NEW YORK: Henry James condemned it a century ago as a ”primal topographic curse”. Rem Koolhaas, the architect and urbanist, countered that its two-dimensional form created ”undreamed-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy”. More recently, two historians described its map, regardless of its flaws, as ”the single most important document in New York city’s development”.
Two hundred years ago this week the city’s street commissioners certified the no-frills street matrix that heralded New York’s transformation into the city of angles, the rigid 90-degree grid that spurred unprecedented development, gave birth to traffic gridlock and defiant jaywalking, and spawned a new breed of entrepreneurs who would exponentially raise the value of Manhattan’s real estate.
Today debate endures about the grid, which mapped out 11 avenues and 155 crosstown streets along which modern Manhattan would rise.
The grid was the great leveller. By shifting millions of cubic metres of earth and rock it carved out modest but equal flat lots available for purchase. And if it fostered what Alexis de Tocqueville viewed as relentless monotony, its co-ordinates also enabled drivers and pedestrians to figure out where they stood, physically and metaphorically.
The grid certified by the city’s street commissioners on March 22, 1811, spurred development by establishing 11 kilometres of regular, predictable street access. It also laid the groundwork for nearly 800 hectares of landfill that would be added to the island over the next two centuries. The grid, which incorporated some existing roads, would also prove surprisingly resilient. It accommodated motor vehicles (after footpaths and porches were pruned). It allowed planners to superimpose Central Park in the 19th century and superblocks such as those of Stuyvesant Town and Lincoln Centre in the 20th. In the 21st the grid was extended west to include apartment houses on Riverside Boulevard.
What made the grid plan so farsighted was that in 1811 a vast majority of the city’s population lived below what became Houston Street, tellingly named North Street then.
When City Hall was finished that year its rear facade was of cheaper brownstone, in part, legend had it, because of the idea that since most New Yorkers lived south of the building they would see it only from the front.
Joel Towers, executive dean of Parsons the New School for Design, suggests that the grid presents an opportunity, now that climate change and rising sea levels elevate topography to the urban agenda.
”What will the city look like over the next 200 years? Maybe we can start to think of all those backyards and roofs as sponges, as a permeable landscape.
”Over the course of 200 years our infrastructure will be built piece by piece, block by block, community by community. That’s very different from 1811, when you could just bulldoze the land.”
Source: SMH, http://www.smh.com.au/world/the-genius-of-the-great-leveller-that-grew-into-new-york-20110325-1c9ty.html
Image Source: Greg Beharrell, http://www.x929.ca/shows/beharrell/?p=12274
