The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 was the original design for the streets of Manhattan above Houston Street, which put in place the rectangular grid plan of streets and lots that has defined Manhattan to this day. It has been called "the single most important document in New York City's development," and the plan has been described as encompassing the "republican predilection for control and balance ... [and] distrust of nature." It was described by the Commission that created it as combining "beauty, order and convenience."
The Commissioners were Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father of the United States; the lawyer John Rutherfurd, a former United States Senator; and the state Surveyor General, Simeon De Witt. Their chief surveyor was John Randel Jr., who was 20 years old when he began the job.
The plan originated as a proposal by the New York State Legislature, adopted in 1811 for the orderly development and sale of the land of Manhattan between 14th Street and Washington Heights. The plan is arguably the most famous use of the grid plan or "gridiron" and is considered by most historians to have been far-reaching and visionary. Since its earliest days, the plan has been criticized for its monotony and rigidity, in comparison with irregular street patterns of older cities, but in recent years has been viewed more favorably by urban planners.
There were a few interruptions in the grid for public spaces, such as the Grand Parade between 23rd Street and 33rd Street, which was the precursor to Madison Square Park, as well as four squares named Bloomingdale, Hamilton, Manhattan, and Harlem, a wholesale market complex, and a reservoir. Central Park, the massive urban greenspace in Manhattan running from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue and from 59th Street to 110th Street, was not a part of the plan, as it was not envisioned until the 1850s.
History of the gridiron
Beginnings
The gridiron as a concept for the layout of a town or city is not new. Gridirons can be found in the Old and New Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt, and in Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley in 2154 BCE with a population of 40,000 people, where many historians claim it was invented, and from where it may have spread to Ancient Greece. When the Greek city of Miletus was sacked by the Persians in 494 BCE and then liberated by Athens in 476 BCE, over the next three centuries it was rebuilt on the grid plan, with Hippodamus as the local originator of the rectilinear grid system for the city's center, a concept he probably did not invent, but had heard about from elsewhere. Hippodamus went on to spread the grid to Pireaus, Rhodes and other cities in Greece.
The grid plan, or "Hippodamean plan", was also utilized by the Ancient Romans for their fortified military encampments, or castra, many of which evolved into towns and cities; Pompeii is the best-preserved example of Roman urban planning using the gridiron system. Over time, however, and under the pressure of the needs of other cultures, Greek and Roman settlements which had been built using the grid became obliterated or so severely adapted that it is difficult to perceive the remains of the grid. Most Muslim cities, for instance, are not built according to a strict gridiron, although there may be fractured grids within them; Cairo is a notable exception.
In France, England, and Wales, castra evolved into bastides, agricultural communities under a centralized monarchy. This example was followed on the European continent in cities such as New Brandenburg in Germany, which the Teutonic Knights founded in 1248, and in the many town planned and built in the 14th century in the Florentine Republic. The gridiron idea spread with the Renaissance, although in many cities, for instance London, it failed to take root. In some European cities, such as Amsterdam and Paris, destruction of parts of the city by fire, warfare and other calamities offered an opportunity for the grid system to be used to replace more evolutionary street layouts, especially in outlying areas, while the central city, often sheltered behind medieval walls, remained organic and undesigned.
In America
In what would become the United States, the gridiron now predominates. In areas that were under Spanish control, the 1753 Laws of the Indies specified the use of the gridiron, and the results can be seen in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Albuquerque, New Mexico; San Diego; San Francisco; and Los Angeles, just as they can in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. By the time of the passage of the federal Land Ordinance of 1785, the grid plan was firmly established. The Ordinance proscribed that newly created states were to have rectilinear boundaries, rather than boundaries shaped by natural features, and within the new areas, beginning in the Northwest Territory, everything was to be divided into rectangles: townships were six miles square (9.66 km), "sections" were one mile square (1.61 km), and individual lots were 60x125 feet (18.29x38.1m). Cities such as Anchorage, Alaska; Erie, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; and Sacremento, California all show the American preference for the grid.
There was significant variation in the size of the grids used. Carson City, Nevada may have the smallest at square and streets, while Salt Lake City, Utah is much larger at square blocks surrounded by streets. The most popular would appear to be the square block with streets that are to wide. This size grid can be found in Anchorage; Bismarck, North Dakota; Missoula, Montana; Mobile, Alabama; Phoenix, Arizona; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Although some English colonial cities, such as Boston, had streets that adhered more to natural topography and happenstance, others, such as, notably, Philadelphia and Savannah, Georgia, had been built to the gridiron concept from the beginning – in Philadelphia's case, William Penn, specified the city's orthogonal pattern when he founded it in 1682, although its blocks turned out to be too large, encouraging the creation of intermediate streets, while James Oglethorpe's Savannah, with its significantly smaller blocks, was not conducive to large-scale development, restricting the city's economic influence. New Amsterdam, however, had not been laid out in a grid pattern by the Dutch. The streets of lower Manhattan were more "organic", and incorporated Native American trails, cow paths, and streets that followed the topography and hydrology of the swampy land.
Prior to the Commissioners' Plan
Private developments
The first efforts at putting a grid onto Manhattan in some form came from private developers. In the early 1750s, Trinity Church laid out a small neighborhood around the new King's College – which would later become Columbia University – in rectangular blocks. However, because the plan required landfill in the Hudson River, which wouldn't happen until much later, the streets were never laid down. The second instance came when the powerful De Lancey family decided to break up part of their vast estate in the 1760s, and laid out of grid of streets centered on "De Lancey Square". As royalists, their holdings were confiscated after the American Revolution, but the streets remained – although a new street, Grand Street, was laid through the central square. The north-south streets of the De Lancey grid become the core north-south streets of the Lower East Side: Chrystie, Forsyth, Eldridge, Allen, Orchard and Ludlow Streets, and the grid became the pattern for additional streets laid out in the area.
