The GreaTesT Grid - Princeton University · 48 Teh GreaTesT Grid Figure 19. this was part of the...

The GreaTesT Grid The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811–2011 Edited by Hilary Ballon

Museum of the City of New York

and Columbia University Press

Preface

editor’s acknowledgments

introduction

1. Before the Grid

Reflection: Michael R. Bloomberg

2. The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811

3. surveying the City

4. Opening streets

Reflection: James Traub

5. selling Lots: From Land to real estate

Reflection: Rafael Viñoly

6. The Public realm: squares, Parks and avenues

7. The development of the east side

Reflection: Alexander Garvin

8. improving the West side

9. Counterpoint: Broadway

10. rethinking the Grid above 155th street

Reflection: Wendy Evans Joseph

11. Modern reforms

Reflection: Amanda M. Burden

12. Moving on the Grid

Reflection: Edward Glaeser

13. Urban Paradigm: The Grid in Contemporary Thought

Contributors

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Museum of the City of New York

Contents

The Greatest GridThe Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811–2011

Edited by Hilary Ballon

Co-Published by

The Museum of the City of New York

Columbia University Press Graphic Design: Thumb

©Copyright 2011, Museum of the City of New YorkAll rights reserved.

Printed and bound in the United States.

All reasonable attempts have been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in future volumes. No part of this volume may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Individuals who do not use conventional print may contact the publisher to obtain this publication in an alternate format.

Distributed by Columbia University Press61 West 62nd StreetNew York, NY 10023212.459.0600

First Edition, 2011ISBN: 978-0-231-15990-6Please contact the publisher for Library of Congress catalog-in-publication information.10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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6 The GreaTesT Grid

The GreaTesT GridThe Master Plan of Manhattan 1811–2011

Honorary Chairs

Amanda M. BurdenChair, City Planning Commission and Director,

New York City Department of City Planning

Scott M. Stringer Manhattan Borough President

Co-chairs

Richard T. Anderson President, New York Building Congress

Jill ChalstyFounder and Chairman, Community

for Education Foundation

Todd DeGarmo CEO, STUDIOS Architecture

Ronay MenschelChairman, Phipps Houses

Mitchell S. SteirChairman and CEO, Studley, Inc.

The exhibition is supportedby generous grants from:

Dyson Foundation

ConEdison

The Durst Organization

Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc.

Major sponsorship is alsoprovided by:

Jill and John Chalsty

Todd DeGarmo/STUDIOS Architecture

Nixon Peabody LLP

Ronay and Richard L. Menschel

Vornado Realty Trust

Additional support has been received from:

American Continental Group, Inc.AvalonBay Communities, Inc.Benchmark Builders, Inc.Suzanne Davis and Rolf OhlhausenCooper Joseph StudioThe 42nd Street FundGardiner & TheobaldNew York Building FoundationThe Peter Jay Sharp FoundationRobert Derector AssociatesSilverstein PropertiesThe Solow Art and Architecture FoundationStructure Tone, Inc.Taconic Charitable FoundationVVA Project Managers & ConsultantsWeidlinger Associates, Inc.

The exhibition is also madepossible with funds from:

Manhattan Delegation, New York City CouncilNew York Council for the Humanities

The companion bookis supported by:

Furthermore: A Program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund

< Detail of The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, Figure 8

10 The GreaTesT Grid

editor’s acknowledgments

Birthdays come and go, but I am grateful that Susan Henshaw Jones and Sarah Henry were persuaded that this one should be noted. I thank the team at the Museum of the City of New York for their commitment to this project, most especially to Susan, whose dynamic leadership has made the Museum of the City of New York as exciting as its namesake city; to Sarah, whose incisive intellect and story-telling mastery make her, as far as I am concerned, an ideal thought partner; and to Autumn Nyiri, whose organizational skills were indispensable to the realization of this project. Ever since working with Wendy Evans Joseph on an exhibition about Frank Lloyd Wright’s towers more than a decade ago, I dreamed of working with her on another project as the exhibition designer. She asks questions about how to exhibit objects that reveal new perspectives and expand the ways to understand the subject. In designing the book and the exhibition graphics, Luke Bulman and Jessica Young of Thumb were especially thoughtful about the play between abstract and concrete qualities of the Manhattan grid. Jeffrey Ribeiro, an urban planner in the making, was the effective editorial assistant on the book.

My gratitude to Carolyn Yerkes and Andrea Renner, the assistant curator of The Greatest Grid, is commingled with intense pride and affection. As this book was completed, these two extraordinary former students of mine completed their PhDs and launched their professional careers. Carolyn demonstrated her amazing range and insight as she effortlessly moved from the early modern period, her primary field of research, into modern urban theory in her contribu-tions to this book. From the beginning of this project, Andrea infused it with her rigor, creative research, attentiveness to each object, and nuanced interpretations. The Greatest Grid could not have been com-pleted without Andrea, whose intelligence touches every part of it.

I relish the chance to thank those I love and whose love sustained me during a challenging time: Elizabeth Easton, Sarah McPhee, and Mariët Westermann for their precious gift of abiding friendship; my devoted, unstinting mother Harriet Ballon Lucks of indomitable spirit; Orin Kramer, my resolute husband with invincible powers of reason-ing that bring clarity and calm, and our beloved children Sophie and Charles, a miraculous trio that gave me what no medicine could, a profound sense of connection, enveloping love, and strength.

Like the grid, this book was enriched by multiple voices. New York has attracted a community of outstanding scholars and urban thinkers. I am grateful that so many were willing to participate in this project and contribute reflections, mini-essays, and catalog entries. Marguerite Holloway, author of a forthcoming book on John Randel, Jr. was especially generous and assisted with the Randel materials.

The authors of the catalog entries are indicated by the initials listed below.

KA Kate Ascher HB Hilary Ballon MH Marguerite Holloway BH Bill Hubbard Jr. WEJ Wendy Evans Joseph MK Matthew Knutzen GK Gerard Koeppel JMS Joanna Merwood-Salisbury MM Michael Miscione MP Max Page AR Andrea Renner JR Jeffrey Ribeiro RR Reuben Rose-Redwood ES Eric Sanderson CS Caleb SmithCW Carol Willis CY Carolyn Yerkes

< Detail of The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, Figure 8

11

34 The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 36


Figure 19.

this was part of the site’s appeal. The Spanish often located their cities on indigenous settle-ments in order to establish dominion over the population and to take advantage of existing infrastructure. The regular street grid formed a crucial part of their strategy: it effaced pre-vious organizational systems and divided the land into even plots that could be quickly reas-signed to new settlers.

In designing the plan of Lima, Pizarro fol-lowed the instructions of Charles V (1500–1558), one of many Spanish rulers who issued ordinances, known as the Law of the Indies, dictating the form of colonial cities. Although the ordinances began in the early sixteenth century as informal guidelines, they became more specific over time as settle-ment expanded. They concerned every aspect of colonial government, including the treat-ment of native populations, and contained specific regulations about the use of the grid as an agent of control that allowed for rapid implementation and expansion of the city.

The street grid of Lima is known as the “damero de Pizarro” (Pizarro’s draftboard) because he personally helped mark off the lines of the streets with a ruler and cord. The original grid had square blocks, 400 feet per side, arranged thirteen blocks by nine blocks with 40-foot-wide streets. In this view, an open square with a fountain in the middle is visible near the bridge across the river. Called the Plaza Mayor or the Plaza de Armas, the square is another essential fea-ture of Spanish colonial settlement. It is the centerpiece around which the grid develops and is the site of the major civic and reli-gious buildings—including the town hall, the president’s residence, the cathedral, and the archbishop’s palace. As the administrative, social, and economic heart of the city, the square also has its location determined by ordinance: a location usually in the center of the city but offset in settlements built at the water’s edge, as with Lima.

The gridiron plan was modeled in part on the example of ancient Roman outpost cities, where the grid became a symbol of rational order imposed on a subjugated population. In the 1570s Viceroy Francisco de Toledo launched a campaign to build reducciones, gridiron settlement towns, throughout the region. The use of the grid marked the exten-sion of colonial power and administration from the capital to the frontier. Many of the frontier towns were abandoned by their Native Andean inhabitants who fled compul-sory labor in the silver and mercury mines, either to return to their traditional settle-ments or to seek wage labor in larger cities. But the Spanish continued to implement the grid model of colonial settlement across the Americas over the centuries. The Spanish replicated the pattern exemplified by Lima in hundreds of towns and cities, including Santa Domingo, Panama City, Mexico City, Veracruz, Cartagena, Valparaiso, Bogotá, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. CY

19. Philadelphia

Thomas Holme, “A portraiture of the city of Philadelphia in the province of Pennsylvania in America,” 1683. The Athenaeum of Philadelphia

In 1681 King Charles II granted William Penn a huge tract of land fronting on the Delaware River. A year later, Penn arrived in his new colony and devised a plan for the main settlement of the colony, Philadelphia. Over the two-mile-wide isthmus between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, Penn laid a grid of streets, an idea unprecedented in English America at the time. The blocks bounded by these streets were larger than the city blocks he would have been used to in London, some as big as 400 by 500 feet. Penn intended that his town would never get as congested as central London: he wanted the houses of his “green country town” to stand among generous kitchen gardens. To further “ventilate” this town of gardens, two 100-foot-wide streets (now Market and Broad Streets)

Figure 17. Figure 18.

credited Morris with running the street com-mission, which presumably chose a vision of order and regularity he had for Manhattan, but we have no evidence. He never detailed the commission’s work in either public or per-sonal documents. The explanatory remarks released with the commissioners’ plan in 1811 are written with Morris’s elegance and clarity but no individual authorship was claimed and no early drafts have emerged that might reveal Morris’s specific contribu-tions. GK

17. John rutherfurd

George Catlin, John Rutherfurd, nd. Oil on panel (86.3 x 68.6 cm). Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Gift of Leonard F. Loree, 0356. Photo by Peter Jacobs

Of the three 1811 commissioners, John Rutherfurd (1760–1840) was the only one born in Manhattan but brought the least relevant experience to the work. He spent most of his life in New Jersey, attending

to his vast, mostly inherited landholdings; at his death he was said to be the state’s largest landowner. He served briefly in the New Jersey General Assembly and repre-sented the state in the United States Senate (1790–98), resigning during his second term to retire, as an obituary put it, “to the more agreeable pursuits of private life.” It seems possible that he was tapped for the street commission through the inf luence of fel-low commissioner and relative Gouverneur Morris (Rutherfurd was married to a daughter of Morris’s half-brother), who may have desired a pliant ally. Rutherfurd was a Morris chauvinist; after Morris’s death, Rutherfurd claimed that Morris had originated the idea of the Erie Canal, an assertion Morris never made. Judging from Morris’s frequent diary references to Rutherfurd’s absences from or lateness to meetings of the street commissioners, it seems likely that Rutherfurd contributed the least to the commission’s work, with the

headstrong visionary Morris and the skilled surveyor De Witt dominating the decision-making.

