Where gridlock grew into greatness

New York is defined by its 200-year-old grid system, which is not sophisticated or stately but which has evolved into an urban theatre now celebrated by a landmark exhibition in the city, writes MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

IN THE OLD photograph, a lonely farmhouse sits on a rocky hill, shaded by tall trees. The scene looks like rural Maine. On the modern street, apartment buildings tower above trucks and cars passing a busy corner where an AMC Loews multiplex faces an overpriced hamburger joint and a Coach store.

They are both the same spot. Not so long ago, all things considered, the intersection of Broadway and 84th Street didn't exist; the area was farmland. The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, now at the Museum of the City of New York, unearths that 1879 picture of the Brennan farm among other historic gems. The show celebrates the anniversary of what remains not just a landmark in urban history but in many ways the defining feature of the city.

After all, before it could rise into the sky, Manhattan had to create the streets, avenues and blocks that support the skyscrapers. The grid was big government in action, a commercially minded boon to private development and, almost despite itself, a creative template. With 21st-century problems – environmental, technological, economic and social – now demanding aggressive and socially responsible leadership, the exhibition, which runs until April 15th, is a kind of object lesson.

In 1811 Simeon De Witt, Gouverneur Morris and John Rutherfurd were entrusted with planning the city. New York huddled mostly south of Canal Street, but it was booming and, thanks to the growing port, its population had tripled to 96,373 since 1790. Civic boosters predicted that 400,000 people would live in the city by 1860. They turned out to be half-right. New York topped 800,000 before the American civil war.

The planners proposed a grid for this future city, stretching northwards from, roughly, Houston Street to 155th Street in the faraway heights of Harlem. This was in many respects a heartless plan. It involved virtually no parks or plazas. The presumption was that people would gravitate east and west along the numbered streets to the rivers when they wanted open space and fresh air, and not spend lots of time moving north or south. That partly explains why there were only a dozen avenues.

In the abstract, the idea was nothing revolutionary; grid plans went back to ancient Greece and Rome. But installing one in Manhattan was deeply subversive because, while still undeveloped, the island was already parcelled into irregularly shaped, privately owned properties.

This meant the appropriation of land, and reconstruction. First, Manhattan had to be surveyed, a task that took years. Property lines had to be redrawn and government mobilised for decades on end to enforce, open, grade and pave streets. Some 60 years passed before the grid arrived at 155th Street. Streets were still “rough and ragged” tracks for a long time, as one diarist observed in 1867, describing a recently opened stretch around 40th Street and Madison Avenue as a mess of “mud holes, goats, pigs and geese”. Even so, the grid gave the island a kind of monumentality and order.

Was it monotonous? Yes. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was among those who thought so. Other city plans are certainly more sophisticated (Paris) or elegant (Barcelona) or stately (Savannah, Georgia). But New York’s grid had its virtues. For one thing, it proved flexible enough to adapt when the city’s orientation did shift north-south, flexible enough to accommodate Olmsted’s Central Park, the genius of which lies in the contrast between its own irregularity and the regularity of the grid.

FOR ANOTHER THING, the grid turned out to be, far beyond what anyone could have envisioned in 1811, a windfall for those same landowners who first opposed it but whose newly rejigged lots on subdivided blocks came to be worth fortunes. New York property values boomed thanks to the grid, which effectively created the real-estate market. In 1965 John Reps, an urban historian at Cornell University, wrote, in The Making of Urban America, that the city commissioners "were motivated mainly by narrow considerations of economic gain". Reps thought they put money before aesthetics. They did, but that view now seems a little uncharitable. Money and aesthetics aren't antithetical, and the grid has proved itself oddly beautiful. I'm referring not just to the sociability it promotes, which the author and activist Jane Jacobs identified, or to the density it allows, which the Dutch architect and author Rem Koolhaas celebrates, or even to the ecological efficiency it sustains, which now makes New York, on a per-capita basis, a very green place. I'm also referring to a kind of awareness it encourages.

It is true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and footpaths that creates urban theatre on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same, because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street.

Painters from Poussin to Seurat, Picasso to Mondrian and Pollock to Chuck Close have exploited the special power of grids to create order yet also highlight small differences. Manhattan’s grid is not perfectly regular. Some blocks are longer than others. Some avenues are wider. Broadway cuts diagonally across six north-south streets, and those cuts have made room for public spaces (Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle and Verdi Square).