The third instance of a privately developed grid in New York City came in 1788, when the long-established Bayard family, relatives of Peter Stuyvesant, hired surveyor Casimir Goerck to lay out streets in the portion of their estate west of Broadway, so the land could be sold in lots. About accommodated 7 east-west and 8 north-south streets, all wide, making up 35 whole or partial rectilinear blocks of width from east to west, and between and long north to south – although near the edges of the estate the grid broke down in order to connect up with existing streets. The Bayard streets still exist as the core of SoHo and part of Greenwich Village: Mercer, Greene, and Wooster Streets, LaGuardia Place/West Broadway (originally Laurens Street), and Thompson, Sullivan, MacDougal, and Hancock Streets, although the last has been subsumed by the extension of Sixth Avenue.
At about the same time as the Bayards, Petrus Stuyvesant, the great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant, intended to lay out a small grid of streets, nine by four, to create a village on his estate. The orientation of the streets was to be true north-south and east-west, not shifted, as Manhattan Island is, 29 degrees east of true north. The only street to actually be laid was the grid's central east-west axis, Stuyvesant Street, which remains the one street in Manhattan oriented closely to true east and west.
The surveying of the Commons
Goerck's first survey
Despite the fact that the city's charters over the decades – the Dongan Charter (1686), the Cornbury Charter (1708) and the Montgomerie Charter (1731) – supported by specific laws passed by the province or state in 1741, 1751, 1754, 1764, 1774 and 1787, gave the city's Common Council full powers over the creation of new streets, the Council rarely did so, independent of the actions of the various landowners who developed their property and ran streets through their projects as they saw fit, which were approved after the fact by the Council. Its first effort to do so came in June 1785 as part of the Council's attempt to raise money by selling property.
The Council owned a great deal of land, primarily in the middle of the island, away from the Hudson and East Rivers, as a result of grants by the Dutch provincial government to the colony of New Amsterdam. Although originally more extensive, by 1785 the council held approximately , or about 9% of the island. Unfortunately, the land was not only of such poor quality – being either rocky and elevated or swampy and low-lying – that it was not suitable for farming or residential estates, and was also difficult to get to because of both the lack of roads and access to waterways.
To divide the Common Lands, as they were called, into sellable lots, and to lay out roads to service them, the Council hired Goerck, one of a handful of officially-approved "city surveyors", to survey them. Goerck, who was related to the Roosevelt family by marriage, was instructed to make lots of about each – precision in such matters was not to be expected with the available surveying tools, given the topography and ground cover of the Common Lands – and to lay out roads to access the lots. He completed his task in December, only six months later, creating 140 lots of varying sizes. Although not laid out in a gridiron patter – Goerck was not instructed to do so – most of the lots were organized into two columns of 45 lots with a road between the columns. The lots were oriented as the lots of the future Commissioners' Plan would be, with the east-west axis longer than the north-south axis; their five acre size would become the template for the Commissioners' five acre blocks; and Goerck's middle road would eventually reappear on the Commissioners' Plan, without acknowledgment, as the wide Fifth Avenue.
Goerck's second survey
Unfortunately for the Common Council, the disadvantages of the plots in the Common Lands worked against their sale, and there was no run on the market to buy them. Still, sales continued at a steady, if not spectacular, pace. By 1794, with the city growing ever more populated and the inhabited area constantly moving north towards the Common Lands, the Council decided to try again, hiring Goerck once more to re-survey and map the area. He was instructed to make the lots more uniform and rectangular and to lay out roads to the west and east of the middle road, as well as to lay out east-west streets of each. Later, the Commissioners would use Goerck's East and West Roads for their Fourth and Sixth Avenues, again without acknowledging their debt. Goerck's cross streets would become the numbered east-west streets of the later plan. Goerck took two years to survey the 212 lots which encompassed the entire Common Lands. Again, impeded by tools and topography, Goerck's work was somewhat less than precise. In 1808, John Hunn, the city's street commissioner would comment that "The Surveys made by Mr. Goerck upon the Commons were effected through thickets and swamps, and over rocks and hills where it was almost impossible to produce accuracy of mensuration." Often the streets intended to intersect at right angles would not quite do so.
Still, Goerck's work in surveying the Common Lands was the basis for the Commissioners' Plan, as explained by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission: "The Commissioner's Plan borrowed heavily from Goerck's earlier surveys and essentially expanded his scheme beyond the common lands to encompass the entire island." Historian Gerard Koeppel comments "In fact, the great grid is not much more than the Goerck plan writ large. The Goerck plan is modern Manhattan's Rosetta Stone..."
The Mangin-Goerck Plan
In 1797, the Council commissioned Goerck and Joseph-François Mangin, another city surveyor, to survey Manhattan's streets; Goerck and Mangin had each submitted individual proposals to the Council, but then decided to team up. Goerck died of yellow fever during the course of the project, but Mangin completed it and delivered the draft of the Mangin-Goerck Plan to the Council in 1799 for correction of street names; the final engraved version – made by engraver Peter Maverick, who would also go on to engrave the published map of the Commissioners' Plan – would be presented to the Council in 1803. However, Mangin had gone well beyond the terms of his commission, and the map not only showed the existing streets of the city, as instructed, but was also, in Mangin's words, "the Plan of the City ... such as it is to be..."
In other words, the Magnin-Goerck Plan was a guide to where and how Mangin believed future streets should be laid out. It called for enlarging the tip of the island and using landfill to regularize its waterfront. He placed a number of street grids on land that was, at the time, agricultural or undeveloped. The grids, which had different baselines, met up, and there Mangin placed parks and public spaces. He extended the Bayard grid northward, and the De Lancey grid to the east and north, and created a new grid of true north-south/east-west streets, among other inventions. As Gerard Koppel comments:
In sum, Magnin's plan of the city "such as it is to be" was a synthesizing of patterns already establishing themselves at the suburban fringes of the city and, in the city proper, an orderly filling in east and west with linear streets out to continuous roads along the waterfronts. The city government hadn't asked for it, but it seemed to be just what it wanted.