Some contemporaries, prompted by the vagaries of cursive and pronunciation, mis-takenly spelled his name Rutherford, which later generations of the family, perhaps with a sigh, eventually adopted. GK

Precedents and Context

18. Law of the indies

Joseph Mulder, view of Lima, in Francisco de Echave y Assu, La Estrella de Lima convertida en sol sobre sus tres coronas. (Amberes: J.B. Verdussen, 1688). Public domain

Gridiron plans were an essential feature of Spanish colonial settlements in the New World, where the conquistadors, and later the viceroys, used city planning to regulate and extend the empire. This bird’s-eye view over Lima shows the core of the city founded by Francisco Pizarro on January 18, 1535. Lima provides a typical example of how the Spanish designed new cities according to governmental ordinances. Pizarro defeated the Inca leader Atahualpa and captured the capital city of Cusco, high in the Andes, in 1533. He then established the new capital, Lima, the “Ciudad de los Reyes,” (city of kings) near the Pacific Coast. The spot Pizarro chose along the Rímac River had been part of the Inca empire, and

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 49


17. >

townships (to be called a range of townships) and dividing every other one into thirty-six lots. Hutchins was dogged by Indian raids, and in three surveying seasons he could complete only seven of these ranges of town-ships. This is the map Hutchins presented to Congress to record his survey of what has since been called the Seven Ranges. BH

23. Plans to re build London

John Rocque, Views of the city of London before and after the 1666 fire, after Christopher Wren’s Plan for rebuilding the city, 1758. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

When the Great Fire of London burned out on September 5, 1666, the conflagration had destroyed much of the city’s medieval core. John Evelyn, a witness to the devastation, wrote that the fire had burned London’s “churches, public halls, exchange, hospital, monuments, and ornaments …I went again to the ruins, for it was no longer a city.” In response to the disaster, the government of

Charles II formed a commission of archi-tects and surveyors who were tasked with leading the rebuilding of London. Several of the commissioners, as well as John Evelyn, drew up their own designs for a new city. Their plans reflected a common desire that the incineration of the old city fabric, though tragic, should be taken as an opportunity to replace London’s narrow, twisting streets and fragmented neighborhoods with a mod-ern urban vision.

Christopher Wren imagined a new London with a regularized grid of rectangular blocks running parallel to the Thames, crossed by broad avenues radiating out from the rebuilt St. Paul’s cathedral. But although it had lost its buildings, London was not a blank slate; rather, it was covered with property lines that the city’s inhabitants wanted to main-tain. Instituting any of the proposed plans for redesigning the city would have meant displacing all its residents and forcing them

to sell their lots—a solution that was neither practical nor desirable for a monarch wor-ried about his public image in the wake of a major crisis. Parliament debated the propos-als and the Privy Council reviewed them, but in the end no plan that ignored the previous property divisions was endorsed. London was rebuilt according to a pre-fire survey, with moderate improvements like widened streets and new city churches, but nothing on the scale of what Wren had proposed.

22. The rectangular survey of

the United states

“Plat of the seven ranges of townships being part of the territory of the United States, N.W. of the River Ohio / surveyed in conformity to

an Ordinance of Congress of May 20th, 1785

under direction of Thos. Hutchins, late geog-

rapher to the United States”; engraved by W.

Barker, 1796. Hand-colored lithograph. Library of

Congress, Geography and Map Division

In 1785 the Continental Congress con-ceived the idea of selling its lands north-west of the Ohio River to help pay down the Revolutionary War debt. Its plan was to divide the territory into townships six miles square, then to divide every other town-ship in a checkerboard of thirty-six one-square-mile lots (later called sections). The undivided townships would be sold to land companies, while the square-mile lots would be sold directly to individual settlers as fam-ily farmsteads.

This idea was completely without prec-edent in the history of land distribution. By the eve of the Revolution, it had become common practice in New England to survey unclaimed land into six-mile-square town-ships and then sell them to “proprietors.” But within those square boundaries, the proprietors laid out farms in patterns that accorded with the topography and in sizes rarely exceeding a few acres. No one had ever conceived the idea of a family farm fully one mile square—640 acres—laid over the land-scape with no regard to natural features.

And yet, this was the charge Congress laid before its new Geographer of the United States, Thomas Hutchins. He was to go to the recently surveyed point where the Pennsylvania border touches the north bank of the Ohio River, and from there proj-ect a line due westward. At intervals of one mile along that line, a team from one of the thirteen states would drive southward back to the Ohio River, laying out a column of



25. Washington, d.C .

John Reid, “Plan of the City of Washington in the Territory of Columbia ceded by the States of Virginia and Maryland to the United States of America and by them established as the Seat of their Government after the Year 1800,” 1795. Hand-colored engraving. Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

In 1790 Washington, D.C. was selected as the site of the national capital, and in 1791 architect-engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant established the plan of the federal city. The New York City commissioners inevitably con-sidered this landmark plan of only twenty years earlier and purposefully chose to reject it as a model. While their “Remarks” refer explicitly only to Paris and London, there

was an implied contrast between their vision of New York, with rectangular house lots, and the capital city, designed for government and the representation of power.

In L’Enfant’s plan an orthogonal grid is overlaid with a larger-scale grid of diagonal streets punctuated by frequent squares. The intersections of the two grids produced non-rectangular lots that added to the cost and complexity of construction, complications the commissioners wished to avoid. But an advantage of the plan of Washington is that it creates opportunities for buildings to call attention to themselves in the urban fabric. Monuments could be sited at the end of a vista, such as the Capitol, or face a square, such as the White House, whereas in New

York individual structures were submerged in the overall unity of the street and block. The scale of Washington was also monu-mental: L’Enfant’s avenues had an 80-foot carriageway with 40 feet on each side for a tree-covered walk, or 160 feet in total, com-pared to 100 feet for New York’s avenues.

Washington and New York now stand for two different approaches to city planning, and it is clear that the commissioners saw it this way in 1811. HB

The plans to rebuild London after the Great Fire demonstrate the widely held belief that a great city should incorpo-rate figural space like open squares into the street grid. In rejecting this idea for Manhattan, the commissioners of the 1811 plan departed from the Baroque model that had been used to design the new capital city of Washington, D.C. only a decade earlier. The commissioners also demonstrated the boldness of their vision by successfully implementing their plan. Whereas the Crown was unwilling to change property lines to lay out a new city, the Manhattan commissioners accepted that task. CY

24 . edinburgh

Alexander Kincaid, “A Plan of the City and Suburbs of Edinburgh From Actual Surveys by Alexander Kincaid, Engraved by John Beugo,” 1784. Engraving. National Library of Scotland, Map Collection

In the mid-eighteenth century, the medieval city of Edinburgh had reached its capacity, with a dense collection of buildings clus-tered up against the single wide street that connects Castle Rock to Holyrood House. To entice wealthy residents to remain in Edinburgh instead of decamping for London, city planners made several efforts to extend settlement to the north plain, which is sepa-rated from the Old Town by a dramatic ridge. In 1767 the young architect James Craig won

the competition to design the New Town with his proposal for an axial street grid laid out between two open squares. In Craig’s plan, the New Town was set parallel to the Old Town and connected to it by a bridge. Craig’s plan covered only four rows of city blocks, between Queens Street and Princes Street. Seven other sections of the New Town were planned and built piecemeal by different architects over the next 120 years.

Although Craig’s New Town plan also has a rectangular grid, it incorporates greater formal variation than the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan does, as smaller streets cut into the blocks bound by the major ave-nues. The result is an intricate network of open and closed spaces, the interior streets

creating blocks-within-blocks removed from the principal axes. The New Town was designed at a fine grain because the city planners had a specific vision of what they wanted it to be: an upscale residential neighborhood of row houses and small apart-ment buildings. The Commissioners’ Plan of Manhattan is inherently more flexible in this respect because by keeping the scale of the streets the same, it does not give some loca-tions more prestige than others. CY


52. a house “in the air”

Egbert L. Viele, View of 2nd Ave. Looking up from 42nd St., 1861. Lithograph. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Mrs. Wendell T. Bush, 28.153.215

Looking north at the intersection of East 42nd Street and Second Avenue today, one sees a canyon of high-rise buildings extending far into the distance. If one were to travel back to the same intersection in the early 1860s, the scene would be similar

to the one shown here, where the avenue had been laid out but the surrounding hills were not yet leveled to align with the street grade. Houses were left up in the air as the streets and avenues were cut through the hills. A significant number of buildings had already been demolished to make way for the city’s thoroughfares and those that remained would soon be swept aside by what one commentator referred to as the “leveling

hand of improvement.” Additionally, as the poet Clement Clarke Moore remarked, “nothing is to be left unmolested which does not coincide with the street-commissioner’s plummet and level. These are men, as has been well observed, who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.” The topo-graphical changes that resulted from the Commissioners’ Plan were nowhere more evident than in the view shown here of the northward path of Second Avenue on Manhattan’s East Side. RR

53. Grading eighth avenue

Regulating and Grading Eighth Avenue, looking North from 106th Street, ca. 1869. Collection of The New-York Historical Society, #55940

Formidable terrain made road building on the West Side particularly difficult. As late as the 1860s, a horsecar could travel up Eighth Avenue only as far as 84th Street before the way became impassable, and most of northern Manhattan remained a

rural expanse. Steep hills with formations of Manhattan schist—a notoriously hard rock to cut—presented topographical obsta-cles that the 1811 grid ignored. In this view from 106th Street from about 1869, a team of laborers excavates through a hillside to extend Eighth Avenue north, using a crane to hoist large loose or loosened rock out of the path. The section of the hill visible on the right is today part of Central Park, where stone steps lead pedestrians up and over the ridge. Nothing remains of the hill on the left, which, like most of the natural topography of the West Side, was demolished to clear the land for development. CY

Figure 53.

How Manhattan’s Topography

Changed and Stayed the Same

Most historical accounts suggest that the grid plan dramatically transformed Manhattan’s topography over the course of the past two centuries. It is conventionally noted by historians and other urban commentators that the island’s early topography was so rugged that the name Mannahatta translates as “island of hills,” and the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 is said to have resulted in the leveling of hills and filling of valleys to produce a flat surface for the grid. However, only recently have there been attempts to document the extent of topographic change that resulted from the implementation of the 1811 grid plan.

The island’s hilly origins can be seen most clearly in its parks. Many areas with significant rock outcroppings were preserved in the city’s emerging system of parklands during the nineteenth century, the most famous of which is Central Park. Opened in 1857, Central Park was not part of the original grid plan, which would have cut straight through what are now the park’s bound-aries. While elements of the original topography remain, Central Park was aesthetically altered to create the appearance of an English pastoral landscape.

Anyone who has walked the city’s streets can attest that the landscape is still somewhat hilly. For instance, there is a major drop of over 115 feet in elevation on the West Side around 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, which has remained largely unaltered topographically since the grid was laid out in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Manhattan’s highest point, in Washington Heights above 155th Street, lies 265 feet above sea level, much as it did in 1811.

In general, Manhattan’s West Side was and remains more topo-graphically uneven than the East Side. Its elevation has always been higher, and the greatest absolute change in elevation, 118 feet, was on the West Side, compared to 46 feet on the East Side.Both sides used approximately 24 million cubic yards of earth to fill low areas, but it was necessary to remove over 40 million cubic yards west of Central Park, as opposed to 16 million cubic yards on the East Side.

Recent research demonstrates that within the historical shore-line between 1st and 155th Streets, the infilling of low areas resulted in an average increase of 9 feet in elevation and leveling led to an average decrease of 12 feet. However, the elevations in some areas changed very little while the topography of others were changed by more than 100 feet—roughly the equivalent of a ten-story building. Much of the island’s shoreline was also extended into the Hudson and East Rivers through infilling.

The establishment of the grid considerably changed the appearance of Manhattan’s topography, yet today’s topography

still bears a striking resemblance to conditions in the early nine-teenth century. In short, two centuries after the grid was laid out across the island, Manhattan remains an “island of hills” upon which an imposing metropolis has been built.

Reuben Rose-Redwood

Figure 52.

