Commissioners' Plan of 1811

thumb|275px|An 1893 redrawing of the 1807 version of the Commissioners' grid plan for [[Manhattan, a few years before it was adopted in 1811]]

thumb|275px|The city blocks of [[Portland, Oregon; Savannah, Georgia; and Manhattan shown at the same scale]]

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 was the original design for the streets of Manhattan above Houston Street and below 155th Street, which put in place the rectangular grid plan of streets and lots that has defined Manhattan on its march uptown until the current day. It has been called "the single most important document in New York City's development," and the plan has been described as encompassing the "republican predilection for control and balance ... [and] distrust of nature".

There were a few interruptions in the grid for public spaces, such as the Grand Parade between 23rd Street and 33rd Street, which was the precursor to Madison Square Park, as well as four squares named Bloomingdale, Hamilton, Manhattan, and Harlem, a wholesale market complex, and a reservoir. Central Park, the massive urban greenspace in Manhattan running from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue and from 59th Street to 110th Street, was not a part of the plan, as it was not envisioned until the 1850s. The numbering was also extended through Manhattan and the Bronx.

History of the gridiron

The gridiron layout of a town or city is not new; it is "the most pervasive city design on earth" and can be found in "Italy and Greece, in Mexico, Central America, Mesopotamia, China [and] Japan." It existed in the Old and New Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt, in the Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro – where many historians claim it was invented – from where it may have spread to Ancient Greece. The Greek city of Miletus was rebuilt after destruction by the Persians on a grid plan, with Hippodamusoften called "the father of European urban planning"as the local originator of the rectilinear grid system for the city centered on the agora, a concept he probably did not invent, but had heard about from elsewhere. Hippodamus went on to spread the grid to Piraeus, Rhodes, and other cities in Greece. was also utilized by the Ancient Romans for their fortified military encampments, or castra, many of which evolved into towns and cities; Pompeii is the best-preserved example of Roman urban planning using the gridiron system. In France, England, and Wales, castra evolved into bastides, agricultural communities under a centralized monarchy. This example was followed on the European continent in cities such as New Brandenburg in Germany, which the Teutonic Knights founded in 1248, and in the many towns planned and built in the 14th century in the Florentine Republic. The gridiron idea spread with the Renaissance, although in many cities, for instance London following the Great Fire of 1666, it failed to take root.

thumb|left|375px|"A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia" (1683) by Thomas Holme, the first map of the city.

In the United States the gridiron now predominates. In areas that were under Spanish control, the 1753 Laws of the Indies specified the use of the gridiron in newly built communities, and the results can be seen in St. Augustine, Florida; Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico; and in San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in California. The French also built the nucleus of New Orleans, Louisiana on a grid, in part influenced by the Spanish Law of the Indies, which provided numerous practical models in the New World to copy from. Although some English colonial cities, such as Boston, had streets that adhered more to natural topography and happenstance, others, such as Savannah, Georgia, Baltimore, and Philadelphia had been built to the gridiron concept from the beginningin Philadelphia's case, William Penn specified the city's orthogonal pattern when he founded it in 1682, although its blocks turned out to be too large, encouraging the creation of intermediate streets, while James Oglethorpe's Savannah, with its significantly smaller blocks, was not conducive to large-scale development, restricting the city's economic influence. Cities such as Anchorage, Alaska; Erie, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; and Sacramento, California, all show the American preference for the grid.

There was significant variation in the size of the grids used. Carson City, Nevada, may have the smallest at square and streets, while Salt Lake City, Utah, is much larger at square blocks surrounded by streets. The most popular appears to be the square block with streets that are wide. This size grid can be found in Anchorage; Bismarck, North Dakota; Missoula, Montana; Mobile, Alabama; Phoenix, Arizona; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. happenstance and property ownership without any overarching order, until around 1800 when the Common Council of New York began to assert authority over the streetscape, promulgating regulations to keep them clear and to require new streets be approved in advance. They also began to lay assessments on property owners to pay for the cost of keeping the streets in repair. Beginning in 1803, the Council started to condemn streets which served no public purpose, and, importantly, took responsibility for building streets, which heretofore had been done by individual property owners.