The Council apparently accepted the plan as "the new Map of the City" for four years, even publishing it by subscription, until political machinations perhaps engineered by Aaron Burr acting through the city's street commissioner, Joseph Browne Jr., brought it into disrepute. Burr – the political enemy of Mangin's mentor Alexander Hamilton – may have been upset that the design of New York's City Hall had gone to Mangin and his partner John McComb Jr., and not to Burr's candidate, Benjamin Henry Latrobe Jr., but for whatever reason, the plan was disavowed by the Council, and was no longer to be considered "the new Map of the City." The Council ordered that copies which had already been sold be bought back if possible, and that a label warning of inaccuracies be placed on any additional copies sold. They stopped short at totally destroying the plan, but, still, neglect may have had the same effect: the original square engraved map has disappeared, and of the smaller versions only less then a dozen are extant, none in good condition.
Nevertheless, despite the Council's official disavowal of Mangin's layout of future streets, as the city grew the Mangin-Goerck Plan became the de facto reference for where new streets were built, and when the Commissioners' Plan was revealed in 1811, the area of the plan which the public had been warned was inaccurate and speculative had been accepted wholesale by the Commission, their plan being almost identical to Mangin's in that area.
The Commissioners' Plan Genesis
Politics may have caused the Common Council to officially decertify Magnin's plan for the future expansion of the city, but the episode nonetheless was a step forward in the development of the city's future. In the "warning label" the Council caused to have placed on copies of Mangin's map was the statement that expansion of the city, such as shown on the map, was "subject to such future arrangements as the Corporation may deem best calculated to promote the health, introduce regularity, and conduce to the convenience of the City." Here the Council was showing its willingness to consider actively planning for how the city would develop.
In 1807, they acted. Optimists at that time expected the city's population, then around 95,000 people, to expand to 400,000 by 1860, when, in fact, it reached 800,000 before the beginning of the Civil War. Faced with opposition and conflict from property owners and various political factions, the city asked the state legislature for help. The Council said its goal was "laying out Streets... in such a manner as to unite regularity and order with the public convenience and benefit and in particular to promote the health of the City ... [by allowing] a free and abundant circulation of air" to stave off disease. (At the time, foul air was thought to be the cause of many diseases.)
Gouverneur Morris nocolor crop.jpg
Ezra Ames - Simeon de Witt - Google Art Project nocolor crop.jpg
In March 1807, the state legislature responded by appointing as a Commission the three man suggested by the Common Council to establish a comprehensive street plan for Manhattan: Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father of the United States; the lawyer John Rutherfurd, a former United States Senator representing New Jersey and a relative to Morris by marriage; and the state Surveyor General, Simeon De Witt, a cousin of De Witt Clinton, who was the Mayor of New York City, a State Senator, and the most powerful politician in New York.
A month later, the legislature gave the Commissioners "exclusive power to lay out streets, roads, and public squares, of such width, extent, and direction, as to them shall seem most conducive to public good, and to shut up, or direct to be shut up, any streets or parts thereof which have been heretofore laid out... [but] not accepted by the Common Council." The jurisdiction of the Commission was all of Manhattan north of Houston Street, and into the Hudson and East Rivers 600 feet beyond the low water mark. They were given 4 years to have the island surveyed, and then to produce a map showing the placement of future streets. There were few specifications given to them about those streets, except that streets were to be at least wide, while "leading streets" and "great avenues" were to be at least wide.
Morris was not named the president of the Commission, but acted as such. A majority of Commissioners, i.e. two of them, was required to make decisions. The Commissioners were authorized to be paid $4 a day for their work () – although Morris and Rutherfurd, both rich men, waived their fees – and were empowered to enter onto private property in the daytime to undertake their duties; this was greeted with widespread hostility from property owners, but the Commission's authority was explicit. They held, for instance, the "exclusive power" to close streets that interfered with their plan, a plan which landowners as well as the mayor, the Common Council and all other citizens of the city had no choice but to accept.
At the meetings of the Commission, which were infrequent and usually not attended by all three men, their primary concern was what kind of layout the new area of the city should have, a rectilinear grid such as was used in Philadelphia; New Orleans; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina, or a more complex system utilizing circles, arcs or other patterns, such as plan Pierre Charles L'Enfant had used in laying out Washington, D.C. In the end, the Commission decided on the gridiron as being the most practical and cost-effective, as "straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in."
Surveying the island False start
In order for the Commissioners to determine what the future of New York City's streets would be, they needed to know the precise location of the current streets, which meant that most of the four years they were given for their task would be taken up with surveying Manhattan island.
The Commission's first chief surveyor was Charles Frederick Loss, who, like Mangin and the deceased Goerck, was an officially recognized city surveyor, a position he received contingent on becoming a naturalized American citizen. Unfortunately Loss did not appear to be a very competent surveyor, as several of his ventures had serious errors, which eventually resulted in his being relieved of his position in 1811. Loss exhibited the same lack of ability as the chief surveyor for the Commission, and finally the Commission made an agreement with Loss that he would do only the first task that had been assigned to him: to make a map of Manhattan island, and get accurate measurements for the location of certain streets which would provide a framework for the plan of future streets. For this, Loss would receive no wages but a simple fee of $500. (). Loss was to deliver the map by May 1808.
Randel joins the project
The Commissioners' replacement as chief engineer and surveyor, John Randel Jr., took over the position in June 1808; the project would occupy him for most of the next 13 years. Randel had been apprenticed to De Witt, and had been an assistant on several surveys as well as measuring the road from Albany to Schenectady, New York. When he was hired by the commission – on De Witt's suggestion and with Morris' approval – he was a relatively inexperienced 20 year old.
