[URBAN NOTE] "Unearthing the City Grid That Would Have Been in Central Park"

[rfmcdonald]

Marguerite Holloway's article in The New Yorker tells a fascinating story about the early mapping of Manhattan, and the recent recovery of that project.

On an overcast day in November, 2014, just before Thanksgiving, two men dug a rather large hole in a lawn in Central Park. They started at seven-thirty in the morning, and by midday the hole was big enough for them both to stand in. As they dug, they filtered excavated soil through a screen. They found eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese porcelain, blue earthenware fragments, and the rim of a pearlware teacup, as well as the stem of a clay pipe and brown, olive, aqua, and purple glass shards. And they unearthed a roughly three-foot-tall, nine-inch-square white stone, two sides of which were inscribed with numbers.

The ceramic and glass remnants were unexceptional, but the white stone was anything but. It was a discovery akin to finding a marble statue submerged in a remote lake or a lamppost in the wild woods of Narnia. Hundreds of stones like this one were fastidiously implanted across the island two centuries ago, but not a single one seemed to have survived, in its original position, amid the construction and endless reconstruction of New York City. The stones were set at the intersection of every street and avenue to chart the bold nineteenth-century plan that gave Manhattan its great grid. The carved marble sign in Central Park marks an intersection that never came to be, one of many spliced out of the grand plan when city residents demanded an antidote to the grid.

Central Park has long kept its grid memory secret. But in little more than a year since that November morning, three more marble street monuments have been discovered in the curvaceous green core of the island.

In 1807 the Common Council asked the state to appoint three commissioners to plan the city’s development. (The aldermen were hoping to avoid the disagreements and political reversals that occurred at the local level; and they did maintain some say by recommending three men who should serve as the commissioners.) They hired a young Albany native named John Randel, Jr., to survey the island and draft the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, an eight-foot-long blueprint for the grid, which was to run from North (now Houston) Street to 155th Street. After Randel handed it in, the Common Council hired the exacting surveyor to inscribe the grid in the rural landscape. Randel resurveyed the island with instruments of his own invention, placing wooden stakes or pegs at every one of the more than fifteen hundred planned intersections. Once done with that task, he and the bane of his meticulous existence—his unruly, ever-shifting, drink-loving crew—set about replacing the pegs with less easily vandalized or purloined markers. At some fifteen hundred and fifty intersections, according to Randel’s notes, the men set “monumental stones”; at nearly a hundred others, where they encountered bedrock or boulder, they placed iron bolts.