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  • Making New York City
  • Morris A. Pierce (bio)
Gerard Koeppel. City on a Grid: How New York Became New York. Philadelphia: DaCapo Press, 2015. xxiv + 296 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.99.

Gerard Koeppel's third book, City on a Grid. follows his histories of the Erie Canal and New York City's water system. Those earlier books were quite good, but share bookshelves with many others covering the same topics. Koeppel notes that Manhattan's extensive grid has "never had a book," so he wrote one, with the main story being "the creation and long life of the iconic street grid of New York" (pp. xii–xiii).

Koeppel provides a brief history of rectilinear street grids in other cities that date back nearly 5,000 years and includes several cities in ancient Greece. The Spanish brought the grid to New World cities such as Lima and Buenos Aires, while William Penn introduced a grid to Philadelphia and James Oglethorpe laid out Savannah, Georgia, on one as well. Koeppel also mentions the desire of the Continental Congress that new states should have rectilinear borders and that new territories "should be divided up into rectangles" based on "townships six miles square" (pp. 5–6).

The first attempt to bring order to street planning in Manhattan was the DeLancey family's 1760s establishment of a rectilinear grid to facilitate subdividing and selling their 340-acre estate. As royalists, their property was confiscated after the Revolution, but their grid remained. Shortly thereafter, another family, the Bayards, who had acquired several hundred acres in southern Manhattan, hired Casimir Goerck to survey their property, which resulted in another grid that "remains as today's Soho," including 25' x 150' lots and along Houston Street (p. 25).

The author then takes us north to the 1,300-acre Common Lands, which had been inherited from the Dutch and included roughly the area between 23rd and 90th streets between Second and Seventh Avenues. Faced with the need to raise revenue to repay its Revolutionary War debt, the city hired Goerck to survey and divide the land into five-acre lots for lease or sale. Goerck completed his work by December 1785 with lots laid out on both sides of a single north-south road, but the poor topography of the land did not result in many sales. [End Page 97] Improved economic conditions in the 1790s led the city to re-engage Goerck to update the survey and map, which included two additional roads parallel to the one from the first survey. These three roads later became Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Avenues, and his crossing roads would become numbered streets. Goerck's 1796 map showed grids of roughly 200' by 920', which remains the standard grid size in Manhattan.

Joseph François Mangin, a French émigré, was hired with Goerck in 1797 to create an official map of the city. Shortly after beginning work, Goerck succumbed to yellow fever, leaving Mangin to carry on alone. Mangin delivered his map in April 1799, and the Council contracted with noted engraver Peter Maverick to prepare a six-foot square version for publication. In October 1801, even before Maverick had completed the engraving, the Council "voted to extend Broadway" to what is now Union Square, giving Mangin's map an authoritative seal of approval (p. 40).

Enter Dr. Joseph Browne, brother-in-law of anti-Federalist and sitting Vice President Aaron Burr. Browne in 1798 had proposed forming a private company to bring water from the Bronx River into the city, which was received favorably by the Council who then asked the legislature for support, which was greatly aided by state assemblyman Burr. The future vice president planned to use the water company as a subterfuge to form a bank to compete with his archrival Alexander Hamilton's Bank of New York. Burr's machinations worked, and the Manhattan Company's bank became very successful, more than can be said for the water company. Burr was likely responsible for Browne's appointment as city street commissioner in October 1802, a post which Browne used to attack Mangin's plan as being "improper to adopt" (p. 49). By...

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