Randel's surveying in 1808 had nothing to do with laying out the grid, which had not yet been determined as the final result of the Commission's work. Instead, he was determining the topography and ground cover of the land and the placement of natural features such as hills, rocks, swamps, marshes, streams, and ponds, as well as man-made features such as houses, barns, stables, fences, foot paths, cleared fields and gardens. He was also carefully noting the locations of the three north-south roads that Goerck had laid down as part of his survey of the Common Lands. Goerck had not placed the lots and roads in the Common Lands in the context of the overall island, and this Randel did, thus allowing the Commissioners to know where, exactly, Goerck's Common Lands grid was. This was important, because it could serve as a template for a grid for the entire island, should the Commission decide to go in that direction.
Randel wrote afterwards that in the course of his work he "was arrested by the Sheriff, on numerous suits instituted...for trespass and damage by...workmen, in passing over grounds, cutting off branches of trees. &c., to make surveys under instructions from the Commissioners." In August 1808, Randel was sued by a landowner in August 2008 for trespass and causing damage to the landowner's property, such as cutting down trees and trampling on crops; $5000 was requested in damages, but the landowner received only $150. Nonetheless, the potential for future problems was real. Gouverneur Morris asked the Common Council for a means of protecting the necessary actions of the surveyors, but, for political reasons, the council could not aqree on a solution, and passed the buck, again, to the state legislature. It acted in 1809 with a law providing that if the needed actions to perform the survey could not be performed "without cuting trees or doing damages ... reasonable notice" was to be provided by the Commission or the surveyors to the landowner, and they were to view the property together to access the situation. The landowner was to present a bill for "reasonable damages", which the city was to pay within 30 days; any disagreement among the parties as to what was reasonable would, of course, end up in court. The new law did not completely stop lawsuits, but it cut down their number, and allowed Randel to go about his business with a degree of immunity from legal entanglements.
In 1809, Randel's surveying again seems to have been focused on positioning the Common Lands, and Goerck's lots and streets in it, to the rest of the island. Goerck had shown their relationship to the Bloomingdale Road to the west, much of which would become part of Broadway, and the Eastern Post Road to the east, a road which would be demapped by the Commissioners Plan'. Little is known about Randel's surveying in 1810.
And in the meantime, the Commissioners were, generally speaking, distracted by various other personal and political business; although they met – infrequently – there is no record of what they discussed, or if they were getting closer to a decision about what their plan would entail. Finally, on November 29, 1810, with the surveying season for that season over and only four months left before they were to report out their plan, they seemed to have arrived at a decision. On that date, Morris informed the Common Council that although more work was left to be done "on the ground", the Commission itself had "completed their work" and would be able to make a report that would "compl[y] substantially, if not literally within the law, shewing [sic] all the streets which to be laid out..." Randel then spent a considerable amount of time in December meeting with Morris and perhaps the other Commissioners at Morsis' estate in the Bronx, during which time it appears that the grid plan was born. At Morris' suggestion, the Common Council hired Randel to actually do the extensive work involved in making the grid a physical reality, and Randel began this work even before the grid plan was announced publicly.
Randel's survey of the entire island – – had begun in 1808 and was completed in 1810, and he now prepared the drafts of the new grid without regard to the topography of the land. The three maps were large, almost nine feet in length when connected together. Commissioner Simeon De Witt said of Randel's work that it was made "with an accuracy not exceeded by any work of the kind in America." Randel himself would later write that "The time within which the Commissioners were limited by the Statute to make their Plan of the streets, avenues, and public places on Manhattan [was] barely sufficient to enable them to comply with the letter, although not fully with the spirit, of the Statute." (italics in original)
"If it should be asked why was the present plan adopted in preference to any other, the answer is, because, after taking all circumstances into consideration, it appeared to be the best; or, in other and more proper terms, attended with the least inconvenience."
— The Commission, from their "Remarks"
The plan Streets and avenues
The Commissioners published their plan in March 1811 in the form of an eight-foot map – redrawn by the otherwise little known William Bridges from Randel's original, and engraved by Peter Maverick – with an accompanying 54-page pamphlet. The grid had 12 primary north-south avenues and numerous cross streets arranged in a regular right-angled grid tilted 29 degrees west of true north to roughly replicate the angle of Manhattan island. The Commission chose not to use circles and ovals such as Pierre L'Enfant had used in his design of Washington D.C., convinced that simple rectangles were best, the most convenient and easiest to build on, and therefore the most conducive to the orderly development of the city. The combination of north-south avenues and east-west streets at the specified dimensions was the creation of approximately 2000 long, narrow blocks.
Except in the north and south ends of the island, the avenues would begin with First Avenue on the east side and run through Twelfth Avenue in the west. In addition, where the island was wider, there would be four additional lettered avenues running from Avenue A eastward to Avenue D. Some of the avenues, such as Twelfth Avenue, ran through land that did not as yet exist, but the state legislation which created the Commission also authorized the city to extend its boundaries 400 feet into the Hudson and East Rivers, so the land required for these new streets would eventually be created. Broadway, an existing road, was not included in the 1811 plan, and was added to the grid later.
The plan also called for 155 orthogonal cross streets. The location of the cross streets was fixed at the boundaries of parcels into which the land had previously been divided. The basepoint for the cross streets was First Street: this was a short and inconspicuous street, which still exists, and originally ran from the intersection of Avenue B and Houston Street to the intersection of the Bowery and Bleecker Street. Peretz Square, a small, narrow triangular park bounded by Houston Street, 1st Street, and First Avenue, is the grid's cornerstone.
The numbered streets running east-west are wide, with about between each pair of streets, resulting in a grid of approximately 2,000 long, narrow blocks. With each combined street and block adding up to about , there are almost exactly 20 blocks per mile. Fifteen crosstown streets were designated as wide: 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, 72nd, 79th, 86th, 96th, 106th, 116th, 125th, 135th, 145th and 155th Streets.
