The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 was the original design for the streets of Manhattan above Houston Street and below 155th Street, which put in place the rectangular grid plan of streets and lots that has defined Manhattan on its march uptown until the current day. It has been called "the single most important document in New York City's development,"Augustyn & Cohen, pp.100–06 and the plan has been described as encompassing the "republican predilection for control and balance ... [and] distrust of nature". It was described by the Commission that created it as combining "beauty, order and convenience."
The plan originated when the Common Council of New York City, seeking to provide for the orderly development and sale of the land of Manhattan between 14th Street and Washington Heights, but unable to do so itself for reasons of local politics and objections from property owners, asked the New York State Legislature to step in. The legislature appointed a commission with sweeping powers in 1807, and their plan was presented in 1811.
The Commissioners were Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father of the United States; the lawyer John Rutherfurd, a former United States senator; and the state Surveyor General, Simeon De Witt. Their chief surveyor was John Randel Jr., who was 20 years old when he began the job.
The Commissioners' Plan is arguably the most famous use of the grid plan or "gridiron" and is considered by many historians to have been far-reaching and visionary. Since its earliest days, the plan has been criticized for its monotony and rigidity, in comparison with irregular street patterns of older cities, but in recent years has been viewed more favorably by urban planners.
There were a few interruptions in the grid for public spaces, such as the Grand Parade between 23rd Street and 33rd Street, which was the precursor to Madison Square Park, as well as four squares named Bloomingdale, Hamilton, Manhattan, and Harlem, a wholesale market complex, and a reservoir."Map of the city of New York and island of Manhattan as laid out by the Commissioners appointed by the Legislature, April 3, 1807" New York Public Library Digital Collections (zoomable map) Central Park, the massive urban greenspace in Manhattan running from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue and from 59th Street to 110th Street, was not a part of the plan, as it was not envisioned until the 1850s. The numbering was also extended through Manhattan and the Bronx.
History of the gridiron
The gridiron layout of a town or city is not new; it is "the most pervasive city design on earth" and can be found in "Italy and Greece, in Mexico, Central America, Mesopotamia, China [and] Japan."Holloway, p.151 It existed in the Old and New Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt, in the Indus Valley cities of HarappaLees, Andrew (2015) City: A World History. New York: Oxford. p.11. and Mohenjo-daroKoeppel (2015), pp.1–2 – where many historians claim it was invented – from where it may have spread to Ancient Greece.Higgins, p.55 The Greek city of Miletus was rebuilt after destruction by the Persians on a grid plan, with Hippodamusoften called "the father of European urban planning"Glaeser, Edward (2011) Triumph of the City: How Our Best Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier New York: Penguin. p.19. as the local originator of the rectilinear grid system for the city centered on the agora, a concept he probably did not invent, but had heard about from elsewhere.Koeppel (2015), p.2Rose (2016), pp.70-71 Hippodamus went on to spread the grid to Piraeus, Rhodes, and other cities in Greece.Higgins, pp.50–67
The grid plan, or "Hippodamian plan",Koeppel (2015), p.3 was also utilized by the Ancient Romans for their fortified military encampments, or castra, many of which evolved into towns and cities; Pompeii is the best-preserved example of Roman urban planning using the gridiron system. In France, England, and Wales, castra evolved into bastides, agricultural communities under a centralized monarchy. This example was followed on the European continent in cities such as New Brandenburg in Germany, which the Teutonic Knights founded in 1248, and in the many towns planned and built in the 14th century in the Florentine Republic. The gridiron idea spread with the Renaissance, although in many cities, for instance London following the Great Fire of 1666, it failed to take root. However the rapid expansion of towns and cities during the early industrial revolution developed using a grid street plan such as Whitehaven in Cumbria. In British Empire cities, it necessitated the adoption of new neoclassical urban plans in particular the Scottish Enlightenment 'New Towns' of Edinburgh of 1767 and Glasgow of 1781 were particularly influential in the English-speaking countries. In some European cities, such as Amsterdam and Paris, destruction of parts of the city by fire, warfare and other calamities offered an opportunity for the grid system to be used to replace more evolutionary street layouts, especially in outlying areas, while the central city, often sheltered behind medieval walls, remained organic and undesigned.Koeppel (2015), pp.1–16Somewhat the opposite situation pertains in modern American cities, where the city itself is, more often than not, laid out in a grid, while the sprawling suburbs which surround it are dominated by curving streets, with side streets, many ending in cul-de-sacs, which offer poor connectivity. In the city, there are multiple routes between two points for either the pedestrian or the automobile driver, while the suburbs force the traveler to choose between a small number of possible routes, and frequently will offer only one path between two points. The curving, poorly connected streets inhibit walking and make it almost inevitable than every journey will be taken by car. The gridded city, then, is highly adaptable, while the ungridded suburb is not. See Rose (2016), pp.124-125