Opening streets 8180 The GreaTesT Grid



55, 56. rocks on 81st street

Robert L. Bracklow, Rocks, 81st Street and 9th Avenue, December 1886. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Sonia and Alexander Alland, Jr., 93.91.420

Robert L. Bracklow, Rocks, 81st Street and 9th Avenue, December 1886. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Sonia and Alexander Alland, Jr., 93.91.421

Issachar Cozzens, in his Geological History of Manhattan or New York Island of 1843, described the challenges the graders faced in opening the streets: “the Diluvium is a tough cement of clay, gravel, and boul-ders, very hard to dig. In digging through 42nd Street, the pickaxes had to be used for every shovelful of this clayey cement which formed what is called, a hard-pan, of about fourteen or more feet in thickness.” Bedrock that could not be cleared by shovel

and pickaxe often required gunpowder to remove. In these photographs by Robert Bracklow (1849–1919), a team of laborers uses a system of pulleys and winches to pull large rocks from a site at 81st Street and Ninth Avenue, near where the American Museum of Natural History stands today. Horse-drawn carts would drag away the rubble, which then could be used as building material or to fill in swamps and valleys. By this time, the Department of Public Works employed over one thousand laborers. CY

54 . rock on 71st street

Dewitt McClellan Lockman, Plan of Rock Uncovered as of October 1857. Collection of The New-York Historical Society, #84754b

This plan from October 1857 shows a mass of rock blocking the middle of 71st Street between Avenues A and B (now York Avenue and FDR Drive). The diagram at the center outlines the uncovered rock, but beyond the north and south edges of the street it fell to the lot owners, not the street graders, to deal with its removal, as a note at the bottom of the plan makes clear: “The rock taken out to this point where Mr. Pendleton became responsible. The earth excavation on the block was all done.” The diagram records the rock’s features and dimensions, with a tally of its total area running down the right side of the drawing. According to the note in the center, the graders were able to dig out this rock, but more drastic measures were neces-sary to remove other topographical elements from the street grid. CY

Opening streets 83


Manhattan has no center. Older European cities do, of

course, and you find them by following the signs that say

centre ville or centro citta. There you will typically find a

broad, serene pedestrian space, often demarcated by

an ancient cathedral and the old city hall. If you asked

a New Yorker for directions to “the center of town,” he

would be bewildered, and might, for want of better, send

you to Times Square, or Columbus Circle, which are

simply nodal points that New Yorkers pass through, often

at their peril. For this, we have Manhattan’s original city

planners to thank.

Is “thank” the right word? Paris is charming, Vienna is

charming — even Washington, D.C. is charming. Manhattan

is not. The very word “square,” so pleasing elsewhere,

in Manhattan means “place where Broadway diagonally

crosses an avenue.” In 1925 the essayist Benjamin de

Casseres described Times Square as “a ganglion of streets

that fuses into a traffic cop.” So the question we must ask

when we think about what those planners of 1811 wrought

is: How do we feel about charming? How do we feel about

living in a city without a center?

I guess the right answer would be “proud.” Manhattan

is a remorseless place to which its citizens are peculiarly

adapted, and of which out-of-towners seem unaccount-

ably fond. It was designed that way: In their report, the

commissioners of the 1811 plan noted rather scornfully

that they had eschewed the “circles, ovals and stars

which certainly embellish a plan” in favor of “conve-

nience and utility.” I would never say that what I love

about New York is its “utility,” but I would say that the

utilitarian street plan has made possible the helter-skelter,

pell-mell life of the city — which is what I do love.

James Traub

Reflection

57. Lots below street level

Robert L. Bracklow, Fifth Avenue and 117th Street, ca. 1870. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Sonia and Alexander Alland, Jr., 93.91.367

Grading left some lots below street level. When that happened, lot owners had to fill in their land themselves to bring their prop-erty back up to grade. For the owners unwill-ing or unable to take on this task, living in a pit had its consequences. As he explored northern Manhattan in December 1897, look-ing for natural springs, James Reuel Smith encountered a German man whose house and the vacant lots around it had been left seven feet below 115th Street after the graders had finished their work. “The old man says he is going to move on account of the careless-ness of his new and citified neighbors,” Reuel reported. “They live in very nice-looking flats behind his house, on the north side of West 114th Street, but are prone to throw into the vacant lots whatever material they wish to dispose of in haste, and he has grown tired

of making vain protests against the practice.” In Robert L. Bracklow’s photograph of the grading at 117th Street and Fifth Avenue, the lot in the foreground sits below street level while the blocks across the intersection remain above grade on rock outcroppings. CY

58. Farm house at 84th street

Brennan Farm House, 84th and Broadway, 1879. Collection of The New-York Historical Society, #84696d

This image captures a glimpse of the Brennan Farm House at what is now the intersec-tion of West 84th Street and Broadway, as it appeared in 1879. In the 1840s the writer Edgar Allan Poe and his family rented a room at Patrick and Mary Brennan’s farm-house, which is likely where he wrote his famous poem, “The Raven.” During his time in New York, Poe came to appreciate what he saw as the “sublime” nature of Manhattan’s rugged terrain. He dreaded the destruction

of the island’s natural beauty, stating that “these magnificent places are doomed. The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath. Streets are already ‘mapped’ through them, and they are no longer suburban residences, but ‘town-lots.’” When the grid plan was extended northward on the West Side, the Brennan farmhouse was demolished and the hill upon which it stood was leveled. In 1980 the City Council renamed West 84th Street from Broadway to Riverside Drive after Poe to commemorate the time that he spent at the Brennan Farm House. RR


85


Central Park

98. randel Farm Map: future site

of Central Park

Randel Farm Map no. 53, vol. 3, p. 15, showing 101st to 109th Streets from Sixth Avenue to Ninth Avenue, June 15, 1819. Pen and ink with water-color on paper. Used with permission of the City of New York and the Office of the Manhattan Borough President

Central Park was not part of the Commis-sioners’ Plan of 1811 and thus does not appear on the Randel Farm Maps of north-ern Manhattan. Instead, the proposed street grid covers the entire area, including the two columns of blocks on the right side of the sheet that are bound by Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Avenues. These blocks were never built because this section of the grid became the northwest corner of the park. At the top of the sheet, a square building can be seen near the proposed intersection of Sev-enth Avenue and 109th Street. Known as

Blockhouse No.1, this stone fortification was constructed during the War of 1812 as part of Manhattan’s defenses against the British; today it is the oldest building in the park. On the left of the sheet, the blocks bound by Eighth and Ninth Avenues were eventually built without regard to the irregular terrain and the previous property divisions that the map records. CY

99. Greensward Plan for Central Park

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Greensward Plan, 1858. Pen and ink on paper. New York City Department of Parks, The Arsenal

In 1853 the city used an act of eminent domain to acquire the land in the center of Manhattan for the creation of a public park. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the competition to design the new park with a proposal that erases the 1811 grid within its borders, even as it hints at the grid’s formal regularities. Olmsted and Vaux’s entry, called the Greensward Plan,

respects the grid most clearly at its boundar-ies, as it covers an area exactly three blocks wide and forty-seven blocks long, from Fifth to Eighth Avenue between 59th and 106th Streets. (Central Park was extended to 110th Street in 1863.) Within that rectangle, a cir-culation system combines north-south and east-west routes to form a relaxed grid of gently curving roads and paths. This system connects to the surrounding 1811 street grid at regular intervals around the perimeter of the park, allowing for continuous travel from one side of the city to the other. The Greensward Plan offers an escape from the grid but it does not ignore it. CY

Figure 99.

Figure 98.

The Public realm 119


100. View of Central Park, 1864

Pierre Martel, Central Park, 1864. Lithograph published by H. Geissler. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of J. Clarence Davies, 29.100.2568

When construction began on Olmsted and Vaux’s plan for Central Park, the population of Manhattan was concentrated downtown and the grid’s northern reaches remained a projection. “The time will come when New York will be built up,” Olmsted observed then, “when all the grading and filling will be done, and when the picturesquely-varied, rocky formations of the Island will have been converted into formations for rows of monoto-nous straight streets, and piles of erect build-ings.” In this 1864 view of Central Park from the southeast corner entrance, the conversion that Olmsted foresaw had begun only on the east side, where the terrain was flatter than on the west side. Already buildings line the edges of the blocks along Fifth Avenue, while the streets have not yet been cut through the

west side hills. Despite the lack of uptown residents, Olmsted anticipated that when the street grid eventually filled out, property near the park would increase in value, and he defended the park’s size on these grounds. When the construction of the grid was com-plete, Olmsted expected that an “artificial wall, twice as high as the Great Wall of China, composed of urban buildings” would circle the park; by the year of this view, it had started to rise. CY

101. aerial view of Manhattan, 1921

Lewis McSpaden for Fairchild Aerial Camera Corp., Aerial Survey of Manhattan Island, New York City, August 4, 1921. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

Pieced together from one hundred aerial pho-tographs, this eight-foot-long photomosaic of Manhattan demonstrates the foresight of the Central Park commissioners in reserv-ing such a long swath of the grid for public use at a time when much of the land around

that swath remained undeveloped. Taken on August 4, 1921, by Lewis McSpaden for the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, this composite reveals how by the early twentieth century the 1811 grid had filled out almost completely. Central Park had become an 843-acre oasis on an island with little other open space, its terrain sealed off from the rest of the city by a continuous street wall of build-ings. Although this site was chosen for the park in part because the rocky land there was cheaper to acquire and more difficult to develop than in the other neighborhoods initially proposed, the park’s location in the middle of the island offers a practical sym-metry, as it provides equal access from both the east and west sides. CY

102. The Willowdell arch and the Central

Park designers

Victor Prevost, Bridge No. 3, September 23, Central Park, 1862. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

In his remarks on the plan for Central Park, Olmsted wrote that the most difficult prob-lem facing the park designers was how to incorporate a transportation system into the landscape: “How to obtain simply the required amount of room for this purpose, without making this class of its construc-tions everywhere disagreeably conspicuous, harshly disruptive of all relations of compo-sition between natural landscape elements on their opposite borders, and without the absolute destruction of many valuable top-ographical features.” Olmsted and Vaux’s solution separated circulation according to means of locomotion, with carriage roads, equestrian paths, and pedestrian walks organized into independent systems so that

Figure 100.

Figure 101.

travelers on foot could move safely through-out the park without crossing paths with horses and carriages. In addition, four sunken transverse roads were cut into the earth, allowing traffic on the street grid to pass through the park without interrupting the landscape.

Over forty bridges were built to separate the circulation systems vertically from each other. In this photograph of Willowdell Arch, the men who helped create Central Park—including Andrew H. Green on the far left, Vaux third from the left, and Olmsted on the far right—stand on a larger road, East Drive, at the point near 67th Street where it passes over a smaller pedestrian path. These crossing points demonstrate how Olmsted and Vaux developed an alternate transportation grid for Central Park: a grid without intersections. CY

Figure 102.

The Public realm 121


150. amsterdam avenue at 123rd street

Caleb Smith, P.S. 36 at 123rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, 2006. Digital photograph. Courtesy of the photographer

Certain blocks of the 1811 grid retain their rock outcroppings despite having been devel-oped. Built over a schist formation, P.S. 36 stands atop the rock on concrete foot-ings. Completed in 1967 to the designs of Frederick G. Frost, Jr. and Associates, the elementary school consists of four buildings located on the western side of the block on Amsterdam Avenue that is bound by 123rd Street and Morningside Drive. This 1.35-acre site had formerly been a part of Morningside Park, which it adjoins to the east, and thus it was never cleared and leveled. In 1964, over objections that public park space should not be developed in densely populated areas, the land was transferred to the Board of Education to address overcrowding. CY

151. Bennett avenue between

181st and 186th streets

Caleb Smith, Rock outcropping on Bennett Avenue between 181st and 186th Streets, 2006. Digital photograph. Courtesy of the photographer

On the west side of northern Manhattan, topography takes over from the street grid. A long ridge of rocky hills lies parallel to the river, crossed by few east-west streets. The ridge culminates at the island’s highest point, a schist outcropping 265 feet above sea level, located in Bennett Park. Nearby on Bennett Avenue, this photograph shows a lot north of 181st Street that is occupied by another schist outcropping, a 50-foot-wide rock ledge that stands where 182nd Street should cross the avenue. CY

Figure 149.


