Review by New York Times Review
Whence Manhattan's famous rectilinear grid - that "old inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition and distribution," as Henry James put it, that for two centuries has shaped city life so profoundly? Historians have answered this question in two ways. In one telling, the grid is the product of the republican revolution: In place of royal irregularity, New Yorkers substituted a democratic spatial order in which all blocks were equal. In the other, the grid is simply an engine for property development and speculation. Koeppel, a historian, offers a third possibility: The plan for the famous grid, announced in March 1811, was rather "an excuse for a plan, arrived at with little thinking and with time running out." Its origins lie in an earlier plan that divided the Common Lands of mid-Manhattan into five-acre parcels, cut by three broad north-south thoroughfares (the forerunners of Park, Fifth and Sixth Avenues) as well as 60-foot-wide east-west streets. A decade later, the State Legislature empowered a three-man commission to preempt private street development. But the commissioners were slow to engage in their work and fell back on the Common Lands grid. The plan, Koeppel argues, "was simply not something that had been deeply thought out." None of this exactly contradicts the familiar tales of commercial ambition and republican predilection for order and equality. What Koeppel does instead is to give us the best account to date of the process by which an odd amalgamation of democracy and capitalism got written into New York's physical DNA. MASON B. WILLIAMS teaches history and leadership studies at Williams College. He is the author of "City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 13, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Historian Koeppel (Bond of Union) continues his examinations of New York-centric infrastructure with a look at the story behind the development of New York City's extraordinary 1811 street grid plan, which "defined the urbanism of a rising city and nation." Devastated by the 9/11 attacks, Koeppel launched his expert investigation into what made the city special, using a photo from the early 1880s of early Manhattan that showed the grid-"a rectilinear plane of many parallel streets crossed at right angles"-in the midst of the newly developing Upper East Side neighborhood now known as Carnegie Hill. Koeppel is fascinated by the history of old New York; Manhattan's grid, conceived by city planner Casimir Goerck and French designer Joseph François Mangin, came to make it both a "congested place" and an "orderly place of energy and industry." Mangin's plan met stout resistance from city commissioners and faced several challenges, but without any political alternative, it survived, sparking an influx of population and commerce. Koeppel's bold commentary on the constant evolution of Gotham may stir controversy in some quarters, but he unabashedly celebrates the metropolis that has never learned what it means to grow old or stale. Maps and b&w photos. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
New York is considered to be one of the most congested cities in the United States, in no small part because of its well-known grid structure. That the term gridlock refers to a traffic standstill is certainly no coincidence. Journalist Koeppel (Water for Gotham; Bond of Union) focuses on the emergence of this rectilinear grid structure on the island of Manhattan, examining the early examples of grids in places such as Mohenjo-Daro, Pakistan, and Ancient Greece as possible influences for New York's organizational arrangement. He then discusses how the city has grown and developed around the grid. Verdict For a book that concentrates on a city plan, this title does its best to stay interesting, although it can get a bit dry at times. Readers curious about the growth of infrastructure in large city centers will definitely be interested in Koeppel's take.-Rebecca Kluberdanz, GB65 Lib., New York © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A popular historian examines the origin and development of Manhattan's famous grid. Given exclusive power and broad discretion, charged with uniting "regularity and order with public convenience," the three-man state commission appointed in 1807 took four years to come up with the rectilinear grid150 parallel streets, 12 parallel avenues, 2,000 almost identical blocksthat continues to order the daily life of Manhattan. Their design, likely cribbed from earlier maps and surveys, short on "beautifying embellishments," and long on simplicity and efficiency, accomplished (along with the roughly contemporaneous construction of the Erie Canal) precisely the goal of town fathers: to turn New York into the nation's leading city. Though he focuses on the commission and their design and the controversies and criticisms arising over the next 10 years as chief surveyor John Randel Jr. executed their vision, Koeppel (Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire, 2009, etc.) also tells a pre-grid, streets-and-roads story of Colonial-era Manhattan, bringing readers up through to the political rivalry of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, whose battles helped set the stage for the commission's work. As he follows the relentless grid's progress, from the edges of the settled old city all the way uptown, delightful detours pop up: about the anomaly that is Broadway, about the creation of Central Park ("the grid's unimagined saving grace"), and about 20th-century proposals to fill in the East River or to add three levels to the too-few avenues to relieve congestion. Scattered throughout the narrative, well-chosen, lively comments from writers, poets, politicians, architects, and scholars either roast or toast the commission's creation. Koeppel delivers all this with great verve and humor, leaving readers to decide whether the grid is the brilliantly democratic, effective plan its architects thought or the dull and ugly manifestation of unimaginative minds ruled by commerce. For Manhattanites, surely, and for anyone who's visited and been either charmed or overwhelmed by the grid. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
