Manhattan’s linearity is so prevalent, we often forget about it. But with its street grid, New York is surely the most rectilinear of the world’s great cities, free (for better or worse) of the meandering lanes of the older metropolises of Europe or Asia, not to mention the ancient byways of Jerusalem or Damascus. When the occasional street does manage to escape the grid—the diagonal slope of Stuyvesant Street in Greenwich Village, the menacing “bloody angle” of Doyers Street in Chinatown—there is a perverse fascination that that stray lane is able to escape the brutal, or maybe beautiful, imposition of urban geometry.
It was not always this way, as one is reminded by the excellent exhibition “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811–2011.” The exhibition celebrates the two-hundredth anniversary of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which laid out the city we know today. That’s two centuries of people being able to traverse almost the entire island by virtue of simply knowing how to count—a more revolutionary innovation than we can appreciate today.
At the very first, Mannahatta was the bountiful land of many hills, hunted, fished, and farmed by the Lenape; later, it became a small and riotous Dutch colony, and later yet a more orderly outpost of the British, who finally ceded it to the upstart Americans.
It was not until the early nineteenth century that legislators, led by patricians Gouvornuer Morris, Simeon De Witt and John Rutherford—working under the explicit encouragement of