We feel all these shifts in the grid, alert to changes thanks to the expectation of sameness. The grid also makes a complex place instantly navigable. This isn’t a trivial benefit. Cities such as Berlin and London, historic agglomerations of villages, include vast nowhere stretches, and they sprawl in ways that discourage easy comprehension and walking. An epicentre of diversity, Manhattan, by contrast, invites long walks, because walkers can judge distances easily and always know where they are. The grid binds the island just as New Yorkers are bound by a shared identity. That is, the grid gives physical form to a certain democratic, melting-pot idea – not a new concept, and probably not exactly what the planners had in mind, but worth restating.

In the same way that tourists who come to Manhattan can easily grasp the layout and, as such, feel they immediately possess the city, outsiders who move here become New Yorkers simply by saying so. By contrast, an American can live for half a century in Rome or Hamburg or Copenhagen or Tokyo but never become Italian or German or Danish or Japanese. Anybody can become a New Yorker. The city, like its grid, exists to be adopted and made one’s own.

Hilary Ballon, a professor of urban studies and architecture at New York University, who organised the exhibition, adds that it even affects our daily behaviour. “We cross at corners with the grid” is her example. That’s not quite the New York I know, but it’s true that when we jaywalk or take shortcuts across plazas or stroll down Broadway, we are aware of violating the grid. The grid is the ego to our id.

And, for the same reason, we’re conscious of the street wall, the regular line of building facades, so that when one building is set back and breaks that line, our equilibrium is disturbed. Like the neighbourhoods it circumscribes, the grid has its integrity.

“It would have been easier not to destabilise the landownership on the island,” Ballon concludes in her introduction to the show’s catalogue. “The commitment to prepare New York for the future sets an example for our times: do we have the capacity to address climate change, build 21st-century infrastructure and promote sustainable growth?” That’s the question. Put another way, the grid was a leap for government and private enterprise united by faith in urban development. It was also proof of how adaptable citizens, and cities, can be. Generations of humane and progressive New Yorkers lifted it from the drawing table to greatness. An equitable and just city today depends on a vigilant populace keeping tabs on our planners and politicians.

More and more people want to live in cities now. New York remains a model. Can it live up to the grid?

– New York Times

Belinda McKeon on 'Manhattanhenge'

Apparently the grid system makes it impossible to get lost in a city. You find your avenue, you find your cross-street, and you find the doorman you need to nod to, or the staircase you need to climb, or the elevator button you need to push. But for a good year after moving to New York, I made quite a decent fist of getting lost. I’d come out of a subway station and find myself on the corner of a street and an avenue, with a face on me that probably suggested I’d been asked to find the square root of an imaginary number rather than a perfectly obvious address on Broadway and 32nd Street.

Then, somewhere along the line, the system clicked for me, and now I’m very close to being that person who comes back to Dublin and texts someone to say I’ll meet them on Dawson between Molesworth and Nassau.

In Dublin, you wander. You lope about. You slip down one street and take a shortcut across another. In Manhattan, all those right angles do something to you. You don’t wander so much as dart. You walk the city as though you are slicing it, deepening those neat incisions with every step. At a crosswalk (even the word seems born of a grid, much more so than the meandering term “pedestrian crossing”), you glance to either side and are met with the sight that reminds you, more than any other, that this is New York: an avenue stretching long and straight to a thin horizon, yellow-flecked traffic swooping and streaming on its way. Then the lights change, and at so many intersections on so many blocks, another stream is released: crosswalk, traffic, crosswalk, on and on.

From a vantage point 50 or 60 blocks up, looking down, you think not of a gridiron but of a magnetic field. And the eyes are drawn to it. From that place, high over the city, the eyes can barely be torn away.

There are places where the grid breaks down. There are those tangles of the West Village and the financial district where the streets meet one another not at precise angles but at seeming cross-purposes, all scattered skew-ways on the map like the elbows of the city jostling and flailing. Once you’re used to the straight-up system of streets and avenues, you’ll stumble around these parts of Manhattan feeling sure you must have spent the whole day in Chumley’s speakeasy – and then you’ll remember that Chumley’s literally collapsed five years ago. Those are the levels of confusion we’re talking about for those of us who tend, too easily, to wire ourselves to the grid.

In midsummer the grid roasts us, with its sheer walls of heat and humidity, its concrete arteries shimmering in the unbearable sun. But for a couple of evenings at that time of year, the grid rewards us, too, with a sight that, to Irish eyes, brings thoughts of Newgrange, of Loughcrew, of Carrowkeel: the sun aligning precisely with the east-west grid as it sets over the Hudson River. They call it Manhattanhenge – what a word. But no word could do justice to its quiet gorgeousness (pictured left).

Thinking of it now, in the depths of winter, gives reason enough to look forward to another year in the grid.