The width of the crosstown blocks was irregular. The distance between First and Second Avenues was , while the block between Second and Third Avenues was . The blocks between Third and Sixth Avenues were , while the blocks between the avenues from Sixth to Twelfth were . Lexington and Madison Avenues were added after the original plan. The shorter blocks near the Hudson and East River waterfronts was purposeful, as the Commissioners' expected that there would be more development there at a time when water-based transportation was still significant. The Commission expected that street frontage near the piers would be more valuable than the landlocked interior, the waterfront being the location of commerce and industry of the time, and so it would be to everyone's benefit to place avenues closer together at the island's edges.
A curiosity about the grid plan the Commissioners chose for New York City is that while many other cities used a square grid, they did not. Perhaps influenced by the dimensions of the island, which is longer north-south than it is east-west, Manhattan's blocks are long rectangles, with the east-west dimension, while varied, larger than the big grid of Salt Lake City, while the north-south dimension, at , just longer than the small grid of Carson City. Historian Gerard Koeppel remarks that "while the grid brought order to the place, it also made it a place of extremes."
In implementing the grid, existing buildings were allowed to remain where they were if at all possible, but if removal was necessary the owners would receive compensation from the city, although appeal was available to a special panel appointed by the state's highest court. (See "Opening" and "regulating" the streets below) In 2011, it was estimated that almost 40% of the buildings north of Houston Street which were standing in 1811 (721 out of 1,825) had to be moved. On the other hand, if the plan improved the accessibility of a property, the city was authorized to levy an assessment on the owner for the improvement, a method previously used by the city after building public amenities, such as wells.
Public spaces
Conspicuous by their relative absence from the plan were amenities for the city's population, including parks and plazas. The legislature which had created the Commission called for it to provide public areas but, perhaps because they underestimated the growth potential of the city, they laid out very few of these. The primary one was the Grand Parade of between 23rd and 33rd Streea and between Third and Seventh Avenues, which was thought might become the basis for a central park. Smaller squares were placed at 53rd to 57th Street between Eighth to Ninth Avenues (Bloomingdale Square), 66th to 68th Street from Third to Fifth Avenue (Hamilton Square), 77th to 81st Streets between Eighth and Ninth Avenues (Manhattan Square), and 117th to 121st Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues (Harlem Square). Observatory Place, intended for a reservoir, stood at 89th to 94th Streets between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, and there was a large space in what became the Lower East Side, from 7th to 10th Streets and from First Avenue to the East River, intended as a wholesale market complex.
Of the public spaces created by the Commission, only Manhattan Square has survived, as Theodore Roosevelt Park, the grounds around the American Museum of Natural History. The park is official a part of Central Park as of 1874. The Grand Parade was first reduced from to by 1815, and then demapped altogether, except for which survives as Madison Square Park. The market on the Lower East Side was whittled down from to , then finally became the Tompkins Square Park.
Randel and William Bridges
There was a private controversy regarding the publication of the map of the Commissioners' Plan. Randel had begin to prepare a map to go to the engraver, using his original papers, when he found out that the council had given William Bridges, another of the handful of city-recognized surveyors, the right to do so. Bridges simply copied one of Randel's previously published maps, which were in the public domain, introducing errors as he did so. Bridges published and copyrighted the resulting map as a private venture, leaving Randel out in the cold.
Executing the plan
Laying out the grid
Even with the publication of the Commissioners' Plan, the work of gridironing Manhattan was far from done. Randel's map only showed 16 elevation points for the entirety of Manhattan island, and many more would be needed. In addition very few of the streets were actually placed into the physcial landscape of the island; 125th Street, for instance, was the northernmost street for which Randel had an actual phsyical position. These tasks, that of completing the survey with elevations, along with marking the actual positions of the notional streets of the plan, would take Randel another 11 years, until 1821. To do this work, Randel spent his own money, amounting to thousands of dollars, developing surveying instruments which would not vary in size because of temperature changes, resulting in great precision.
To inscribe the grid onto the land, Randel and his staff erected almost 1,600 markers – primarily marble monuments inscribed with the number of the street, placed at each intersection. Where rocks prevented the use of the marble markers, they pounded in iron bolts. In all, they positioned 1,549 marble markers and 98 iron bolts to define the pattern of the grid.
As Randel's work proceeded, and landowners could see for themselves, on the ground and not on a map, where the planned streets would be, some of them took action to fight against the plan, destroying not only temporary measurement pegs, but also digging up the marble markers. Randel simply replaced the pegs and the markers, and the Common Council covered the cost of doing so.
As part of his post-plan work, Randel published a detailed series of 92 small colored "Farm Maps" that overlaid Manhattan's natural topography with the intended grid, and made an atlas of the city, filling in with "astounding precision" the details of street locations and elevations which had been left off the official map.
"Opening" and "regulating" the streets
With the grid inscribed on the landscape with markers and pegs, the actual streets had to be "opened", and they also had to be paid for. The city had no great reserve of money, and no regular income stream, so they developed a mechanism to pay for the opening and building of the streets, and for compensating the landowners whose property would be used for them. The 1807 law had specified that the city would calculate damages to the landowners' property as well as asses the benefits the landowners would receive from the new streets. Any disagreement between the parties could then be appealed to the state supreme court. Unfortunately, such a system would not be sufficient for the number of streets and avenues called for by the Commissioners' Plan, so the Common Council approached the state legislature with a new one, which they approved in a new law in April 1813.
In the new system, the state supreme court would appoint three "commissioners of appraisal and estimate" for the street to be opened – generally local surveyors or other people familiar with the area the street would pass through – to evaluate the cost of the land being taken, and the beneficial value of the new street to the landowner. The appraisal commission could assess the city with as much as a third of the cost of the opening &ndahs; raised to 50% in 1869 – and the remainder of the cost would come from the difference between the beneficial value and the value of the property. The supreme court would then review the figures and ask for revisions or approve them. The result was "binding and conclusive."
