Opinion

The making of Manhattan

It was once an island of rolling hills, ponds and trees. Until one surveyor transformed Manhattan into what he considered a thoroughly modern metropolis — a lattice cityscape stretching block after carefully crafted block. Thanks to John Randel Jr., we live on the grid.

Erratic and peculiar. Exacting and unrelenting. Self-righteous and fixated. Also ingenious and pioneering. That was Randel, according to the new biography “The Measure of Manhattan” (W.W. Norton) by Marguerite Holloway.

Randel was a child of the Enlightment age, a man who favored science over nature. The grid he designed was partly philosophical — “spiritual transformation through mathematics” — and entirely American in its “egalitarianism through uniform geometry.”

Love it or hate it, it was Randel’s determination that made Manhattan what it is today. For in his time, he frequently clashed with those who favored a more natural — and chaotic — city, one that would resemble the twists and turns of lower Manhattan.

Clement Clarke Moore, owner of an estate called Chelsea and author of “The Night Before Christmas,” circulated a pamphlet that lambasted Randel’s leveling of hills and alteration of watercourses and said it revealed the hubris of a man who “would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.”

Even in colonial times, New York faced population problems. Between 1790 and 1800 alone, the number of people in the city doubled to 60,000. Its chaotic streets were mostly unpaved, uneven, crowded with carriages, horses, dogs and hogs, and often fetid with manure, sewage, stagnant water and mosquitoes.

The federal government already tackled the issue of the territories west of the Thirteen Colonies, saying the land should be parcelled into 6-by-6 mile townships. Holloway notes that 69% of the land in the lower 48 states are made up of contiguous rectangular grids.

She quotes scholar Hildegard Binder Johnson on how grids embodied the spirit of the age: “Thomas Jefferson and other eighteenth-century Americans were dedicated to a rational approach to the problems of their day.”

In New York, the grid system was considered a rational approach to a number of problems. It meant firefighters could get to blazes faster. And cross streets that ran river-to-river could help solve the problem of raw sewage, facilitating breezes “to rid the city of stagnant, unhealthful air.”

Though only 20 years old, Randel was given the job to survey Manhattan in 1808 because of his politically connected Albany family.

There were only two limitations. First, everything below Houston Street (then called North Street for its defining the boundary of the colonial village) would remain unchanged. Second, Broadway came with the job. It had been the island’s main means of travel for centuries, first as the Wickquasgeck Trail used by the Lenape tribe and later widened by early Dutch settlers.

From 1808 to 1810, Randel and his crew hiked the island’s stony hills, waded through its marshes, wetlands and creeks. He used a surveyor’s cross and a compass, constantly foresighting and backsighting 180 degrees to ensure a straight line, while his chain-and-post crew pushed marker pegs into the earth at regular intervals.

If a tree was in his way, a member of the crew felled it with an ax. On private property, they frequently came under attack by irate farmers and their dogs.

“The promise of a great metropolis did not delight many landowners,” Holloway writes, quoting historian Martha Lamb. “Their houses and lots were in danger of being invaded and cut in two, or swept off the face of the earth altogether.”

On one occasion, while attempting to draw a line through the home of an old woman who sold vegetables, “they were pelted with cabbages and artichokes until they were compelled to retreat.”

Other settlers would wait until nightfall to remove his pegs or plow up his markers. Randel was hauled off to jail for trespassing numerous times, until in March 1809 state legislation was passed allowing the surveying team to enter private land during the day and to cut trees. Owners could bill the state for damages.

Randel designed a grid running continuously to 155th street, with streets 60 feet and avenues 100 feet wide. The city’s main axes, its wide avenues, would not run truly north-south, but nearly 29 degrees east of true north, to fit the natural tilt of Manhattan itself.

So what if the only significant surviving tract of land in the plan was the Grand Parade around 23rd Street — which was not a park but a 240-acre space devoted to military drilling and for use as an assembly point in the event the city was invaded.

Upon the map’s release in 1811, however, the 9-foot-long map detailing Randel’s vision of Manhattan drew immediate backlash from those who value nature.

The famed writer Edith Wharton called it a “cramped, horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness.”

Randel and his supporters at the city’s council offered this, in short, by way of retort: It’s an island. You want fresh air and a view? Walk in any direction and you’ll find a river. He also considered the grid advantageous to “the buying, selling and developing of real estate.”

Following the arduous task of measuring and planning, Randel received the go-ahead to begin scratching his pioneering and controversial 1811 map into the dirt and rock of the island, a task that would last until 1817 as roughly 3,500 stones were set across the island to designate future intersections.

Randel also suggested a number of grand plans for Manhattan — like an elevated train over Broadway and a promenade above the waterfront.

Though they never came to pass, Randel’s map and surveys already had changed Manhattan forever. The West Side was flattened, and the East Side raised, by as much as 115 feet in some areas. Ponds were filled in. An island was made flat and orderly.

Of course, there was a backlash. The lack of back alleys, for one, was a problem. The uniform blocks sometimes suffocated building development.

But the biggest issue was that, no matter how many “cross breezes” the city enjoyed, the lack of trees and green space wore down residents.

The philosophy of the day had changed, from enlightment to naturalist. In 1844, a campaign began for a large green space — and in 1857, Central Park saved us from the never-ending grid.