The cost of imposing urban order

When I went to the Museum of the City of New York at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street last Saturday, the place was overflowing with visitors. The main exhibition space was jammed. Still more people were lined up in the central corridor, waiting for admission. What brought them there was .

I’d expected that a show devoted to such a basic element of city planning—the street network—would appeal mainly to two kinds of people: those who work in planning, design, and development and those who love poring over old maps. But the story of the grid has excited more than just those limited groups; it’s become a genuine crowd-pleaser—causing the museum to extend the exhibition to mid-June, two months past the original closing date.

The enthusiastic response is a tribute to the skill of curator and historian Hilary Ballon, who has assembled a mesmerizing series of maps, photos, drawings, documents, and other objects, and has explained them extremely well in text panels posted on the walls. Dr. Ballon also edited a book called , published by the museum and Columbia University Press (224 pages, $40 hardcover).

The show reveals the destruction and sometimes outright obliteration that were required to impose a rectilinear grid on an island dotted with hills, valleys, marshes, and rocky outcroppings. A few parts of the city were spared. The streets of the Financial District remain narrow and quirky. Greenwich Village has an irregular pattern, at odds with areas to the east and north. Nonetheless, the fundamental structure of New York is a series of broad north-south avenues and narrow east-west streets meeting at 90-degree angles. The relentlessly rectangular arrangement encouraged development and is key to the city’s functioning.

Beginnings

The Dutch, who established New Amsterdam in the 17th century, had neither the need for a large-scale ordering system nor the resources to massively rearrange the island’s topography. By the final decade of the 18th century, however, New York had passed Philadelphia to become the most populous city in the new nation; the time had come to replace messiness with clarity, to replace irregularity with predictability.

Consequently, in 1796 the city surveyor, Casimir Goerck, prepared the first rectangular plan of the island—subdividing municipally owned land in the middle of Manhattan. Fifteen years later, the quest for order culminated in the far more important Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. (One of the three signed copies of the document—which is very large—is on display.) The Commissioners’ Plan called for a series of rectangular blocks, which would make building more economical and transportation and wayfinding simpler and more methodical.

Ten hand-colored maps by John Randel Jr., the surveyor, cartographer, and civil engineer who surveyed the island for the grid and created the official 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, are on display. They allow visitors to compare the grid with the city’s topography.

The streets and avenues were laid out in straight lines, ignoring just about everything in their paths. And there were things in their paths. By 1811, New York was hardly tabula rasa. Under the Dutch and then the English, Manhattan had amassed a rudimentary collection of roads that connected farms and hamlets across the island and the main population center at the island’s southern tip. Few vestiges from the first two centuries of European-American development would manage to survive.

A lithograph from 1861 shows a house practically teetering on a bluff above Second Avenue near 42nd Street, its fence preventing humans or animals from falling down the steep hill. That house, and others like it, were caught precariously in the expanding grid; many such structures would have to be moved or demolished.

Property owners, to make their plots of land mesh with the new, level streets, found it necessary to flatten the slopes and fill in the low spots. Photographs from 1886 show workers leveling the terrain at 81st Street and 9th Avenue. They used hand tools and pulleys and winches to extract large rocks from the road and to flatten the ground. Horse-drawn carts dragged the rubble away—some of it to be used as building material, some of it to fill valleys and swamps.

It was an ugly process that went on for decades. Edgar Allan Poe, who lived in a farmhouse at 84th Street and Broadway in the 1840s, lamented: “These magnificent places are doomed. The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath.” Photos show boulders that were too massive to be moved with the rudimentary technology of the 19th century; some of them sat on undeveloped lots between multistory buildings. These bits of rugged natural landscape must have been terrifically enticing to children.

Old roads obliterated

Harlem, founded by the Dutch in 1658, was organized around the intersection of three roads. Such a casual arrangement would not persist. Most old streets and roads were eliminated as the city grew northward. Small hamlets were absorbed into miles of new rectangles.

Traveling the island today, you would hardly suspect that parts of Manhattan once resembled the rural landscapes of Currier and Ives. The realm of free-standing dwellings and varied topography, closely related to nature, largely succumbed to the forces of urbanization.

On display in the museum is a stone marker more than three feet high. Carved into its upper portion are the numbers of a street and an avenue that the marker demarcated. These markers were heavy and solid. At least half their height was buried beneath ground-level. They were therefore much harder to pull out than the wooden pegs that surveyors first placed along the developing grid; land owners frequently pulled the pegs out, thinking their removal would hinder the city’s program of running streets across their properties.

One drawing in the exhibition depicts the notorious Five Points neighborhood, by 1827 “the nation’s first great slum,” according to the text.  Five Points got its name from the irregular junction of its major streets. The exhibition observes that “the disorder of the street plan serves to reinforce the chaos of the neighborhood.” The official view was that such chaos should be cleaned up, ironed out.

A few diagonal streets, such as Bowery and Broadway, cut through the grid. A painting shows the area just south of current-day Union Square as it looked in 1828: not very impressive. A narrow house with a porch appears overwhelmed by the wide street and public space in front of it; it looks dinky. As decades went by, many of the little houses gave way to bigger structures. When development pressure moved up Broadway, triangular sites like the one just south of Madison Square presented magnificent urban design opportunities; the Flatiron Building, from 1902, showed that the grid, combined with the diagonal, could give rise to aesthetic achievements.

The show depicts efforts that were made to produce rows of buildings that would harmonize entire blocks. It goes on to discuss the evolution of zoning, including the 1916 code that resulted in stepped-back skyscrapers.

By the 1850s and 1860s, as Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s romantic Central Park was taking shape, resistance to the grid began to rise again. The idea of extending the grid all the way north on the island looked ill-advised, given the irregular natural landscapes that would have to be eradicated. And so, the exhibition reports, more departures from the grid were allowed in northern Harlem. Topography endured in that section, more than it did farther south. Given how infrequently the white middle class travels to Manhattan’s northern end, except to visit The Cloisters, the easing of the grid will probably come as a revelation to many people who consider themselves knowledgeable on urban geography.

Traffic and movement

How well does the grid accommodate traffic? That question runs through the exhibition, with different permutations. The grid has the great virtue of offering many alternative routes; if one street is clogged or closed, there are others nearby. In the 19th century, it became obvious that some of the east-west blocks, with lengths of up to 920 feet, were too  big; they didn’t allow enough routes for north-south traffic.

Thus, in the 1830s, developer Samuel B. Ruggles carved Lexington Avenue out of his own land between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue (later rechristened Park Avenue). That added a much-needed north-south route. It inspired the city to later form Madison Avenue in the long block between Fourth and Fifth Avenues.

In 1910, Mayor William J. Gaynor proposed yet another avenue in the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues to alleviate congestion. It would have shaved a bit off the back of the New York Public Library’s property south of 42nd Street. But that proposal came too late. It would have required large-scale demolition, decades before the federal government was supplying money for urban renewal.

There are legitimate criticisms of the Manhattan grid—that it’s monotonous, that it doesn’t generate enough distinctive places, that it provided too few parks, that it made the mistake of omitting alleys. But with nearly 1.6 million people living on just 23 square miles (69,464 residents per square mile), Manhattan actually is a locale where the grid in many respects seems to work quite well.

Between one east-west cross street and another there’s a distance of only about 200 feet. Walking north or south at a good clip, you can cover a block in no time at all. You feel like you’re getting somewhere, and usually, thanks to the density of buildings and population, you feel thoroughly engaged in the environment. Dull it's not.

The Greatest Grid is an illuminating exhibition. The pros and the cons are made clear in this superb show, and the history is more fascinating than almost any of us thought possible.

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