The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811–2011 (review)

The Greatest Grid marks the two hundredth anniversary of the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan, the document that established Manhattan’s grid system of streets and its basic lot size of 20–25 by 90–100 feet. Curator Hilary Ballon organized the densely packed exhibition, which displays paintings, prints, photographs, written documents, some very cool objects (surveyor’s tools, for example), and multiple exquisite period maps to tell the story of the plan’s precedents, formulation, implementation, revisions, and the twentieth-century response. The completed plan was the result of many voices: the three commissioners who drafted it, the surveyors who laid it out, the assessors who decided on compensation for people who lost property, the street department that dug, graded, and paved the streets, real estate developers, reformers who altered the plan and, most amazingly, successive generations of city officials who largely adhered to it from 1811 until it was completed in the late nineteenth century.

The exhibition details its story in fifteen brief sections. “Before the Grid” examines the natural topography of Manhattan, which will be transformed into a more-or-less even playing field for development. A series of beautiful watercolors, the Randel Farm maps, show the topography, existing farms, buildings, and roads, with the grid superimposed. The maps, which cover all of Manhattan, are the discovery of the exhibition, found in the Borough President’s office as a result of research for this event. These maps take your breath away as they lay out the chutzpah or ambition of the plan of what had to be leveled, closed, or moved to make way for the grid. It was, as the exhibition text points out, an early and enormous use of eminent domain. “Precedents and Context” touches on other grid plans, such as that of Philadelphia, and earlier, smaller-scale grids used to lay out tracts of land in Manhattan.

The centerpiece of the show, “The Commissioner’s Plan,” is probably the most traditional section, with large portraits of the three commissioners (these are the only identified faces to appear in the exhibition) and the Commission’s secretary, surveyor, and chief engineer John Randel Jr.’s original plan—a stunning nine-foot-long ink-and-pencil drawing.

“Surveying the City” and “Opening the Streets” are two of the most fascinating sections and tell the part of the story that is least known to the general public. “Surveying the City” includes surveyors’ tools, a photo of a surveying instrument permanently embedded in a Central Park boulder, and Randel’s field notes, including a plan of the Bradhurst House smack in the middle of the proposed street bed (it had to be moved). The section details the scope and sensitivity of the undertaking. An oath sworn by a surveying crew demonstrates how many people were needed to perform this activity, and a label documents the resistance and hostility Randel and his crews met as they tried to survey the area: Randel was frequently arrested for trespassing on private property. “Opening the Streets” reveals the massive and long-term nature of this undertaking. Photographs and prints show houses towering above roads opened ten to twenty feet below, and massive boulders with houses shoehorned in between. A section drawing showing 57th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues juxtaposes the proposed grade of the opened street with the actual grade of the land as it first dips below and then towers above the proposed grade, making you aware of the amount of filling and leveling work needed to create something as mundane as a street. This was the task of a little-known city agency, the Street Department, that was one of the most powerful agencies during the nineteenth century, and which disappeared when its work was complete.

“Selling Lots” examines the development of real estate in response to the creation of the street grid, with auction posters, photographs of rows of residential dwellings creating the “street...