Outcroppings

147. amsterdam avenue and

124th street

James Reuel Smith, View of the southwest corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 124th Street, November 16, 1898. Collection of The New-York Historical Society, #84700d

As the street graders continued north above Central Park, development of the blocks followed. This view of the intersec-tion of Amsterdam Avenue and 124th Street shows the convergence of new and old, the Acropolis apartment building on the left tow-ering over the farmhouses clustered near a groundwater source known locally as Indian Spring. James Reuel Smith (1852–1935) photographed this corner in 1898 as part of his effort to document the city’s remain-ing natural springs, images that were even-tually published in Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx, New York City, at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1938).

On the right in the photograph, 124th Street has recently been graded, while in the fore-ground, Amsterdam Avenue already has stone pavers and streetcar tracks. Smith noted that the “land immediately round about the spring is thirty feet below the present level of the street and Avenue but is being rapidly filled in and built upon. On a high bluff to the west of it is a cottage built sixty-five years ago, which is one of the oldest dwellings now left standing in Manhattanville.” The newly graded streets brought more residents to the neighborhood, and within twenty years these farmhouses had been replaced by apartment buildings. CY

148, 149. riverside drive between

93rd and 94th streets

Riverside Drive, Rock between 93rd and 94th Streets, ca. 1903. Collotype. Museum of the City of New York, Prints and Photographs Collection, X2010.11.3102

West 94th Street. View south on 94th Street near Riverside Drive, ca. 1895. Cyanotype. Museum of the City of New York, Prints and Photographs Collection, X2010.11.3099

Street grading often required so much exca-vation that it lowered the level of the street to well below the level of the adjacent blocks. Owners of the individual lots on these blocks were responsible for clearing and leveling their land, but they were not required to do so. In 1898, James Reuel Smith described what happened when East 78th Street was cut through the high bluffs near the property of a Dutch farmer named Mr. Fuer, “leav-ing his castle and farm ‘in the air.’ Mr. Fuer has lived on and cultivated his ‘sky-farm’ for thirty-seven years.” There were no sky-farms

atop this rock spur that spanned the block between 93rd and 94th Streets on Riverside Drive, but the difficulties of its removal were such that it remained in the lot into the early twentieth century, even as the surrounding lots filled with apartment buildings. Figure 148 shows the southern side of the rock, exposed by the grading of 93rd Street, while in Figure 149, the grading of 94th Street has sheared off the rock’s northern side. Although this rock was eventually demol-ished, the outcroppings in nearby Riverside Park, off the street grid, remain. CY


improving the West side 153


If the construction of the Manhattan grid is a nineteenth-century story, the twentieth-century sequel tells of the grid’s erosions, alterations, and erasures. Although the relentless-ness of the 1811 plan had been eased by exceptions like Central Park, technological advances in the new century exaggerated the grid, as skyscrapers climbed higher with the help of steel skeletons and passenger elevators, and devel-opers sought to maximize their land values by building out to the edges of their lots. Critics of the grid continued to fight this density with wholesale urban reforms, replacing vast swaths of the grid with superblocks beginning in the 1930s. Two major zoning laws formalized long-standing complaints about the grid’s density and lack of open space, and one of these, the 1961 Zoning Resolution, ultimately sought to undermine its defining qualities: the continuity of the street wall, the uniformity of the rectilinear pattern, and the density of building coverage.

Hermann Bollmann’s 1962 drawing of Manhattan (see Figure 177) highlights how the three-dimensional grid of the city is formed from individual buildings. The view demon-strates that the integrity of each rectangular block depends on the buildings that stand at its edge, and shows how the Midtown skyscrapers maximize that edge vertically as well as horizontally on the lot surface. In the early twentieth century, this combination of height and bulk worried urban reformers, who were concerned about the ground-level congestion, citywide shadows, and cavernous street corridors that such towers would create. In 1916, opposition to the high-and-wide construction ethos had reached critical mass, and the city’s Board of Estimate passed a resolution that dictated what types of building could be built in what areas of the city, how tall buildings could reach, and how much of the block they could cover. The 1916 Zoning Resolution, New York’s first zoning law, meant that buildings could no longer be both as tall as possible and cover the entire lot: once a building crossed a certain height limit, its footprint had to step back a certain distance from the line of the block. The 1916 Zoning Resolution introduced the setback tower to Manhattan and changed the shape of the street wall.

It was not only the shape of the buildings on the block that changed in the twentieth century, but the pattern of

the blocks itself. Although the commissioners’ plan for the streets had been altered already in the nineteenth century, those changes were mainly limited to the insertion of streets and avenues, such as Broadway and Madison Avenue, which added to the original grid rather than subtracting from it. The incorporation of superblocks into the grid—created by eras-ing sections of street from the plan—marked a departure of a different kind. Some superblocks were formed for monu-mental buildings, like the New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal at the beginning of the twentieth century; others contained monumental ensembles, such as Columbia University, Rockefeller Center and Lincoln Center.

From the 1930s through the middle of the century, large sections of the grid were obliterated to create open tracts of land for tower-in-the-park housing projects, which were endorsed by many housing reform advocates as preferable to block-based tenements. Robert Moses, for example, pursued a decades-long program of slum clearance, replacing entire neighborhoods with superblocks under the banner of urban renewal. Although the housing superblocks fit neatly into the orthogonal street system, they completely changed the grain of the city. The oversize blocks did not have the grid’s walk-able character, and because they were generally reserved for only one building type—residential—they lost the mixed-use quality of the building-lined street wall. The superblocks pro-vided opportunities for architectural monumentalism that the grid did not otherwise afford. These opportunities were usu-ally missed, as the housing developments on the superblocks most often consisted of undistinguished slabs like those of the Manhattanville Houses. In changing the scale and density of the grid, the superblocks destroyed what made it unique.

By the 1950s, the 1916 Zoning Resolution had been qualified by so many amendments that it was no longer considered to be a useful tool for modulating the density of the grid. In 1960, the Board of Estimate passed a new zoning resolution, to become effective the following year, which replaced the old law with a set of rules designed to encour-age builders to incorporate open space onto their lots. Using Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Avenue as a model, the 1961 Zoning Resolution rewarded property own-ers who reserved a portion of their lots for public space with floor area bonuses that allowed them to build taller towers. In Midtown in particular, where real estate values are at a

premium, developers took advantage of the legislation by including plazas and arcades at the street level in exchange for more stories on their buildings. This resulted in a steady erosion of the grid as chunks of the street wall were traded for vertical square footage—as in the XYZ Buildings on Sixth Avenue—and mid-block arcades were created.

By the end of the twentieth century, the grid had become less vulnerable to attack. The heyday of the tower-in-the-park housing model had come and gone, and today the density of existing construction and high real estate values make it prohibitively expensive and logistically complicated to clear multiblock tracts of land for superblock projects. Instead, the prevailing trend in Manhattan has been to reassert the grid, as the recent development of Battery Park City and the cur-rent proposal to rebuild lower Manhattan demonstrate.

11. Modern Reforms

< Detail of Seventh Avenue Looking North from 35th Street, Figure 180

179


Seagram Building broke with the dominant typology of the bulky step-back buildings that line Park Avenue in an unbroken street wall. Its site plan addressed the perception that the streets and sidewalks of the 1811 grid had not provided the city with sufficient open space.

Although the reduced footprint of the Seagram Building meant a loss of f loor area—some of which was compensated by the lower buildings to the east of the tower—the overall effect was immediately appreci-ated as a masterpiece of urban design. It was partly in response to this project that the 1961 Zoning Resolution offered height bonuses to buildings that incorporated open spaces at the ground level. The setback pla-zas that were built as a result reduced the city’s density and changed a fundamental characteristic of the grid’s three-dimen-sional realization. CY

188. XYZ Buildings, sixth avenue

View up Sixth Avenue with the McGraw-Hill Building (1969) at 1221 Sixth Avenue in the foreground, the Exxon Building (1967–71) at 1251 Sixth Avenue in the center, and the Time & Life Building (1959) to the right, 1974. Photograph by Ezra Stoller © Esto

The impact of the 1961 Zoning Resolution on the Manhattan grid can be seen most clearly on Sixth Avenue, along the stretch between 47th and 51st Streets, where the street wall has disappeared. There, the buildings are set back into the blocks and open plazas line the avenue, an arrangement that took advantage of the height incentives the new resolution offered for including public space at the ground level.

In this photograph by Ezra Stoller looking north up Sixth Avenue, three adjacent plazas are visible, all built by Harrison, Abramovitz & Abrams as part of Rockefeller Center’s west-ward expansion. Of the four skyscrapers in the center of the photograph, the northernmost one, second from the right, is the Time & Life

The superblock made possible an approach to planning which was otherwise impos-sible in New York: the grouping of several buildings around a public space. (Columbia University and Rockefeller Center set the precedents: these urban compositions on a superblock yield, respectively, an expan-sive campus quadrangle and an ice rink.) The platform over 65th Street is visible in the photograph, although the adjoining block had not yet been cleared for Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School. The designers of Lincoln Center intentionally detached the plazas from the surround-ing streets to create a serene enclave for the arts. The recent renovation of Lincoln Center undertaken by Diller + Scofidio + Renfro (completed 2010) has, among other things, reconnected it to 65th Street; the platform that cast the street in permanent shade has been removed, and new theater entrances and other animating features have brought the street back to life. CY

Plazas

187. seagram Building

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, 375 Park Avenue between East 52nd and East 53rd Streets, view from the northwest, 1958. Photograph by Ezra Stoller © Esto

In 1958, the same year that the architec-ture and urban planning firm of Voorhees Walker Smith & Smith submitted its new zoning proposal to the New York City Planning Commission, the Seag ram Building on Park Avenue was completed to the designs of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Voorhees proposal, which was the basis for the 1961 Zoning Resolution, cited the Seagram Building as a model for its radical new approach to massing and site planning. Instead of maximizing the building footprint by extending it to the edges of the lot, Mies had opted for a slender tower set back from the street on a landscaped plaza. By pre-serving this open space at ground level, the

187Modern reforms


framing Grand Army Plaza at the south-eastern tip of Central Park at Fifth Avenue. Along with the Sherry-Netherland Hotel to the north, the Squibb Building, Bergdorf Goodman, and the Paris Theater to the south, and the Plaza Hotel, these buildings filled in the street wall around the Carrère and Hastings–designed pedestrian plaza, which opens to the park on its north side. Built by McKim, Mead & White in 1927, the Savoy Plaza Hotel fronted on Fifth Avenue with a line of retail shops at its base, concen-trating activity at the street while contrib-uting to the sense of enclosure within the central square.

That enclosure was broken when the General Motors Building replaced the Savoy Plaza in 1968. Edward Durell Stone, working with Emery Roth & Sons as the associated architects, pulled the new skyscraper back from the street perimeter and sank another plaza, below street level, into the space along Fifth Avenue. The addition of this

public space gave General Motors a height bonus for its tower under the 1961 Zoning Resolution, but critics of the design remarked that in addition to being redundant with the Grand Army Plaza immediately adjacent, the sunken plaza was difficult to access and remained unused for much of the year. One of those critics was Donald Trump, who filled in the plaza when he bought the General Motors Building in 1998; the glass cube of the Apple Store now marks its former spot. Designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and built in 2006, the cube restores a small fragment of the lost street wall. CY

Figure 190.