Once the street was legally "opened" with the approval by the court of the commission's figures, the city collected the assessment from the landowners along the street, and once the assessment was totally collected, the streets could be built, or "regulated". The land was cleared, hills were excavated or hollows filled in, the right of way was leveled and the street was paved. Many years could pass between when a street was "opened" and when it finally began to resemble a city street, having been cleared, leveled, graded and paved.
The decision on what the elevation of the street would be fell to the Common Council, as the commission for each street was disbanded once the street had been opened. The Council was aggressive in administering the street plan, even causing John Jacob Astor to back down when he challenged their decisions.
Of course, the new system did not stop landowners from appealing the assessments made by the streets commissions – generally speaking, landowners who had inherited their property were more inclined to appeal assessments than were land speculators, who simply paid the assessments and waited for the values of their properties to rise, as they inevitably did. The outcomes of the landowner appeals, together with those of the lawsuits against the plan which had been filed as early as 1810, created a body of precedents by which the state law was administered. Most of the appeals failed, in particular those that claimed that the Plan was an unlawful taking of property, since eminent domain was a well-established principle of law, although its use on such an extensive basis in New York City was new.
Modifications and extensions
Central Park and other alterations
By far the largest alteration to the Commissioners' Plan was the creation of the Central Park between 59th and 110th Streets and Fifth and Eighth Avenues.
The concept the park first came up for public discussion around 1850. By and large its advocates were wealthy landowners and merchants, who argued that New York lacked the kind of parks that graced cities such as London and Paris, and that the creation of such a park would enhance New York's reputation as an international city. With the population of the city growing, there was an intense need for public spaces, which the Commissioners' Plan had been notoriously short on providing for. In 1853, the state legislature authorized the city to use eminent domain to acquire the necessary land, and appointed in 1857 a Central Park Commission, led by Andrew Haswell Green to build the park. The commission held a design contest, which was won by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's "Greensward plan". The construction of the park, the first landscaped park in the United States, was completed in 1859, and in 1863 the northern boundary was moved from 106th Street, where it had originally been set, to 110th Street. In 1870 the park passed from state control to local control when a new city charter came into effect.
Significant to the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 was the fact that Green was an outspoken critic of the grid. In 1867, he convinced the state legislature to give his Central Park Commission the power to make changes in the grid above 59th Street. However, even though few streets in that area had been laid out yet, property lines conformed to the grid, making sweeping changes to it difficult to achieve. Green was able to take advantage of a high ridge and create Morningside Park and Morningside Drive, and also created Riverside Park along the Hudson River; both parks were designed by Olmsted and Vaux.
Other interruptions of the 1811 plan include the main Columbia University campus in Morningside Heights; Lincoln Center; Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village; and the City College of New York campus.
Because a formal planning commission in support of the Commissioners' Plan was not created, there was no authority outside of the Common Council to protect its integrity. Thus the elimination of the Grand Parade and the wholesale marketplace and the addition of Union, Tompkins, Stuyvestant and Madison Squares came about, as well as the already noted additions of Lexington and Madison Avenues. Fourth and Sixth Avenues were extended downtown, and Broadway uptown. The angled course of Broadway created Herald and Times Squares, among others.
Above 155th Street
The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 stopped at 155th Street, but as the city grew, and subsumed what had been independent villages such as Greenwich Village and Manhattanville, it became clear that a plan of action would be need for the part of Manhattan above that line. The Common Council directed the city's street commissioner to develop a plan for Upper Manhattan in 1851, but no money was allocated for the task, so there was no result. In any case, any street plan for that area would have had a difficult time in extending the simple rectilinear grid created by the Commissioners for the area below 155th Street, because the topography of Upper Manhatan was significantly more difficult to tame, consisting as it does of extremely steep hills, high ridges made of hard Manhattan schist, and deep valleys caused by tectonic fault lines at what is now Dyckman Street, which transects the Fort Washington Ridge; 155th Street; and at 125th Street, which crosses the Manhattan Ridge to create the Manhattanville Valley.
Concerning Manhattanville, even before the publication of the Commissioners' Plan, the Common Council had agreed with the founder of Manhattanville, Jacob Schieffelin, to grade and pave that community's main road, Manhattan Street, which was part of a grid which was rotated significantly farther to the east than the Commissioners' grid would be. When push came to shove, and the question of whether the street they had paid a contractor $600 to create should be demapped and uncreated, the Council decided instead to keep the street, and in 1849 it was officially connected to the western portion of 125th Street, where it remains today, explaining why that street has a bend in it. One other Manhattanville street was also kept, which became the western portion of 126th Street.
With the need for a street plan for Upper Manhattan, in 1860 the state legislature created another commission, this one of seven people – with Olmsted and Vaux as consulting landscape architects – to come up with a plan of action which would not be a copy of the grid plan promulgated by the original Commission. The new plan was to take into account "the elevated, irregular, and rocky formation of that district." However, the plan created by the new commission in 1863 essentially called for an extension of the original grid, and by 1865 the legislature had disbanded the commission, and turned over responsibility for an Upper Manhattan street plan to Andrew Haswell Green's Central Park Commission.
The commission did extensive due diligence on the area, studying property ownership, population density, sanitation, food and supplies distribution patterns, even the weather of the region, and in 1868, a plan was published which called for grids in the valleys, but also streets, avenues and parks which conformed to the topography of the land. Green said about the results of his commission's plan that it created "the only portion of Manhattan Island whee any trace of its pristine beauty remains undesecrated and unrased [sic] by the leveling march of so-called 'public improvements.'"
Several other avenues were added to the grid when Upper Manhattan was developed, such as Riverside Drive, Claremont Avenue, and Saint Nicholas Avenue. The old Bloomingdale Road and Broadway – which are pictured on the original 1811 map, but which were not part of the original planned grid – were eventually combined together as Broadway was extended northward; it also took in part of the Kingsbridge Road in upper Manhattan.