Private developments

The first efforts at putting a grid onto Manhattan in some form came from private developers. In the early 1750s, Trinity Church laid out a small neighborhood around the new King's Collegewhich would later become Columbia Universityin rectangular blocks. However, because the plan required landfill in the Hudson River, which would not happen until much later, the streets were never laid down.

The second instance came when the powerful De Lancey family decided to break up part of their vast estate in the 1760s, and laid out a grid of streets centered on "De Lancey Square". As royalists, their holdings were confiscated after the American Revolution, but the streets remainedalthough a new street, Grand Street, was laid through the central square. The north–south streets of the De Lancey grid become the core north–south streets of the Lower East Side: Chrystie, Forsyth, Eldridge, Allen, Orchard and Ludlow Streets, and the grid became the pattern for additional streets laid out in the area.

The surveying of the Commons

Goerck's first survey

Despite the fact that the city's charters over the decadesthe Dongan Charter (1686), the Cornbury Charter (1708) and the Montgomerie Charter (1731)supported by specific laws passed by the province or state in 1741, 1751, 1754, 1764, 1774 and 1787, gave the city's Common Council full powers over the creation of new streets, the Council rarely did so, independent of the actions of the various landowners who developed their property and ran streets through their projects as they saw fit, which were approved after the fact by the Council.

Goerck's second survey

Unfortunately for the Common Council, the disadvantages of the plots in the Common Lands worked against their sale, and there was no run on the market to buy them. Still, sales continued at a steady, if not spectacular, pace. By 1794, with the city growing ever more populated and the inhabited area constantly moving north towards the Common Lands, the Council decided to try again, hiring Goerck once more to re-survey and map the area. He was instructed to make the lots more uniform and rectangular and to lay out roads to the west and east of the middle road, as well as to lay out east–west streets of each. Later, the Commissioners would use Goerck's East and West Roads for their Fourth and Sixth Avenues. Goerck's cross streets would become the numbered east–west streets of the later plan. Goerck took two years to survey the 212 lots which encompassed the entire Common Lands. Again, impeded by tools and topography, Goerck's work was somewhat less than precise. In 1808, John Hunn, the city's street commissioner would comment that "The Surveys made by Mr. Goerck upon the Commons were effected through thickets and swamps, and over rocks and hills where it was almost impossible to produce accuracy of mensuration." Often the streets intended to intersect at right angles would not quite do so.

Still, Goerck's work in surveying the Common Lands was the basis for the Commissioners' Plan, as explained by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission: "The Commissioner's Plan borrowed heavily from Goerck's earlier surveys and essentially expanded his scheme beyond the common lands to encompass the entire island." Historian Gerard Koeppel comments "In fact, the great grid is not much more than the Goerck plan writ large. The Goerck plan is modern Manhattan's Rosetta Stone..."

The Mangin–Goerck Plan

thumb|right|425px|The Mangin–Goerck Plan of 1803; the "warning label" can be seen at the bottom under "Plan of the City of New York"

In 1797, the Council commissioned Goerck and Joseph-François Mangin, another city surveyor, to survey Manhattan's streets; Goerck and Mangin had each submitted individual proposals to the Council, but then decided to team up. Goerck died of yellow fever during the course of the project, but Mangin completed it and delivered the draft of the Mangin–Goerck Plan to the Council in 1799 for correction of street names; the final engraved versionmade by engraver Peter Maverick, who would also go on to engrave the published map of the Commissioners' Planwould be presented to the Council in 1803. However, Mangin had gone well beyond the terms of his commission, and the map not only showed the existing streets of the city, as instructed, but was also, in Mangin's words, "the Plan of the City ... such as it is to be..."</blockquote>