Building, completed in 1959. Designed before the zoning resolution had passed, the site has an open plaza along the avenue and another along 50th Street. In 1963, plans were unveiled to construct three more skyscrapers—originally called the XYZ buildings—between 47th and 50th Streets, an ensemble of towers arranged around a central square, akin to Rockefeller Center. As the plans progressed, the centralized plaza fell out of the proposal, and the three tow-ers were built instead with a series of forecourts along the avenue. Because they had reserved these areas at the ground level for public space, under the 1961 Zoning Resolution the archi-tects were allowed to build taller. The effects can be seen in the enormous slabs of the Exxon Building (1967–71) at the center of the photo-graph and the McGraw-Hill Building (1969) at the left; the Celanese Building (1973), which was the last of the XYZ buildings to be com-pleted, is just out of sight to the south.

Like the Seagram Building which inspired the change in the zoning law, the XYZ buildings

are rectangular slabs anchored by lower build-ings to the rear with open plazas to the front. Yet unlike their predecessor, these plazas are not isolated interruptions in the street wall, small punctures in a plane, but rather they are a linked sequence that erases that plane entirely. This places a greater emphasis on the avenue over the streets, and diminishes the perception of the grid at the ground level. CY

189. savoy Plaza hotel, Fifth avenue

between 58th and 59th streets

Wurts Bros., Savoy Plaza Hotel, Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets, 1942. Museum of the City of New York, Prints and Photographs Collection, X2010.7.1.8255

190. General Motors Building, Fifth

avenue between 58th and 59th streets

The General Motors Building, 767 Fifth Avenue be-tween 58th and 59th Streets, 1968. General Motors LLC. Used with permission, GM Media Archives

Until its demolition in 1964, the Savoy Plaza Hotel formed part of the ring of buildings

Figure 189.

189Modern reforms


headquarters, the original design of 550 Madison incorporated one pedestrian arcade along Madison Avenue and another mid-way down the block between 55th and 56th Streets. Both arcades earned the building floor area bonuses under the zoning law, but one was arguably a more successful space than the other. Partially exposed to the air, the 60-foot-high arcade along Madison opened the building’s base to pedestrians and created a dramatic visual effect when seen from outside, but from inside the vaulted spaces were dark and windswept. The glassed-in arcade at the rear of the building, however, provided a convenient mid-block shortcut for pedestrians and a comfortable indoor space popular with tourists and mid-town workers on lunch break.

After the Sony Corporation bought 550 Madison in 1994, a renovation by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates filled in the arcade along the avenue with retail space, reaffirming the dominance of the street wall and commercial

activity at street level. When the new land-lord turned the mid-block pedestrian arcade into the Sony Plaza, home of the Sony Wonder Technology Lab, the outcry over the privati-zation of an area intended for public use was somewhat mitigated by the improvements Sony made to the corridor, such as expand-ing its square footage—an indication of the general success of this particular grid altera-tion. CY

196. 787 seventh avenue

Through-block passageway, Equitable Building

at 787 Seventh Avenue between 51st-52nd

Streets, 1985. Photograph by Edward Larrabee

Barnes, courtesy Robert A. M. Stern Architects

At the rear of the Equitable Center at 787 Seventh Avenue, a mid-block passage cuts through the block between 51st and 52nd Streets, the southernmost in a series of cov-ered arcades that stretches north to 57th Street. These aligned passageways create a pedestrian route through the long midtown

blocks, a secondary street comprised of linked interior and semi-interior spaces. Although many of the arcades added to cor-porate office towers under the 1961 Zoning Resolution were bland and uninspired, geo-metric murals by Sol LeWitt and bronze sculptures by Barry Flanagan enliven the nine-story atrium at the Equitable Center. But the arcade’s most dramatic effect is on circulation: it allows pedestrians a short-cut between the avenues that the 1811 grid does not provide. Even though the blocks on the Upper West Side are the longest in Manhattan, the arcade shortcuts built after the 1961 Zoning Resolution are concentrated in Midtown. There, high real estate values provided an extra incentive for developers to take advantage of the floor area bonuses that the resolution awarded in exchange for these public-oriented interventions. CY

regridding

197, 198. regridding of Ground Zero

Original site plan for World Trade Center com-

plex, ca. 2000. Public domain

Site plan for the redevelopment of lower

Manhattan, 2008. Rendering courtesy Silverstein

Properties

Before August 5, 1966, when ground was broken on the site of the new World Trade Center, a continuous street grid covered the western side of lower Manhattan that predated the 1811 street grid to the north. Although its blocks were small and irregu-larly shaped, for the most part this grid was fairly uniform and integrated into the sur-rounding traffic system. The construction of the World Trade Center on a 16-acre site along the river replaced a swath of the older grid with a superblock, closing sections of two north-south streets (Washington and Greenwich) and three east-west streets (Fulton, Dey, and Cortland). When complete,

25.

Figure 197.

Figure 195.

Figure 196.

Through-street arcades

191. Map of Through-street arcades

Privately-owned public spaces and the

Manhattan street grid: plazas and arcades in

central Midtown, 2011, based on the data of

Jerold S. Kayden. Created by Carolyn Yerkes

The 1961 Zoning Resolution had its great-est effect in midtown Manhattan, where the economic incentive was strongest for developers to include publicly accessible space in their lots in exchange for height bonuses on their towers. The added pub-lic spaces could take various forms, from open plazas to covered arcades, but most of these spaces were built at the ground level and thus resulted in a steady erosion of the street grid. The cumulative effects of the 1961 Zoning Resolution can be seen in this map of the two-block zone between Fifth and Seventh Avenues from Central Park South to 40th Street, which shows all the plazas (blue) and arcades (orange) that have been

built since the resolution’s passage. In an effort to emphasize the effect of the zoning resolution on midtown Manhattan, public spaces built before 1961, such as the plazas around the Time & Life Building on Sixth Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets, are not shown.

The data for this map were compiled by Jerold S. Kayden, a professor of urban planning and design at Harvard University who, in conjunction with the New York City Department of City Planning and the Municipal Art Society of New York, published an exhaustive study of the privately owned public spaces built under the 1961 Zoning Resolution. Above all, the map illustrates how the succession of public plazas created along Sixth Avenue has erased the street wall there and how the addition of mid-block arcades between Sixth and Seventh Avenues has added a de facto secondary street to the 1811 grid. CY

192–5. 550 Madison avenue

550 Madison Avenue, AT&T Building, ca. 1986. Museum of the City of New York, Prints and Photographs Collection, X2010.11.2487

Lennox Joslyn, View of the mid-block arcade at Sony Plaza during a Spiderman promotion, 550 Madison Avenue, Sony Building, March 2, 2007. Digital photograph. Courtesy of the photographer

View of the Sony Building showing the open ar-cade at the street and the glassed-in mid-block arcade at the rear. Courtesy Richard Payne FAIA

View of the Sony Building with the filled-in arcade at the front, 1988. © Norman McGrath

Although the skyscraper at 550 Madison Avenue is known best for the distinctive broken pediment at its peak—a postmod-ern flourish by Philip Johnson that earned the tower its “Chippendale” nickname—the building’s arcades at street level are more significant and affect circulation on the grid. Completed in 1984 by Philip Johnson/John Burgee Architects as AT&T’s corporate

Figure 191.


Figure 194.

191Modern reforms


Amanda M. Burden

Reflection

Vibrant street life is integral to New York City’s identity.

The rectilinear Manhattan street grid, adopted in large

parts of the other boroughs as well, is the city’s armature

for sustaining a pedestrian-focused, walkable city,

infused with energy and vitality.

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 created 200-foot-long

blocks, just short enough to provide continuous diversity

for the pedestrian. Coupled with the tradition of framing

out the grid by building to the street-wall, the pedestrian

experience is enhanced by ensuring that all buildings are

connected to the street and the life of the city.

The street walls, short blocks, and easy orientation made

possible by the grid give New Yorkers and out-of-towners

alike the incentive to explore the city with confidence.

While fine-grained at human scale, the grid also opens

up elongated vistas at the city scale, with majestic views

up and down the avenues. As New York reconnects to its

waterfront and its water, the grid meets the rivers without

interruption, providing a corridor of light and air for the

metropolis and unobstructed views to the water.

The grid was also a logical device to maximize real

estate value by creating regular, geometric parcels to

accommodate the city’s growth. Recent master plans

such as that for Battery Park City have recognized

these virtues and rejected the isolation created by the

superblocks of previous decades, demonstrating the

enduring logic and practicality of the 1811 plan.

For the last nine years, our agenda at City Planning has

been to build on the strengths of the grid. By requiring

a variety of measures, including street tree plantings,

restricting curb cuts, promoting sidewalk cafes, and

requiring ground-floor transparency, we strive to improve

the dynamic quality of the city’s street life for today’s and

future generations. this plan was often criticized for the remote conditions it created at the street level, as the vast site was difficult for pedestrians to access. The seven buildings on the superblock were isolated on wide plazas, and an under-ground shopping concourse drew activity away from the street.

The current plan for the redevelopment of lower Manhattan proposes to knit much of the former World Trade Center super-block back into the surrounding street grid. Two of the closed streets will be reopened to traffic: the north-south axis of Greenwich Street and the east-west axis of Fulton Street. In addition, Dey and Cortland Streets will also be extended as pedestrian walkways across the eastern half of the site. This proposal reasserts the grid as the primary circulation network in lower Manhattan and indicates a turn away from the superblock strategy that dominated urban planning in the 1960s and 1970s. It demonstrates a renewed faith in

the Manhattan vernacular street and in the norms of the 1811 grid. CY

199, 200. Master Plans for Battery Park

City, 1969 and 1979

Alexander Cooper Associates, Master Plan for Battery Park City, 1969. Courtesy Cooper, Robertson & Partners

Alexander Cooper Associates, Master Plan for Battery Park City, 1979. Courtesy Cooper, Robertson & Partners

In the original plans for Battery Park City, the 92-acre landfill site along the western edge of lower Manhattan had no street grid. A continuous megastructure of buildings was to cover the area, connected by a cen-tral spine of vertically-stacked decks and overhead walkways. The plan from 1969 pro-posed a neighborhood conceived in opposition to the city across West Street, with build-ings arranged in pinwheels. (see Figure 199) By 1971, the development of Battery Park City had slowed, and a new master plan was

designed to attract investors. The revised plan by Alexander Cooper Associates explic-itly cited the 1811 Manhattan grid as the model for the redesign, as it “has proven to be remarkably adaptable to modern building and transportation technology.”

The 1979 plan for Battery Park City con-tinued the grid of lower Manhattan across West Street, in hopes that the street exten-sions would reduce the sense of isolation in the new neighborhood. Regular blocks replace the megastructure, whose circula-tion system of stacked decks was deemed too complicated and expensive to implement. Instead, the new plan was organized around traditional streets, which emphasize ground-level circulation and allow land parcels with street frontage to remain the basic unit of development. The 1979 master plan urges that “Battery Park City should take a less idiosyncratic, more recognizable, and more understandable form”; the form the planners chose was the 1811 grid. CY

Figure 198.

Figure 199.

Figure 200.

193


Although the commissioners’ plan created the Manhattan grid by delineating only two elements, the streets and the blocks, the grid affects almost all aspects of urban life. On paper, the plan defined the surface of the city—the widths of the streets and the edges of the lots—but in reality, its orthogonal structure governs everything that occurs on, above, and below that surface as well. Infrastructure and architecture make the grid; utilities, transportation networks, and social patterns follow it.