In the United States the gridiron now predominates. In areas that were under Spanish control, the 1753 Laws of the Indies specified the use of the gridiron in newly built communities, and the results can be seen in St. Augustine, Florida; Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico; and in San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in California.Higgins, p.76Rose (2016), p.89In the rest of the Americas, the grid system can be seen in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, among other cities. Koeppel (2015), pp.1–16. The French also built the nucleus of New Orleans, Louisiana on a grid, in part influenced by the Spanish Law of the Indies, which provided numerous practical models in the New World to copy from.Powell, Lawrence N. (2012) The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp.62-63. Although some English colonial cities, such as Boston, had streets that adhered more to natural topography and happenstance, others, such as Savannah, Georgia, Baltimore, and Philadelphia had been built to the gridiron concept from the beginningEldredge & Horenstein (2014), p.110A street map of Savannah in 1818 can be found in Ballon, p.50in Philadelphia's case, William Penn specified the city's orthogonal pattern when he founded it in 1682, although its blocks turned out to be too large, encouraging the creation of intermediate streets, while James Oglethorpe's Savannah, with its significantly smaller blocks, was not conducive to large-scale development, restricting the city's economic influence.Higgins pp.67–68 New Amsterdam, however, had not been laid out in a grid pattern by the Dutch. The streets of lower Manhattan were more organic, and incorporated Native American trails, cow paths, and streets that followed the topography and hydrology of the swampy land.
By the time of the passage of the federal Land Ordinance of 1785, the grid plan was firmly established in the US. The Ordinance required newly created states west of the original thirteen, to have rectilinear boundaries, rather than boundaries shaped by natural features, and within the new areas, beginning in the Northwest Territory, everything was to be divided into rectangles: townships were sixmiles by sixmiles , sections were onemile by onemile , and individual lots were .An example of the grid laid down according to the 1785 law can be found in Ballon, p.52 Cities such as Anchorage, Alaska; Erie, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; and Sacramento, California, all show the American preference for the grid. The effects of the Ordinance of 1785 have been called "The largest single act of national planning in [American] history."Elazar, Daniel (1962) The American Partnership: Intergovernmental Co-operation in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Quoted by Rose (2016), pp.89-90
There was significant variation in the size of the grids used. Carson City, Nevada, may have the smallest at square and streets, while Salt Lake City, Utah, is much larger at square blocks surrounded by streets. The most popular appears to be the square block with streets that are wide. This size grid can be found in Anchorage; Bismarck, North Dakota; Missoula, Montana; Mobile, Alabama; Phoenix, Arizona; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
History of New York City
The streets of lower Manhattan had, for the most part, developed organically as the colony of New Amsterdamwhich became New York when the British took it over from the Dutch without firing a shot in 1664grew. The roads were a mixture of country lanes, short streets and Native American and animal trails, all shaped by haphazard history,Grava, Sigurd "streets and highways" in , pp.1252–54 happenstance and property ownership without any overarching order, until around 1800 when the Common Council of New York began to assert authority over the streetscape, promulgating regulations to keep them clear and to require new streets be approved in advance. They also began to lay assessments on property owners to pay for the cost of keeping the streets in repair. Beginning in 1803, the Council started to condemn streets which served no public purpose, and, importantly, took responsibility for building streets, which heretofore had been done by individual property owners.Ballon, p.17
Private developments The first efforts at putting a grid onto Manhattan in some form came from private developers. In the early 1750s, Trinity Church laid out a small neighborhood around the new King's Collegewhich would later become Columbia Universityin rectangular blocks. However, because the plan required landfill in the Hudson River, which would not happen until much later, the streets were never laid down. In 1762, the church had streets surveyed and laid down in a rectilinear grid in the "Church Farm"which ran from what is now Cortlandt Street to Christopher Streetand offered the plots to artisans and laborers at affordable rents.Burrows & Wallace (1999), p.187
The second instance came when the powerful De Lancey family decided to break up part of their vast estate in the 1760s, and laid out a grid of streets centered on "De Lancey Square". As royalists, their holdings were confiscated after the American Revolution, but the streets remainedalthough a new street, Grand Street, was laid through the central square. The north–south streets of the De Lancey grid become the core north–south streets of the Lower East Side: Chrystie, Forsyth, Eldridge, Allen, Orchard and Ludlow Streets, and the grid became the pattern for additional streets laid out in the area.