Avenues and streets
For the most part, with the exception of the streets which were displaced by Central Park, the east-west streets of the Commissioner' Plan – which did not, by design, include Greenwich Village – have remained as they were originally drawn and numbered. As mentioned above, the western ends of 125th and 126th Streets are another exception, as are some streets around the parks which developed, such as Central Park South. The avenues, however, have increased in number, as well as having undergone some significant changes in nomenclature over the years.
In the 1830s and 40s, two additional avenues were interpolated between the original avenues, largely due to the influence of real estate speculator Samuel B. Ruggles: Lexington Avenue, known south of 20th Street as Irving Place, was built between Fourth and Third Avenues to service Ruggles' Gramercy Park development, and Madison Avenue was built between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. These interpolations were necessary because, essentially, the Commissioners had left gaps between Third and Fourth and Fourth and Fifth that were too large to allow real estate development.
Of the Commissioners' original avenues, only First, Second, Third, and Fifth Avenues and Avenues C and D have never been renamed, though some of the named avenues, such as Avenue of the Americas (Sixth), are also known by their numbers.
Fourth Avenue: Union Square East (14th-17th Streets), Park Avenue South (17th-32nd Streets), Park Avenue (32nd-135th Streets)
Sixth Avenue: Avenue of the Americas (co-named, to Central Park South), Lenox Avenue/Malcolm X Boulevard (co-named, 110th-147th Street)
Seventh Avenue: Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (110th-153rd Street)
Eighth Avenue: Central Park West (Columbus Circle to Frederick Douglass Circle), Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Frederick Douglass Circle to Harlem River Drive at 154th Street)
Ninth Avenue: Columbus Avenue (59th-110th Streets),
Tenth Avenue: Amsterdam Avenue (59th Street to Fort George Avenue at about 193rd Street)
Eleventh Avenue: West End Avenue (59th-107th Streets)
Twelfth Avenue: West Side Highway
Over the years, portions of Avenue A were renamed Sutton Place in Midtown Manhattan, York Avenue in the Upper East Side and Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem. Portions of Avenue B were also renamed East End Avenue in Yorkville.
Reaction Criticism
The plan was vociferously criticized from the start, not the least because it did not take into account the natural topography of the island, but also because it took no notice of classical ideas about beauty, and was monotonous in its regularity. It was also lambasted for being made in service of monetary interests alone.
Among the many critics of the plan were Edgar Allan Poe and Alexis de Toqueville who believed that it fostered "relentless monotony." Walt Whitman, the poet and editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, said of it: "Our perpetual dead flat and streets cutting each other at right angles, are certainly the last thing in the world consistent with beauty of situation." Frederick Law Olmsted, who would co-design Central Park, facetiously said of the gird's origin:
There seems to be good authority for the story that the system of 1807 was hit upon by the chance occurence of a mason's sieve near the map of the ground to be laid out. It was taken up and placed upon the map, and the question being asked "what do you want better than that?" no one was able to answer. This may not be the whole story of the plan, but the result is the same as if it were.
Olmstead also said of it in 1858:
The time will come when New York will be built-up, when all the grading and filling will be done, when the pcturesquly varied rock formations of the island will have been converted into the foundations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect angular buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface, with the single except of the few acres contained in [Central] Park.
Olmsted was clearly no fan of the grid plan: "The great disadvantage under which New-York [sic] labors is one growing out of the senseless manner in which its streets have been laid out. No city is more unfortunately planned with reference to metropolitan attractiveness." Still, by 1876, even Olmsted had to admit that the grid had prevailed.
In 1818, Clement Clarke Moore, the author of A Visit from St. Nicholas – probably better known as "Twas the Night Before Christmas" – whose estate "Chelsea" would be chopped up by the plan, wrote in "A Plain Statement, addressed to the Proprietors of Real Estate, in the City and County of New York" :
The great principle which governs these plans is, to reduce the surface of the earth as nearly as possible to dead level. ... The natural inequities of the ground are destroyed. and the existing water courses disregarded. ... These are men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome. ... We live under a tyranny with respects to the rights of property, which ... no monarch in Europe would dare to exercise ... it is a tyranny of the worst kind; for it is under the sanction of laws which shield those who exercise it from being called to legal account. It is time for all who are interested to arouse, and to unite themselves for the maintenance and preservation of their rights.
Moore signed his pamphlet as "A Landowner", but it was not long before his identity was exposed. Despite these vehement objections and his call to arms, Moore later made a great deal of money by sub-dividing his estate and developing it section-by-section along the gridded streets. Ironically, it was the landowners like Moore, who fought the grid most insistently, who made the most money from exploiting it.
Edith Wharton bemoaned "...rectangular New York ... this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness," while her friend Henry James wrote that:
New York pays the penalty of her primal topographic curse, her old inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition and distribution, the uncollected labor of minds with no imagination of the future and blind before the opportunity given them by their two magnificant water-fronts. This original sin of the longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet meanly intersected, and of the organized sacrifice of the indicated alternative, the great perspectives from East to West, might still have earned forgiveness by some occasional departure from its pettifogging consistency. But, thanks to this consistence, the city is, of all great cities, the least endowed with any blest [sic] item of stately square or goodly garden, with any happy accident of surprise, any fortunate nook or casual corner, any deviation, in fine, into the liberal or charming. That way, however, for the regenerate filial mind, madness may be said to lie – the way of imagining what might have been and putting it all together in the light of what so helplessly is.
Architect Julius Harder wrote in 1898 in The City's Plan:
The street plan ... had only the dubious merit of the most childish regularity and of devoting the maximum proportion of area to building sites. Every consideration of economy of intercommunication, future financial economy, sanitation, healthfulness and aesthetics was absolutely left out of the reckoning.
