We always hear about these
“Commissioners” who were responsible for commissioning a street plat design for
New York City (Manhattan). But what
about the man who actually carried out all the work involved in effectuating
the grid plan? What about John Randel,
Jr.?
Hot off the presses: just
published, a biography of John Randel, Jr., his life and times. Little known anymore, John Randel is the man
responsible for the regularized grid pattern of streets and property lots that
marches over hill and dale (or what’s left of the natural topography after the
street design was put in place) in Manhattan.
The Measure of
Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr.,
Cartographer, Surveyor,, and Inventor by Marguerite Holloway, 2013, http://www.amazon.com/The-Measure-Manhattan-Tumultuous-Cartographer/dp/0393071251
Here is a story from Columbia
University’s New York Stories webpage, about John Randel and his biographer,
along with a nice little video interviewing the author and showcasing some
wonderful historic maps of Manhattan. See
the video at http://news.columbia.edu/grid
New York Squared:
Marguerite Holloway on the Man Who Mapped Manhattan
“Just a few years after Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition
to the great Northwest, another intrepid American set out on a journey through
challenging terrain at the government’s behest. In 1808, John Randel Jr., a
young surveyor, was charged with mapping Manhattan Island and laying out the
street grid that, for 200 years, has shaped and spurred the growth of New York
City.
In 2004, Marguerite Holloway, an assistant
professor at the School of Journalism, found
herself writing about the Mannahatta Project—an effort by environmental
scientists to “recreate” Manhattan in its natural state. The scientists relied
in part on Randel’s data. Fascinated by tales of the Albany-born surveyor
(1787-1865), she says, “I tried to find out as much as I could about him—at the
time, there was very little. It became an obsession.”
Holloway’s obsession has turned into a biography of Randel
that has just been published by W.W. Norton. Researching the book, Holloway, an
experienced science journalist, found herself scouring archives throughout the
northeastern United States. “I’m used to asking people lots of questions,” she
says. “But this time, many of my sources were long dead.”
Her book, she says, tries to paint a complete picture of
Randel, whom she describes as a visionary. He “wrestled the wildness of the
island as he imposed his vision upon it: Gone, in his mind’s eye, were the
hills and ponds, the towering chestnut trees, the unruly outcroppings,” she
wrote in a New York Times piece. “Randel was mesmerized by the image
of a magnificent, neatly ordered metropolis.”
Randel was appointed to the task by New York City’s three
street commissioners—one of whom was Gouverneur Morris, the 1768 graduate of
King’s College who wrote parts of the U.S. Constitution. New York’s mayor for
much of that time was DeWitt Clinton (CC 1786) who later as New York’s governor
went on to champion a different feat of civil engineering, the Erie Canal.
Randel, whom Morris described as “more ambitious of
accuracy than profit,” spent three years surveying the island for the famous
Commissioner’s Plan of 1811. Then he spent the next 10 years physically
imposing the grid from First Street to 155th Street using more than 1,500
3-foot-tall marble monuments sunk into the ground and, where there was no way
to do that, bolts set in rock.
Randel and his men were pelted with vegetables, attacked by
dogs and arrested for trespassing—the targets of landowners alarmed by the
arrival of right angles in rural areas. Not only were the property lines going
to have to be redrawn, but in many cases the imagined thoroughfares went right
through barns and houses, Holloway explains.
"We can't say that he came up with the grid plan but
he was the person who brought the grid to life...he scratched it into the
landscape," she says. "He did it with such precision that surveyors
today can follow Rand l's maps--he got
it right."
A longtime contributor to Scientific American,
Holloway began teaching at the journalism school as an adjunct in 1997 and took
a tenure-track position in 2006; she won a presidential teaching award in 2009.
Holloway teaches science and environmental reporting in the M.S. program and in
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Program in Health and Science Journalism,
part of the M.A. program for experienced journalists.
Living on the Upper West Side, Holloway says, she has long
appreciated the Manhattan street grid—“I liked it even before I’d heard of
Randel.” She also likes the interruptions to the grid, places like the Columbia
campus and Morningside Park, which “give you a different experience within the
city”—no matter if the park is one of the “unruly outcroppings” Randel worked
so hard to tame.” — Story by Fred A.
