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Books > History > American history
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City on a Grid - How New York Became New York (Paperback)
Loot Price: R724
Discovery Miles 7 240
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City on a Grid - How New York Became New York (Paperback)
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You either love it or hate it, but nothing says New York like the
street grid of Manhattan. Created in 1811 by a three-man commission
featuring headstrong Founding Father Gouverneur Morris, the plan
called for a dozen parallel avenues crossing at right angles with
many dozens of parallel streets in an unbroken grid. Hills and
valleys, streams and ponds, forests and swamps were invisible to
the grid; so too were country villages, roads, farms, estates, and
generations of property lines. All would disappear as the
crosshatch fabric of the grid overspread the island: a heavy
greatcoat on the land, the dense undergarment of the future city.
No other grid in Western civilization was so large and uniform as
the one ordained in 1811. Not without reason. When the grid plan
was announced, New York was just under two hundred years old, an
overgrown town at the southern tip of Manhattan, a notorious jumble
of streets laid at the whim of landowners. To bring order beyond
the chaos--and good real estate to market--the street planning
commission came up with a monolithic grid for the rest of the
island. Mannahatta--the native "island of hills"--became a place of
rectangles, in thousands of blocks on the flattened landscape, and
many more thousands of right-angled buildings rising in vertical
mimicry. The Manhattan grid has been called "a disaster" of urban
planning and "the most courageous act of prediction in Western
civilization." However one feels about it, the most famous urban
design of a living city defines its daily life. This is its story
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