Historian, and architect, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes wrote in The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909 (1915-1918), recounting the city's history, that in 1811:
We have now reached the point where the old city, which had grown up haphazard, with crooked streets, wooded hills, and fertile valleys traversed by streams and winding country roads, begins to be absorbed into a new city, in which antiquity and mature are no longer respected, with streets laid out in accordance with a carefully considered symmetrical plan. ... Unfortunately, this plan, although possessing the merits of simplicity and directness, lacked entirely the equally essential elements of variety oif picturesqueness, which demand a large degree of respect for the natural conformation of the land. The new plan was entirely deficient in sentiment and charm, and with its gradual development, little by little, the individuality, the interest, and the beauty of one choice spot after another have been swept away [until] scarcely anything remains to remind us of the primitive beauty and the fascinating diversity of natural charms we know Manhattan once possessed. The year 1811 marks the end of the little old city and the beginning of the great modern metropolis.
Noted architecture critic Lewis Mumford, a vehement protestor against the plan, complained about the "blank imbecility" of this "civic folly" with its "long monotonous streets that terminated nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses." He wrote in The City in History (1961): "Such plans fitted nothing but a quick parcelling of the land, a quick conversion of farmsteads into real estate, and a quick sale." Thirty years earlier, in "The Plan of the City", published in The New Republic in 1932, he called the grid plan "a straight-jacket from which [New York City] has not escaped, from which perhaps it can never escape."
Urban activist Jane Jacobs noted "street[s] that go on and on ... dribbling into endless amorphous repetitions ... and finally petering into the utter anonymity of distances," and famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright wrote of its "deadly monotony," calling it a "man trap of gigantic dimensions."
As seen from the vilification in Moore's and James' comments quoted above, the Commissioners came in for as much criticism as the grid itself. Mumford wrote that: "With a T-square and a triangle, finally, the municipal engineer, without the slightest training as either an architect or a sociologist, could "plan" a metropolis..." and Montgomery Schuyler, another architecture critic, claimed that "We all agreed – all of us, that is, who pay attention to such things – that the Commissioners were public malefactors of high degree." Jean Schopfer, writing in The Architectural Record in 1902, said of the them "Men of genius were needed ... Unhappily, they were ... men devoid of all imagination," while historian Thomas Janvier, in his book In Old New York (1894), wrote of the "deplorable results" of "the excellently dull gentlemen", and criticized the plan as only "a grind of money-making." He wrote about it that the Commissioners
decided that the forests should be cut away, the hills levelled , the hollows filled in, the streams buried; and upon the flat surface thus created they clamped down a ruler and completed their Bœotian [dull, stupid] programme by creating a city in which all was right angles and straight lines.
Further,
Unfortunately, the promise of this far-sighted undertaking was far from being fulfilled in its performance. The magnificent opportunity which was given to the Commissioners to create a beautiful city simply was wasted and thrown away. ... Thinking only of utility and economy ... in the simplest and dullest way ... their Plan fell so far short of what might have been accomplished by men of genius governed by artistic taste. ... [T]hey were surcharged with the dullness and intense utilitarianism of the people and the period of which they were a part.
Modern urban analysts often have negative comments about the grid, from Vincent Scully's calling it an "implacable gridiron" to the comment of Richard Pluz, an historian of housing, that "Even in 1811, the gridiron did not work well." Urban planner Peter Marcuse wrote that it was "one of the worst city plans of any major city in the developed countries of the world." Urban historian John W. Reps said of it that "As an aid to speculation the commissioners' plan was perhaps unequaled, but only on this ground can it justifiably be called a great achievement." According to Reps, the Commissioners were "motivated mainly by narrow considerations of economic gain," and, in fact, facilitating "buying, selling and improving real estate" was, according to chief surveyor Randel, one of the purposes of instituting the grid.
In his book, City on a Grid: How New York Became New York, historian Gerard Koeppel says of the Commissioners' Plan that it was "simply not something that had been deeply thought out," and quotes a student of the grid as saying that it was "a quick solution to a difficult problem" made by "apathetic authors, who simply overlaid Manhattan with eight miles of uncompromising grid."
Praise
From its inception, there have been those who sang the praises of the Commissioners' gridiron plan. The Citizens and Strangers Guide of 1814 said:
The whole island has been surveyed and framed into extensive avenues and commodious streets, forming an important legacy to posterity, from which the most solid advantages may be anticipated.
James Kent, the eminent jurist and legal scholar, called the plan "brillant", and wrote in 1896:
The map and plan of the Commissioners laid out the highways on the island upon so magnificent a scale, and with so bold a hand, and with such prophetic views, in respect of the future growth and extension of the city, that it will form an everlasting monument of the stability and wisdom of the measure.
The lawyer and noted diarist George Templeton Strong enthusiastically embraced the grid and its resulting growth, writing in his diary in 1850:
How this city marches northward! The progress of 1835 and 1836 was nothing to the luxuriant rank growth of this year. Streets are springing up, whole strata of sandstone have transferred themselves from their ancient resting places to look down on bustliung thoroughfares for long years to come. Wealth is rushing in upon us like a freshet.
One critic recently pointed out that the wide avenues attract retail and commercial use, among other benefits, Rem Koolhaas comments that it created "undreamed-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy," and called it "the most courageous act of prediction on Western civilization." Modernist architect Le Corbusier gushed that "I insist on right-angled intersections" and Rafael Vinoly, a Uruguayan-born architect, called it "the best manifestation of American pragmatism in the creation of urban form," while artist Piet Mondrian drew inspiration from the vibrancy of the grid, displaying it in paintings such as Broadway Boogie Woogie.
Finally, Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician, wrote in 1959: "This is the purpose of New York's geometry: that each individual should be poetically the owner of the capital of the world."
See also
Architecture of New York City
City block
History of New York City
Manhattanhenge Surveying Urban planning References Explanatory notes Citations Bibliography
Higgins, Hannah B. (2009) The Grid Book. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51240-4
External links
The Commissioners' report of 1807, with a modern introduction and an 1811 map
"Map of the city of New York and island of Manhattan as laid out by the commissioners appointed by the Legislature, April 3, 1807" New York Public Library Digital Collections (zoomable map)
The Great American Grid, a website devoted to orthogonal planning.