppel (Author)

City on a Grid: 4 of 4: How New York Became New York Hardcover – November 10, 2015. by Gerard Koeppel (Author)

City on a Grid: 4 of 4: How New York Became New York Hardcover – November 10, 2015.  by Gerard Koeppel (Author)

City on a Grid: 4 of 4: How New York Became New York Hardcover – November 10, 2015. by Gerard Koeppel (Author)

Tuesday, 9th April 2019
Good episode? Give it some love!
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Photo:The old Hopper House 2d Ave. 83rd St. 1860

historynew york statehopperhousehopper houseaverd stemmet collectionamerican historynew york citynew yorkbooth

date_range

Date

1828

collections

In Collections

Emmet New York History Collection, NYPL

Most Images are from the collection assembled by the New York physician Thomas Addis Emmet (1828-1919)

create

Source

New York Public Library

link

Link

http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a1df0e30-c60d-012f-5f4b-58d385a7bc34

copyright

Copyright info

Public Domain

City on a Grid: 4 of 4: How New York Became New York Hardcover – November 10, 2015.  by Gerard Koeppel (Author)

https://www.amazon.com/City-Grid-How-York-Became/dp/0306822849

You either love it or hate it, but nothing says New York like the street grid of Manhattan. Created in 1811 by a three-man commission featuring headstrong Founding Father Gouverneur Morris, the plan called for a dozen parallel avenues crossing at right angles with many dozens of parallel streets in an unbroken grid. Hills and valleys, streams and ponds, forests and swamps were invisible to the grid; so too were country villages, roads, farms, and estates and generations of property lines. All would disappear as the crosshatch fabric of the grid overspread the island: a heavy greatcoat on the land, the dense undergarment of the future city.

No other grid in Western civilization was so large and uniform as the one ordained in 1811. Not without reason. When the grid plan was announced, New York was just under two hundred years old, an overgrown town at the southern tip of Manhattan, a notorious jumble of streets laid at the whim of landowners. To bring order beyond the chaos-and good real estate to market-the street planning commission came up with a monolithic grid for the rest of the island. Mannahatta-the native "island of hills"-became a place of rectangles, in thousands of blocks on the flattened landscape, and many more thousands of right-angled buildings rising in vertical mimicry.

The Manhattan grid has been called "a disaster" of urban planning and "the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization." However one feels about it, the most famous urban design of a living city defines its daily life. This is its story.

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