The Council apparently accepted the plan as "the new Map of the City" for four years, even publishing it by subscription, until political machinations perhaps engineered by Aaron Burr acting through the city's street commissioner, Joseph Browne Jr., brought it into disrepute. Burrthe political enemy of Mangin's mentor Alexander Hamiltonmay have been upset that the design of New York's City Hall had gone to Mangin and his partner John McComb Jr., and not to Burr's candidate, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, but for whatever reason, the plan was disavowed by the Council, and was no longer to be considered "the new Map of the City." The Council ordered that copies which had already been sold be bought back if possible, and that a label warning of inaccuracies be placed on any additional copies sold. They stopped short at totally destroying the plan, but, still, neglect may have had the same effect: the original square engraved map has disappeared, and of the smaller versions only less than a dozen are extant, none in good condition.

Nevertheless, despite the Council's official disavowal of Mangin's layout of future streets, as the city grew the Mangin–Goerck Plan became the de facto reference for where new streets were built, and when the Commissioners' Plan was revealed in 1811, the area of the plan which the public had been warned was inaccurate and speculative had been accepted wholesale by the Commission, their plan being almost identical to Mangin's in that area.

The Commissioners' Plan

Genesis

Politics may have caused the Common Council to officially decertify Mangin's plan for the future expansion of the city, but the episode nonetheless was a step forward in the development of the city's future. In the "warning label" the Council caused to have placed on copies of Mangin's map was the statement that expansion of the city, such as shown on the map, was "subject to such future arrangements as the Corporation may deem best calculated to promote the health, introduce regularity, and conduce to the convenience of the City." Here the Council was showing its willingness to consider actively planning for how the city would develop.

In 1806, they took a first step by hiring Ferdinand Hassler. Hassler, a Swiss mathematician and geodetic surveyor who was noted for his work on a topographic survey of Switzerland, had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1805, two years after the French invaded his country and made his work there impossible. Through the auspices of a merchant friend with friends in New York, in the spring of 1806, the Common Council commissioned Hassler to make an accurate map of Manhattan Island, which could be used as a basis for planning future development; it would be Hassler's first substantial contract in the U.S. He accepted the job, and the terms: $5 per day for Hassler (), $4 a day for his assistant (), and $1 per day for expenses (), plus a budget sufficient to hire a surveying crew. He was scheduled to depart from Philadelphia in July, in time for at least part of the 1806 surveying season, but never appeared. Finally, in October, he sent his regrets: both he and his wife had taken ill on the day they intended to leave. Why they did not send word earlier, why Hassler did not press on at some point before October, and why the Common Council never thought to inquire of the whereabouts of their missing surveyor is not known. In any case, by October, the surveying season for 1806 was over, or close to it. Hassler soon received a federal appointmenthe would eventually head the Survey of the Coast (which was renamed the United States Coast Survey in 1836 and the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1878) so the Council was back at square one.

So, in 1807, they acted again. Optimists at that time expected the city's population, then around 95,000 people, to expand to 400,000 by 1860, when, in fact, it reached 800,000 before the beginning of the Civil War. Faced with opposition and conflict from various political factions, including property owners whose private deeds conflicted with the property lines of the Mangin–Goerck, and the reality that any plan the Council came up with could be overturned by a subsequent Council, the city asked the state legislature for help. The Council said its goal was "laying out Streets ... in such a manner as to unite regularity and order with the public convenience and benefit and in particular to promote the health of the City." At the time, foul air, or "miasma," associated with sewage, standing water and low sunlight, was thought to be the cause of many diseases, and the city had lived through decades of epidemics of yellow fever.

A month later, the legislature gave the Commissioners "exclusive power to lay out streets, roads, and public squares, of such width, extent, and direction, as to them shall seem most conducive to public good, and to shut up, or direct to be shut up, any streets or parts thereof which have been heretofore laid out ... [but] not accepted by the Common Council." The jurisdiction of the Commission was all of Manhattan north of Houston Street, and into the Hudson and East Rivers 600 feet beyond the low water mark.