Bernstein — Video by Columbia News Video Team
Thanks, Susan McMahon, for sending the link to the
story.
Please also refer back to my post
of March 21, 2011, commemorating the 200th Anniversary of the 1811
Commissioners’ Plan at http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/03/200th-anniversary-of-commissioners-grid.html
And now, for the first time, the
Randel Farm Maps can be explored digitally, courtesy of the Museum of the City
of New York (where there was an exhibit about New York’s grid pattern planning
last year to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the 1811
Commissioners’ Plan) at http://www.mcny.org/sidebars/randel-farm-maps-online.html
An excellent book on the 1811 grid
was written in conjunction with this exhibit, The Greatest Grid: Manhattan’s Master Plan, 1811-2011, edited by Hilary
Ballon. Blurb from Museum of the City of New York website: “Laying out Manhattan's street
grid and providing a rationale for the growth of New York was the city's first
great civic enterprise, not to mention a brazenly ambitious project and major
milestone in the history of city planning. The grid created the physical conditions for
business and society to flourish and embodied the drive and discipline for
which the city would come to be known.”
The famous 1962
Hermann Bollmann axonometric (parallel perspective) map clearly displays
Manhattan’s famous gridded street pattern, (see my post on Bird’s Eye Views of
NYC for more on the Bollmann map http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/12/map-of-week-12-19-2011birds-eye-view-of.html)
and below is a photograph emphasizing the unrelenting grid of mid-town
Manhattan.
Not everyone is a fan of the grid,
some calling it robotic, uninteresting, lacking in imagination, and mind-numbingly
uniform, the enemy of spontaneity. Others
say the plan maximizes land use, was “visionary,” and tout its “modernity” and its
transformative characteristics – the grid becomes the backdrop for whatever we
want to project onto it.
Rem Koolhaus,
in his seminal 1978 book, “Delirious New
York: A Retrospective Manifesto for Manhattan,” focuses on the grid as the
enabler of Manhattan’s “culture of congestion,” calling New York a “metropolis
of rigid chaos.” He describes the grid
as an “artificial
domain planned for nonexistent clients in anticipation,” a negative symbol of
the short-sightedness of commercial interests with no regard for interaction
between fragments or spontaneity.
On the other hand, the grid is
celebrated on the cover of his book as one of the defining elements of NY, with
the iconic Empire State and Chrysler Buildings lying down in a bedroom where
the area rug is a piece of the grid, and the bedside table lamp is the Statue
of Liberty’s torch.
Tourists to the city tend to like the
grid, because of the ease it creates in getting around the city, and the
unlikelihood of getting too lost with the regular pattern and numbering
system. Of course, getting lost sometimes
is half the fun of being a tourist, and romantics prefer cities like London or
Paris which have little of the regularity to their street patterns, reflecting
development over a long period of time, rather than a city platted basically in
one fell swoop. Naturally the real
winners in Manhattan’s grid plan were the real estate developers who wanted a consistent
and replicable way to develop and sell property. The standard lot size of 25 x 100 (perfect
for the attached townhouse format) made property development particularly
lucrative. The grid allowed for a predictable
scheme for street access, ease of traffic flow, and infrastructure
installation, and thus was a developer’s dream.
Prior to the 1811 Commissioners’
Plan, New York’s street pattern developed in a series of growth spurts that
created a hodge-podge design. There was
the mediaeval tip of lower Manhattan, (still largely extant) with its organic
maze of streets, and similar to what you would find in most European cities of
the 16th century. Then there
were several areas built independently by large-scale land owners, such as
DeLancey and Rutgers, both holders of large farm estates who subdivided their
lands for commercial sale, and laid out streets in a grid pattern of their own
devising. These independently-developed street
grids tended to collide with other adjacent gridded areas. In this 1847 map of Manhattan, we can see the various colliding grids built prior to the 1811 Plan.
For better or worse, New York City
would not be NYC without the grid, and the history of NYC’s physical development
is a fascinating one.
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