Thinking about the New York grid

In case you missed it, the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition on the history of Manhattan's 200-year-old street grid continues through April 15, 2012. 

The show, "The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011," is the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the grid's planning and implementation, but it is also, says Architectural Record, "a celebration of long-range urban planning."

Although sometimes criticized for dullness, the grid in Manhattan has been able to absorb "wave after wave of urban design innovations," says Record's reviewer, Carl Yost. Those include "picturesque Central Park, City Beautiful monuments like Grand Central, thrusting skyscrapers, and Corbusian superblocks."

The planning of the Manhattan grid began in 1807 and reflected an emphasis on efficiency and utility. "Strait-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in,” the commissioners and their team declared.

The New York Times, in reporting on the exhibition last March, observed:

One consequence of the grid is that streets and sidewalks make up more of Manhattan than they do of the other boroughs. The Department of City Planning says they account for 4,275 acres or 29 percent of Manhattan’s acreage, 23 percent of the Bronx, 24 percent of Brooklyn, 25 percent of Queens and 15 percent of Staten Island.

To complement the Manhattan grid's history, the Architectural League of New York, in partnership with the museum and Architizer, invited architects and urban designers to "speculate about how Manhattan’s grid might be adapted, extended, or transformed in the future."

The eight projects that the League's jury selected went on display Dec. 6 in "The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan." That presentation, like the historical show, runs through April 15.

Among the design speculations, as noted by the newspaper The Epoch Times newspaper, are these:

• Tearing up pavement in cross streets and replacing it with swaths of farmland, orchards, and gardens so that Manhattan can grow more of its own food. 

• Extending the grid east into the Harlem River, providing opportunities to repair Harlem’s deteriorated waterfront with new ecologies and filtration systems.

• Creating vertical parks along Second and Tenth Avenues that “could combine recycling, farmer’s markets, social spaces, and agriculture for the benefit of local communities.”

• Closing off an O-shaped area—shutting 23rd Street, 10th Avenue, 125th Street, and Second Avenue to cars so that the O could become the realm of walkers, runners, and cyclists. New Yorkers would be invited to meet and relax along the O. 

There are good and bad aspects to those ideas. The most suspect idea, however, is one that, according to an uncritical description of The Epoch Times, calls for elevating pedestrian pathways above city streets—separating foot and automobile traffic to "free up intersections and reduce travel times." Ideas of that sort are, of course, not new at all; they continue a pattern of auto-first thinking that emerged in the early decades of the 20th century.

Vertical separation of pedestrians appealed to designers and planners at a time when there seemed to be no alternative to letting rivers of auto traffic rush through city centers. There was a presumption, endorsed by Le Corbusier and others, that the automotive lifestyle would be overwhelmingly a good thing, and that traditional, pedestrian-oriented features of cities would have to be subordinated to it. We now know that this was a mistake. (Are the jurors of the Architectural League aware that it was a mistake? That's not so clear.)

Some "innovative" ideas are not to be trusted.