The baseline of the Commissioner's remit was set at Houston Street"North Street" at the time"Art Street", which was located approximately where Washington Square North is today, and "Greenwich Lane", now Greenwich Street. Greenwich Village, then independent of New York City, and the current West Village were not part of the area the Commission was to deal with. A majority of Commissioners was required to make decisions. The Commissioners were authorized to be paid $4 a day for their work ()although Morris and Rutherfurd, both rich men, waived their feesand were empowered to enter onto private property in the daytime to undertake their duties; this was greeted with widespread hostility from property owners, but the Commission's authority was explicit. They held, for instance, the "exclusive power" to close streets that interfered with their plan, a plan which landowners as well as the mayor, the Common Council and all other citizens of the city had no choice but to accept.

At the meetings of the Commission, which were infrequent and usually not attended by all three men, their primary concern was what kind of layout the new area of the city should have, a rectilinear grid such as was used in Philadelphia; New Orleans; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina, or a more complex system utilizing circles, arcs or other patterns, such as the plan Pierre Charles L'Enfant had used in laying out Washington, D.C.

thumb|right|215px|The only known image of [[John Randel Jr., the Commission's chief surveyor, by an unknown artist, probably Ezra Ames.]]

Randel joins the project

The Commissioners' replacement as chief engineer and surveyor, John Randel Jr., took over the position in June 1808; the project would occupy him for most of the next 13 years.

Randel's surveying in 1808 had nothing to do with laying out the grid, which had not yet been determined as the final result of the Commission's work. Instead, he was determining the topography and ground cover of the land and the placement of natural features such as hills, rocks, swamps, marshes, streams, and ponds, as well as man-made features such as houses, barns, stables, fences, footpaths, cleared fields and gardens. He was also carefully noting the locations of the three north–south roads that Goerck had laid down as part of his survey of the Common Lands. Goerck had not placed the lots and roads in the Common Lands in the context of the overall island, and this Randel did, thus allowing the Commissioners to know where, exactly, Goerck's Common Lands grid was. This was important, because it could serve as a template for a grid for the entire island, should the Commission decide to go in that direction.

Randel wrote afterwards that in the course of his work he "was arrested by the Sheriff, on numerous suits instituted ... for trespass and damage by ... workmen, in passing over grounds, cutting off branches of trees. &c., to make surveys under instructions from the Commissioners." The landowner was to present a bill for "reasonable damages", which the city was to pay within 30 days; any disagreement among the parties as to what was reasonable would, of course, end up in court. The new law did not completely stop lawsuits, but it cut down their number, and allowed Randel to go about his business with a degree of immunity from legal entanglements.

In 1809, Randel's surveying again seems to have been focused on positioning the Common Lands, and Goerck's lots and streets in it, to the rest of the island. Goerck had shown their relationship to the Bloomingdale Road to the west, much of which would become part of Broadway, and the East Post Road to the east, a road which would be demapped by the Commissioners' Plan. Little is known about Randel's surveying in 1810.

And in the meantime, the Commissioners were, generally speaking, distracted by various other personal and political business; although they metinfrequentlythere is no record of what they discussed, or if they were getting closer to a decision about what their plan would entail. Finally, on November 29, 1810, with the surveying season for that season over and only four months left before they were to report out their plan, they seemed to have arrived at a decision. On that date, Morris informed the Common Council that although more work was left to be done "on the ground", the Commission itself had "completed their work" and would be able to make a report that would "compl[y] substantially, if not literally within the law, shewing all the streets which to be laid out..." Randel then spent a considerable amount of time in December meeting with Morris and perhaps the other Commissioners at Morris' estate in the Bronx, during which time it appears that the grid plan was born. At Morris' suggestion, the Common Council hired Randel to actually do the extensive work involved in making the grid a physical realityalthough city surveyor William Bridges (see below) also submitted a proposal to do the workand Randel began this work even before the Commissioners' Plan was announced publicly. A provisional contract between the Council and Randel was signed on December 31, the permanent contract being conditional on Randel delivering the final maps of the plan, which he did on March 22, 1811; the maps were filed by the Council's clerk on April 2, two days before the Commission's legal deadline.

Randel's survey of the entire island