I have spent many happy days wandering the streets of Manhattan. Now I was back again for a few days. Staying in midtown. 51st between 2nd and 3rd Ave...a central location. Always an astonishing and stimulating place...lots of energy, lots of color, lots of sensory stimulation (good kinds, bad kinds).
But I had never realized how much my experience was shaped by an 1811 vision of the city by a commission set up by Gov. Clinton (he, also, who began work on the Erie Canal). When the country was just two decades old and the city had a population of just 100,000. But more were pouring in. So he set up a commission with powers of "eminent domain" to design a city that would stretch north of what would be 14th street to Washington Heights. And it would be "rational"...streets east to west, avenues north to south, streets 60 feet wide, avenues 100 feet wide. Two thousand blocks in all. To provide workspace and housing for a projected population of 1,000,000.
So land was bought, hills were leveled, streets pushed underground, and the blocks marched almost inevitably north. The rational plan, of course, eventually ran into opposition...it is, after all, New York...and by 1853 a plan was developed for Central Park and, along the way, other small parks and squares were created, mainly at the behest of speculators. Still the basic plan remained. It is one of the signature characteristics of the city...I think unique to major world cities which have often been left to grow "organically" as spurts of population increase occur.
The Museum of the City of New York (103rd and 5th) had an insightful exhibit devoted to this Great Grid. And funny that as much as I had used the grid all my life as this basic urban landscape, I took it to be something "natural"...like some folks think of Central Park as "natural." But I had never linked it to someone's "vision" for a city...certainly not to a commission that existed 200 years ago.
And funny how unconscious we can be of the shapes that shape our lives and how a vision from so long ago can order our daily comings and goings, our sense of place, and that very place itself.
