Gerard Koeppel City on a Grid (Paperback)
$ 14.13
Description
Further Details Title: City on a Grid Condition: New Subtitle: How New York Became New York ISBN-10: 030682549X EAN: 9780306825491 ISBN: 9780306825491 Publisher: Da Capo Press Inc Format: Paperback Release Date: 04/20/2017 Description: 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 Language: English Country/Region of Manufacture: US Item Height: 233mm Item Length: 155mm Item Width: 24mm Item Weight: 392g Author: Gerard Koeppel Genre: History Release Year: 2017 Missing Information? Please contact us if any details are missing and where possible we will add the information to our listing.