Because the grid up to 155th Street was laid out over a relatively unpopulated area, the systems that support the metropolis developed in tandem with the grid and assumed its shape. Communications systems, power supply, and train lines initially were all above ground until the late nineteenth century, when logic and convenience dic-tated that these be buried underneath the city. The physical armature that had respected the pattern of settlement at street level—tele-graph and telephone wires, electricity cables, and pipes for gas and steam—respected it underground as well. This armature included the tubes for subways, which generally followed the paths of the streets, like the elevated trains that the subway replaced. The first subway in New York, operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), ran north from City Hall, for the most part underneath Broadway. The subway continued underneath Broadway and Seventh Avenue on the west side of Central Park, and on the East Side it fol-lowed Lexington Avenue. The two lines were connected in midtown by the 42nd Street shuttle.

Subterranean trains echo the grid underground; the rest of the transportation network echoes it at street level. Because of the original emphasis on waterfront access, the grid provided many more crosstown streets and travel up and down the island was concen-trated on relatively few avenues. In 1949 the Department of Traffic Engineering developed the one-way traffic system in part to address the limited capacity of the avenues and make north-south transit more efficient, and an automated traffic light system was designed to allow traffic to move through several intersections without stopping.

Today it seems a given that vehicles in Manhattan should obey rectilinear traffic patterns, but this was not always the case. At Columbus Circle, for example, which was built in 1905, the streets connect through a rotary, and in 1920 the pioneering traf-fic engineer William Phelps Eno proposed building similar circular intersections throughout the city. His plan was never instituted, and most New York intersections now employ a “block system,” where one street of traffic stops to allow another street of traffic to pass. Common throughout the world, the use of the block system

in Manhattan means that vehicles rarely depart from the path of the grid. That regularity results both in greater efficiency, with traffic lights that change according to algorithms and one-way streets that alternate directions, and also in serious snarls: the traffic standstills known as gridlock. The grid, however, is also a diffusion system, presenting drivers and pedestrians with alternative routes when a street is backed up.

Not just vehicular traffic, but pedestrians, too, are obliged to fol-low the grid. The area designated for them, the sidewalk, connects the streets and buildings of the grid spatially and is legally associated with both: though owned by the city, the sidewalk is used and main-tained by property owners. For their safety when crossing streets, pedestrians on sidewalks must follow the rules governing vehicles—at least in theory (New Yorkers are famous for jaywalking).

Sidewalks are not only a transit zone to get from point A to point B; they provide a space for social activity, and corners especially are natural gathering places. Jane Jacobs, champion of streets as social space, preferred shorter blocks than the ones created by the 1811 plan: more intersections mean more corners, and more opportunities for human interaction. Furthermore, the long distances between the West Side avenues in particular can be daunting to pedestrians. The zoning law of 1961 incentivized the creation of mid-block passage-ways to shorten the block dimensions, but relatively few of them are located on long West Side blocks.

For pedestrians moving through neighborhoods, the grid’s regular numbering system—as opposed to named streets—makes it easy to navigate, and the distances between the blocks allow walkers to calculate travel time with simple rules of thumb: twenty short blocks to a mile, one block a minute. The grid is not just the physical fabric of the city; the grid also is the systems and people moving through it.

12. Moving on the Grid

< Detail of Street Games, Figure 219

195


Sidewalks

S idewa lks a re the i nv i s ib l e th i rd e l e me nt of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. The plan itself does not show them, and the commissioners’ remarks never mention them, but sidewalks are as much a part of the grid as the streets and blocks that they join. Every aspect of their three-dimen-sional development—including their use—is tied to the two-dimensional grid.

When the Manhattan commissioners wrote their remarks in 1811, laws governing the creation and maintenance of side-walks had been on the books for decades. This legislation was simple and had remained relatively unchanged since the eighteenth century. The laws and ordinances established by the Common Council in 1805, for example, stated that any street in the city measuring 22 feet across or more should have a foot path or walk on each side equal to one-fifth the width of the entire street. Additional ordinances protected these pedestrian walks from encroachments: canopies, awnings, stoops, or steps could project out only one-tenth the width of the sidewalk. Violators were subject to fines, including those who built bow-windows on their houses, planted trees in the walk, or hung obstructing signs from their shops. Furthermore, property owners were required to keep the walks fronting their lots in good repair—at their own expense—to the standard set by law.

Thus, when the commissioners drew up their plans for the grid, they may not have included specifications for side-walks because these were already covered by preexisting legislation. Yet as the extensive street-building operation got underway, the old laws were no longer adequate for the growing city. Laws introduced after 1811 preserved two basic principles from the previous legislation: first, that the width of the sidewalk should be correlated to the width of the street, and second, that construction and maintenance of the sidewalk should remain the responsibility of the adjacent property owner even though the city owns and regulates the walk itself. But in their complexity, the new laws reflected the increased scale of the street grid; they addressed both the physical form and the administrative jurisdiction of the sidewalk in far greater detail than the pre-1811 laws.

First to go was the one-fifth rule of thumb that governed the sidewalk width for streets 22 feet wide and up. In 1812, this single proportional rule was replaced by a law that listed the specific dimensions required of sidewalks along streets wider than 40 feet. Under this law, walks should be “ten feet in all streets forty feet wide; twelve feet in all streets fifty feet wide; fourteen feet in all streets sixty feet wide; sixteen

feet in all streets seventy feet wide; seventeen feet in all streets eighty feet wide; eighteen feet in all streets above eighty and not exceeding ninety feet wide; nineteen feet in all streets above ninety and not exceeding one hundred feet wide; and twenty feet, and no more, in all streets more than one hundred feet wide.” Although these widths approximate the one-fifth proportional rule of the previous legislation, the new law simplified the process by increasing the sidewalk width in one- or two-foot increments.

In their remarks on the 1811 grid, the commissioners pro-posed streets of only two widths: 60 feet for the east-west streets and 100 feet for the north-south avenues as well as for fifteen of the east-west streets. According to the ordi-nances, the sidewalks consequently should be 20 feet wide on the avenues and the wider cross-town streets, and 14 feet wide on the regular cross-town streets. Although unstated in the commissioners’ remarks, the design of the sidewalks was tied to the design of the grid. As alterations disturbed the original consistency and uniformity of the grid over time, the sidewalks reflected those changes. For example, when Central Park was created at the center of the island—by far the largest interruption in the 1811 grid—the park commis-sioners widened the sidewalks along its borders in order to create broad, shaded walks under the trees. Madison Avenue, built between Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue in 1836, is only 75 feet wide and therefore has a narrower sidewalk than the 100-foot-wide avenues of the 1811 grid.

In addition to the rules concerning sidewalk width, the laws regulating sidewalk construction and maintenance also grew increasingly specific after 1811. Legislation detailed the type of stone property owners should use to pave their walks as well as the proper joining method, and an 1817 ordinance forbade property owners from extending the walks in front of their lots beyond the walks of adjoining lots. By requiring all property owners to build or extend the sidewalks at their lots in unison and to the same standard of construction, the city ensured that the physical manifestation of the grid would reflect the uniformity of its conception.

Yet even though the ordinances required property owners to pay for the walks fronting their lots, to keep them clear of snow and trash, and to repair them when necessary, side-walks fell on the public side of the lines that demarcated the street blocks. The city controlled not only the physical development of this space but also the activities that could be performed there. Horses and carts were not to block the sidewalks, and public auctions could not be held on them.

Thus the property lines of the 1811 grid determined not only the spatial aspects of the Manhattan sidewalk, but also its social aspects.

Carolyn Yerkes

engineers had wanted to for years: she reas-serted the grid.

Initially enacted as a pilot program in 2009, cars coming down Broadway were redirected to Seventh Avenue. Five blocks of roadbed at Times Square and three at Herald Square were converted into pedestrian pla-zas to accommodate the hoards of office work-ers, tourists, and shoppers. While there had been hopes that traffic would actually move faster after removing Broadway from the system, analysis showed that in fact there was almost no change despite the reduced amount of roadway. Decreases in pedestrian, motor vehicle, and bicycle accidents, however, led Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to declare the changes permanent in 2010. JR

street Life

212. Parade of the street Cleaners

Byron Company, Street Cleaners, 1896. Gelatin silver print. Museum of the City of New York, Byron Collection, Gift of Percy Byron, 93.1.1.18233

As the development of the grid advanced throughout the nineteenth century, keeping its streets clear became an increasingly com-plex problem. In short, Manhattan was filthy, with gutters full of garbage, clogged sewer drains, and pavement coated with axle grease. The Police Department was responsible for cleaning the streets until 1881, when the Department of Street Cleaning was created to handle the task. The first commissioner of the department, James S. Coleman, contracted out the cleaning of the roads below 14th Street and used his own forces for the northern streets—that is, for most of the grid. During the first decade of its existence, the depart-ment was notorious for graft, patronage, and incompetence, until it was reorganized

by Street Cleaning Commissioner George E. Waring, Jr., appointed in 1895. A sanitation engineer, Waring had been responsible for the drainage of Central Park; he is one of the men pictured standing alongside Olmsted and Vaux in Figure 102. Waring brought a military discipline to the department and overhauled its operations, as he divided the city into sections and assigned each zone to a foreman at the head of a platoon. Waring also organized the annual Street Cleaners Parade, in order to “stimulate and encourage the men, and to increase the respect of citizens for these city employees.” In this photograph from the inaugural parade held in 1896, the street cleaners—called the “White Wings” for their bright white uniforms and headgear—march down Fifth Avenue; they were accompanied by their mechanical street sweepers, sprinklers, ash-carts, and basket wagons, all polished for the occasion. CY

213. Cleaning the sidewalk

Byron Company, Shoveling snow on a sidewalk, 1899. Gelatin silver print. Museum of the City of New York, Byron Collection, Gift of Percy Byron, 93.1.1.14294

Pedestrian safety can be a problem on the grid, not only in the streets but also on the sidewalks. Although the city is responsible for clearing the streets after a snowfall, since the early nineteenth century property owners must remove snow and ice from the sidewalks in front of their lots. An 1809 res-olution gave New Yorkers four hours after every snow, hail, or rainstorm to clean the adjacent walks or else incur a fine—a policy that exists more or less intact today. As the city grew, other laws were enacted to pro-tect its citizens from hazards. For example, an 1812 resolution required contractors dig-ging new streets to erect protective fences or railings alongside their trenches. Anyone who damaged a street or sidewalk had to pay for its repair—an indication of the


203Moving on the Grid


the 30-foot-wide sidewalks that made the avenue so hospitable to promenades in the late-nineteenth century were fair game to street wideners in the twentieth. Since its construction, the avenue had always been crowded with carriages heading to and from Central Park, and in 1908 the process of reducing the sidewalk to allow more room for street traffic began on the stretch of Fifth Avenue between 25th and 47th Streets. Seven-and-a-half feet were removed from the width of each sidewalk, increasing the street width from 40 to 55 feet. The reduction in the pedestrian space meant that previous encroachments on the walks also had to go, and on mansion-lined Fifth Avenue, these were significant. Expensive architectural accouterments like terraces, gardens, stone steps, and entryways that projected into the sidewalk had to be dismantled, much to the chagrin of the property owners, who also had to foot the bill for their removal. CY

216. The Benefits of short Blocks

Diagrams of walking patterns from Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Cities (New York: Random House, 1961.) ©1961, 1989 by Jane Jacobs. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.).

While traffic engineers viewed the grid’s many intersections as a problem to overcome, Jane Jacobs sought to create more of them. In her classic book of 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs advised that shorter blocks are better blocks. With shorter blocks come more intersections, and the corner, the pedestrian corollary of the intersection, creates a valuable point of human interaction. The corner, in her view, is where neighbors bump into each other or stop to chat, ultimately leading to social cohesion.

