City on a Grid: How New York Became New York

"City on a Grid tells--for the first time--the fascinating story of the creation and long life of New York City's distinctive street grid: its many streets crossed at right angles by a few parallel avenues laid upon a rural Manhattan two centuries ago. The grid made New York what it is today, and defined the urbanism of a rising nation. When it was first conceived at the start of the nineteenth century, the grid was intended to bring order to the chaos of 'Old New York'--the quaint, low-scale, but notoriously dirty and disorderly place of jumbled colonial streets that had sprouted from the southern tip of the island from its earliest days. Turning the swamps and hills of Manhattan into the city we know today was a project on the scale of building the Erie or Panama Canals or the Transcontinental Railway. Like those epics, it is a story filled with larger-than-life characters. And the hundreds of rectangular lots and buildings the grid inevitably produced gave a sense of stability and rational purpose for a young city evolving into greatness. Now, then, is the time to tell the grid's story: the events that led to it, how the commissioners and their surveyor came up with their plan, and how the lengthening life of the city has been utterly shaped by it. Whether one loves or hates New York's grid, little has been written to explain how it came to be, who did it and why, and what it has meant for New York and the cities and nation that have looked to New York as the model for American urban life. Until now"--… (more)