The shorter blocks diagrammed on the right indeed produce more corners per unit of square measure, but they also create more paths. These diagrams get to the heart of the way we move across our grid. In her New

York, citizens had a connection to a multitude of persons, businesses, and institutions. With shorter blocks, any one person can meander as efficiently as before while nurturing differ-ent relationships on each trip. In her mind, the hulking 800-foot blocks of Manhattan’s West Side deterred the street life and inter-personal city she was fighting to preserve. JR

217, 218. stoops

Sid Grossman, 133rd Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues, 1939. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, Federal Art Project. 43.131.9.14

Berenice Abbott, Harlem Street II, June 14, 1938. Gelatin silver print. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, Federal Art Project, 43.131.2.233

A lthough they are not par t icular to Manhattan, stoops are a particularly useful architectural feature on the grid. The 1811 plan did not include alleyways within the city blocks or spaces between the property

lots, and as a result it can be difficult—or impossible—to enter a building on the grid from any direction except the front. A stoop eliminates the need for a back door by mak-ing it possible to enter a partially sub-grade basement via a short f light of steps down from the sidewalk. Another short flight up allows the building’s first residential floor to be a half-story above the street, removed from noise and activity. Because of their con-venience, stoops are one of the most common methods for connecting streets and buildings on the grid and historically they have been a center of social life. Basements below stoops can be easily converted into retail storefronts or income properties, while the stoop itself provides a place for neighborhood residents to congregate. CY and CS

Figure 216.

Figure 217.

commissioner’s concern for the streets and sidewalks as well as for their users. CY

214 . Promenading

Byron Company, Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, 1898 . Gelatin silver print. Museum of the City of New York, Byron Collection, Gift of Percy Byron, 93.1.1.18013

When the grid began to fill out in the sec-ond half of the nineteenth century, its long axial streets provided the perfect setting for bourgeois Manhattanites to promenade. On January 15, 1887, the New York Times reported that “Fifth-avenue, the best cleaned street in the city, is the favorite promenade,” an optimal place for strolling in the early afternoon. In this photograph of the avenue from 1898, well-dressed pedestrians pass each other on the broad sidewalks and car-riages ferry the traffic alongside Madison Square Park. “These groups of pretty pedes-trians,” according to the Times, “are becom-ing quite an incident of social life.” As the

fashionable crowd began to build their town-houses farther north, Central Park became “the general Mecca to which all the prome-nades lead, whether the route be ‘the’ Avenue, or Madison-avenue or upper Sixth-avenue.” Such scenes are captured in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, published in 1905 and set in turn-of-the-century New York, where the heroine, Lily Bart, observes the social inter-actions of the wealthy as they play out along Fifth Avenue. Occasionally Lily’s tone encap-sulates how these scenes may have struck those without the means to enjoy a free day promenading, as when she describes the way a spring day mitigated “the ugliness of the long crowded thoroughfare, blurred the gaunt rooflines, threw a mauve veil over the discour-aging perspective of the side streets, and gave a touch of poetry to the delicate haze of green that marked the entrance to the Park.” CY

215. sidewalk Traffic

Berenice Abbott, Tempo of the City II, 1938. Gelatin silver print. Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, Federal Art Project, 43.131.2.248

Berenice Abbott’s photograph of the intersec-tion of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street shows

why 100-foot-wide streets can feel narrow on the grid. In the 1930s, three types of traffic—pedestrian, automobile, and street-car—competed for space, generating a level of congestion that has never abated, even as the modes of transit have changed. Although Fifth Avenue did not have a streetcar line,

Figure 214.

Figure 215.



but there are also exceptional cases where different integers apply to different sections of the street, including Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Furthermore Central Park West and Riverside Drive have a separate algor ithm that requires dividing the building number by ten instead of twenty before adding the integer. Thus the New York Historical Society at 170 Central Park West can be found at (170÷10)+ 60 =77th Street. Before smartphones made the whole

system virtually obsolete, algorithms for the different avenues were printed in telephone books, in city guidebooks and maps, and on wallet-size cards to help both residents and visitors alike locate addresses on the grid. CY

Figure 220. Figure 221.>

Figure 219.Figure 218.

219. street Games

Bruce Davidson, East 100th Street, 1966. Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson spent two years photo-graphing the residents of one block of East 100th Street in the mid-1960s. The pho-tographs, which document the poverty of an East Harlem slum, provide a grim view into a city that has often failed its inhab-itants. This image of children playing is a notable exception in that it records a moment of levity away from the cramped interiors of decrepit buildings. With a view of the Triborough Bridge in the distance, the children use East 100th Street as their gameboard while neighbors chat with each other on the sidewalks. Davidson’s photo-graph captures the way that the streets of the grid provide social spaces for their resi-dents, occasionally serving as racetrack or ball field when the need arises. CY

220. Fifth avenue Mile

Fifth Avenue Mile race, 2009. Courtesy of New York Road Runners

“Twenty short blocks equal a mile” is an indispensable rule of thumb for judging distances in Manhattan, a convenient side benefit of the grid. In the 1811 plan, the commissioners determined that cross-town streets should be 60 feet wide and that the blocks between them should measure about 200 feet on their eastern and western sides. By this metric, twenty short blocks add up to only 5,200 feet—just short of a mile—except that the commissioners also determined that fifteen of the cross-town streets should be 100 feet wide, which supplies the extra distance. Walking at a comfortable pace and factoring in some time spent waiting for traffic lights to change, a New Yorker can expect to cover a block a minute on foot, another useful rule for estimating travel time. The record for the Fifth Avenue Mile, an annual road race that uses the twenty blocks between East 80th

Street and East 60th Street as its course, is 3:47.52, set by Sydney Maree in 1981. Organized by the New York Road Runners, the event draws thousands of runners to the route along Central Park, where they mea-sure themselves against the grid. CY

221. address Calculator

“Manhattan Address Finder,” New York City 5 Borough Atlas, 3rd ed., Hagstrom Map Company, Inc., 1994. © Kappa Map Group LLC, (800) 829-6277. Used with permission

In Manhattan, the grid makes it easy to locate addresses on the cross-streets, because the numbering starts at Fifth Avenue and increases as one moves east or west toward the rivers. Building numbers increase by one hundred at every long block, so the Times Square Building at 229 West 43rd Street, for example, is on the third block west of Fifth Avenue. Locating addresses on the avenues can be much more complicated. When the grid was laid out in 1811, each avenue had

a different starting point depending on how far north the city had developed in that area of the island. As a result, the numbering systems for the avenues do not align with each other, so the Empire State Building at 350 Fifth Avenue is between 33rd and 34th Streets while the same address on Seventh Avenue is between 29th and 30th Streets.

Determining the cross-street for an address on an avenue requires an algorithm. For most avenues, it is possible to take the building number, divide by 20, and then add or subtract an integer specific to that avenue and come up with the cross-street. For Lexington Avenue, the integer is 22, so to find the cross-street of the Chrysler Building at 405 Lexington, one divides 405 by 20 to get 20.25, then adds 22 for a result of 42.25: 42nd Street. Park Avenue has an integer of 35, so the cross-street of the Seagram Building at 375 Park is (375÷ 20)+35=53.75, or 53rd Street. Most avenues have a single integer that applies to their entire length,



Edward Glaeser

Reflection

Manhattan’s grid imposes clarity on the island’s burbling

chaos and enables ordinary pedestrians to negotiate

New York’s complex ecosystem. While many city plans

are more beautiful in the abstract, none has done more

to facilitate the magnificent energy of the flowing human

city. The grid makes manageable the messy humanity of

millions.

The grid’s costs are obvious. The plan’s regularity

eliminates the surprises that pop up in older warrens of

alleyways like Rome or Beacon Hill. Manhattan lacks the

beautiful geometry of Barcelona’s more sophisticated

plan and the impressive vistas of Haussmann’s Paris.

But while the grid doesn’t celebrate the achievements of

generals or architects, it provides a simple geographic

framework that empowers the chaotic genius of the city.

You know where you are and how to get where you are

going. Even without MapQuest, you can calculate the

length of your trip.

The grid encourages walking, which is important since

21 percent of Manhattanites walk to work, as opposed

to 2.9 percent of Americans. The grid’s simplicity is even

more important for tourists, who have enough to be

confused about in Manhattan without also having to cope

with a convoluted street plan.

Cities easily splinter into separate neighborhoods, small

geographic areas that are places apart. Manhattan has

many social divisions, but physically, the island feels

remarkably connected—at least north of 14th Street.

You feel that connection, in part, because you stand so

often on a long avenue that runs almost the length of the

island. Tenth Avenue runs from 14th Street to 190th, with

only a single name change. As a teenager, I would walk

home from Wall Street to 69th, almost entirely on Second

Avenue.

It may not be every urban planner’s beau ideal, but as a

machine for urban living, the grid is pretty perfect.

222, 223. invisible Grid

69th Street plaque at the Eastbank Esplanade, 2011. Photograph by Carolyn Yerkes

69th Street and Freedom Place, 2001. Photograph by Carolyn Yerkes

The grid helps New Yorkers navigate in areas of Manhattan where its streets do not exist. Throughout the city, there are signs mark-ing a “ghost grid,” indicating the locations

where cross-streets would be, had parks, superblocks, or other alterations not inter-rupted them. These two photographs show signage for 69th Street in places where the street does not run. On the left, a plaque on the Eastbank Esplanade marks where the street is cut off by the FDR Drive, and on the right, a sign points to where 69th Street is erased by an Upper West Side superblock.

The prevalence of such signs—which also can be found above ground, on the High Line, and below ground, in subway tunnels—suggests the utility of the grid’s regular numbering system as a directional tool, even when inde-pendent of the grid itself. CY

Figure 223.Figure 222.

209


As an urban plan, the 1811 grid of Manhattan looks like an abstrac-tion, a single pattern covering a landmass from edge to edge without interruption or variation. Because that plan is now a reality, built with some exceptions but in such a way that the original proposal is still readily apparent, the grid has a dual nature: it is a conceptual idea with a concrete form, a theory that can be found in practice.

Manhattan differs from other gridded cities in the way that its plan reaches to the extents of the available terrain and usually ignores geographical features. It is self-contained, nearly uniform, and dense. In the two hundred years since it was first proposed, this extremity of execution has made the 1811 plan a point of reference for architects and planners. Despite the complexity and variation of the structures that fill it out, the grid itself can nearly always be seen or felt; the diagram of the original idea remains legible. This diagram-matic quality allows Manhattan to stand in for all gridded cities, everywhere. If Manhattan did not exist, urban designers would have had to invent it, because the grid provides a paradigm for them to reject, temper, or celebrate.

Even Manhattan’s most vocal critics have had to admit its useful-ness as a real-world demonstration of grid-planning brought to the limit. After his 1935 visit, Le Corbusier referred to Manhattan as “the fairy catastrophe which is the laboratory of the new times,” a statement that captures the surreal quality of a city whose built form adheres so closely to the first proposal for it on paper. Because Manhattan is a specific example that can stand in easily for a general idea, it makes the perfect punching bag for critics of grid-planning. When Le Corbusier sketched the plan of Manhattan to illustrate how, in his opinion, the density of blocks and the construction along the street walls deprives the city of open space, he needed only a few lines to capture both a real place and the total concept of its design. His own ideal city, an enlarged grid of superblocks with towers sur-rounded by parks, can be read as a counter-proposal to Manhattan.

The extremity of Manhattan’s plan also provides an opportunity to test interventional design strategies. Architects and planners have offered a range of possible approaches to mediating the grid’s consistency. The 1811 plan simply extended the city blocks right to the water’s edge, and critics of this feature have proposed riverfront development projects in response. Those who appreciate Manhattan’s axial streets often oppose their density, and advocate incorporat-ing more open space into the city. The Cornell University team’s submission to the 1967 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal—a show that investigated ways to redevelop areas of New York City without clearing entire

neighborhoods—explores methods for preserving the grid’s basic structure while reconfiguring the internal arrangement of buildings on the blocks. Projects like the Cornell team’s, which accept certain aspects of the grid while rejecting others, are representative of the ways designers have used Manhattan as a model to critique and refine grid-planning without discarding its archetype.

Manhattan’s grid has also been held up as model to emulate. In 1978 in Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas offered what is perhaps the best-known celebration of the 1811 plan—a manifesto that lauds the plan’s general principles as well as the buildings that it produced—but others have endorsed the grid through projects that capitalize on its consistency. Works like Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts or the graphic novel of Paul Auster’s City of Glass use the city plan as a visual frame, enlisting the grid as both a formal device and a setting for narrative. For architects and artists, Manhattan offers a useful con-straint for organizing ideas about urban design: graph paper instead of a blank canvas.

13. Urban Paradigm: The Grid in Contemporary Thought

< Detail of City of the Captive Globe Project, Figure 230

211


25.

Figure 227.

Figure 228.

224 , 225. Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier: First edition of Quand les Cathédrales Etaient Blanches (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1937). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C.1

Le Corbusier, “What Is America’s Problem,” published in American Architect, volume 148 (March 1936). Courtesy Cooper Union. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C.1

“I could never have imagined such a violent, such a decisive, such a simple and also such a diversified arrangement of the ground of the city,” wrote Le Corbusier in 1936, remember-ing the Manhattan grid from his visit to the city the year before. Invited by the Museum of Modern Art to give a lecture tour in the United States, the Swiss architect published his critique of the grid first in an article where he wondered “What Is America’s Problem?,” and then again in his book describing the entire American trip: Quand les cathédrales etaient blanches: Voyage au pays des timides

(When the Cathedrals Were White: Journey to the Land of the Timid). The titles of these publications indicate the vehemence of Le Corbusier’s reaction to New York, which he sketched out in a series of vignettes that capture his conception of the city plan and of what it should be. Although the architect admired much about the Manhattan grid, including its regularity and the spectacle of skyscrapers it produced, he considered its streets too densely spaced to support a reasonable standard of living. He proposed regrouping the streets into larger units and clearing the shorter buildings from around the skyscrapers—producing, in essence, an enlarged grid with towers surrounded by parks. He transposed the theory of urbanism that he had produced in his plan for an ideal city, La Ville radieuse of 1935, onto a real city that had developed along opposite lines. CY

226–8. Colin rowe

From The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967), designs from the Cornell University team led by Colin Rowe and Thomas Schumacher with Jerry A. Wells and Alfred H. Koetter. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

In 1967 the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition centered around the idea that urban renewal projects on a vast scale could address a city’s social prob-lems. Four teams of architects and plan-ners drawn from the faculties of Columbia, Cornell, and Princeton Universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were each prompted to respond to a par-ticular problem on a designated site. The question posed to the Cornell team asked: “How can we modify the existing grid plan to improve circulation, encourage the development of parks and new neighbor-hoods, and clarify the order implied by the

terrain itself? ” The team responded with a proposal to blend two opposing views of city planning into one hybrid approach, an approach that both preserves and critiques the 1811 grid.

On a swath of northern Manhattan that stretches from 96th Street to 155th Street but excludes Central Park, the pro-posal has a central zone that maintains the street grid and two adjacent side zones that demolish it. Discrete interventions in the central zone rehabilitate existing build-ings and public areas, whereas in the side zones, tower-in-the-park planning replaces the grid with newly opened park spaces, connecting Morningside Park, St. Nicholas Park, and Colonial Park into a continu-ous band of green. In Figure 227, the blue and white plan highlights the open spaces embedded in sixteen typical street blocks of the central zone. In Figure 228, the team proposes a strategy to reorganize such blocks by converting the private spaces,

Figure 224.

Figure 225.

Figure 226.

213Urban Paradigm


Vriesendorp. Koolhaas then developed the ideas that had informed this project into a book, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, published in 1978, where this painting appears as an illustra-tion. In Delirious New York, an exuberant take on urban history, Koolhaas delivers an ode to the 1811 grid, which he calls “the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization: the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activi-ties it frames, nonexistent.” Using iconic

structures like the Waldorf Hotel, the Downtown Athletic Club, and Rockefeller Center as case studies, Koolhaas explores the Manhattan skyscraper as what he calls “the reproduction of the World,” where every block in the grid is a self-contained universe of vertically-stacked services and programs. In Delirious New York, the City of the Captive Globe is Manhattan. CY

231. Bernard Tschumi

Bernard Tschumi, scene from “Episode 4: The Block,” of The Manhattan Transcripts Project, 1980–81. Ink and cut-and-pasted gelatin silver photographs on tracing paper. The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

In The Manhattan Transcripts, a series of four projects created by Bernard Tschumi between 1976 and 1981, the architect explores the relationship between objects, movements, and events in the city by combin-ing various techniques of architectural rep-resentation. Tschumi refers to the projects

as episodes, and the drawings evoke film stills in the way that they document aspects of urban life. Each episode tells a story set somewhere in Manhattan, with photographs that record the events, diagrams that tran-scribe the action, and drawings that rep-resent the architectural spaces where the stories take place. Organized around figural grids, the resulting collages investigate the conditions that the actual street grid cre-ates in Manhattan: the park at its center in episode one, the regularity of its streets in episode two, the height of its buildings in

Figure 231.

including backyards and gaps between lots, into pedestrian areas. This strategy com-bines small pockets of unbuilt square foot-age to produce more open space but does not disrupt the street wall of the grid. CY

229. superstudio

Superstudio, The Continuous Monument: New York Extrusion Project, New York, New York, Aerial perspective, 1969. Graphic, color pencil, and cut-and-pasted printed paper on board. The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

If the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 takes the street grid to its logical extreme, a regularized

plan that covers an island, then Superstudio’s Continuous Monument: New York Extrusion Project finds the grid’s illogical extreme, as it extrudes the city skyline into an object that covers the world. Founded in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Superstudio devoted itself almost entirely to theoretical projects that critiqued globaliza-tion as a homogenizing force in architecture. In the Continuous Monument of 1969—by which time Superstudio had grown to include Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, and Roberto Magris—a series of photocol-lages depicts a monolithic megastructure circling the planet, a beautiful and terrible vision of the future of urban sprawl. The New York Extrusion Project generates the form of this megastructure from the profile of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, turning the het-erogeneous architecture of the 1811 grid into a smooth glass prism—a skyline that reflects the sky. CY

230. Madelon Vriesendorp and

rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas, The City of the Captive Globe Project, New York, Axonometric, 1972. Gouache and graphite on paper. The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Image by Madelon Vriesendorp; courtesy of OMA

In this conceptual project based on the Manhattan grid, each city block is imagined as an island raised above the street on a podium of polished granite. Every podium supports a unique building, some of which are recognizable—such as the skyscrapers of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris, planted near the top center—while others are fantas-tical. The podiums exaggerate the way that the street grid concentrates architectural ambition into clearly defined limits, forcing each block to become a world unto itself.

The City of the Captive Globe was a proj-ect produced by Rem Koolhaas and Zoe Zenghelis in 1972 with paintings by Madelon

Figure 230.

Figure 229.

215Urban Paradigm


without the 1811 grid belong to a series of drawings that focus primarily on the south-ern tip of the island, where multiple older street systems intersect and overlap. These two plans in particular contrast the fragmen-tary quality of that historically layered area with the monolithic system that governs the rest of the city.

In New York, the adjacency of several grids creates a city without a single center, which is one aspect of the condition that Gandelsonas calls X-Urbanism. Gandelsonas coined the term X-Urbanism to describe a new type of city that he has observed developing since the 1970s: a city formed of low-density sprawl and without a clearly defined core. In his analytical drawings, Gandelsonas investi-gates the formal properties of these multi-center, non-hierarchical urban areas and articulates their patterns. Published in 1999,

these plans of New York City were drawn by students of Gandelsonas at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1983 and were redrawn by Michael Stanton in 1984, with the collaboration of Nancy Clayton and Allan Organsky. CY

233–6. Paul auster, Paul Karasik and

david Mazzucchelli

Artwork by David Mazzucchelli, from City of Glass: The Graphic Novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, New York, 2004, adapted from the novel City of Glass by Paul Auster. Courtesy of David Mazzucchelli

In Pau l Auster ’s C ity of Glass, the Manhattan grid—seemingly a paradigm of order with its numbered streets and regu-larized blocks—is the setting for a story of disorientation. First published in 1985 as part of the author’s New York Trilogy and

later adapted into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, City of Glass follows a writer named Quinn as he loses himself in the streets of New York. In the first panel shown here, a scene from early in the novel, readers learn that Quinn had started writing detective novels under a pseudonym after the deaths of his wife and son. Without family, friends, or money—without even his own name—all Quinn has left is his city, and he uses his walks on the grid to distance himself from his thoughts. When he is mistaken for a detective, Quinn begins to follow an old man named Stillman, who had been in prison for years for abus-ing his own son. Quinn tails Stillman as he walks around Manhattan, and in the second panel shown here we see him charting the man’s path on the ruled lines of his note-book. Studying these charts, Quinn believes

that these paths contain coded messages, as if Stillman’s walks have become thoughts of their own. By the last panel, a scene near the end of the novel, Quinn has lost track of his target, and he sets out onto the grid alone. In his introduction to the 2004 edition of City of Glass, Art Spiegelman describes how Karasik used the imagery of the Manhattan grid to frame a narrative about confused identity. “By insisting on a strict, regular grid of panels,” Spiegelman writes, “Karasik located the Ur-language of Comics: the grid as window, as prison door, as city block, as tic-tac-toe board; the grid as a metronome giving measure to the nar-rative’s shifts and fits.” CY

Figure 233. Figure 235. Figure 236.Figure 234.

episode three, and the density of its blocks in episode four.

The Manhattan Transcripts conclude with “The Block,” an episode that explores life within the five courtyards of a single city block. Those courtyards are visible at the top of this sheet, an excerpt from the episode, where they provide the setting for the events captured in the photographs at the bottom. At the center, movement diagrams are drawn in axonometric pro-jection as three-dimensional figures, like

architectural space itself. In the book of the Manhattan Transcripts that was published in 1981, Tschumi describes these plays on conventional modes of representation as an effort to transcribe “the complex relation-ship between spaces and their use; between the set and the script; between ‘type’ and ‘program’; between objects and events.” Here, the edge of the street grid appears like the sprocket holes on the side of a film strip, framing the action. CY

232. Mario Gandelsonas

Mario Gandelsonas, “Plan 7: The Plan Minus the Gridiron” and “Plan 8: The Gridiron,” from X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), pp. 88-89. Courtesy of the architect

These two drawings capture both the conti-nuity and the peculiarities of the 1811 plan by illustrating the grid as a single object removed from its urban context. In the bot-tom plan, the street system appears as a black and white, three-dimensional figure

floating free from the island of Manhattan. Elements that disrupt the grid, such as Broadway, Central Park, superblocks, and natural topographical features like the river’s edge, are shown separately in the top plan.

New York is one of several cities that Mario Gandelsonas explores in his book X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City, in which he uses the figure-ground tech-nique to represent the urban fabric at large scale rather than at the scale of individual buildings. The plans of Manhattan with and

Figure 232.

217Urban Paradigm

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