page_title: Commissioners' Plan of 1811
section_title: Criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Commissioners' Plan of 1811 / Reaction / Criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration from In Old New York 1894 by Thomas Allibone Janvier
context_page_description: 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 to this 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". It was described by the Commission that created it as combining "beauty, order and convenience."
  The plan originated when the Common Council of New York City, seeking to provide for the orderly development and sale of the land of Manhattan between 14th Street and Washington Heights, but unable to do so itself for reasons of local politics and objections from property owners, asked the New York State Legislature to step in. The legislature appointed a commission with sweeping powers in 1807, and their plan was presented in 1811.
  The Commissioners were Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father of the United States; the lawyer John Rutherfurd, a former United States Senator; and the state Surveyor General, Simeon De Witt.
context_section_description: The plan was also vociferously criticized from the start, not least because it did not take into account the natural topography of the island, but also because it took no notice of classical ideas about beauty, and was monotonous in its regularity. It was also lambasted for being made in service of monetary interests alone. Among the many critics of the plan were Edgar Allan Poe and Alexis de Tocqueville who believed that it fostered "relentless monotony". Walt Whitman, the poet and editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, said of it: "Our perpetual dead flat and streets cutting each other at right angles, are certainly the last thing in the world consistent with beauty of situation."
  Frederick Law Olmsted, who would co-design Central Park, and has been called "the grid's most significant nineteenth-century critic", facetiously said of the grid's origin:
  There seems to be good authority for the story that the system of 1807 was hit upon by the chance occurrence of a mason's sieve near the map of the ground to be laid out. It was taken up and placed upon the map, and the question being asked "what do you want better than that?", no one was able to answer. This may not be the whole story of the plan, but the result is the same as if it were.
  Olmsted also said of it in 1858:
  The time will come when New York will be built-up, when all the grading and filling will be done, when the picturesquely varied rock formations of the island will have been converted into the foundations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect angular buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface, with the single except of the few acres contained in [Central] Park.
  Olmsted was clearly no fan of the grid plan: "The great disadvantage under which New-York  [sic] labors is one growing out of the senseless manner in which its streets have been laid out. No city is more unfortunately planned with reference to metropolitan attractiveness." Still, by 1876, even Olmsted had to admit that the grid had prevailed.
  In 1818, Clement Clarke Moore, the author of A Visit from St. Nicholas – probably better known as "Twas the Night Before Christmas" – whose estate "Chelsea" would be chopped up by the plan, wrote in "A Plain Statement, addressed to the Proprietors of Real Estate, in the City and County of New York" :
  The great principle which governs these plans is, to reduce the surface of the earth as nearly as possible to dead level. ... The natural inequities of the ground are destroyed, and the existing water courses disregarded. ... These are men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome. We live under a tyranny with respects to the rights of property, which ... no monarch in Europe would dare to exercise ... it is a tyranny of the worst kind; for it is under the sanction of laws which shield those who exercise it from being called to legal account. It is time for all who are interested to arouse, and to unite themselves for the maintenance and preservation of their rights.
  Moore signed his pamphlet as "A Landowner", but it was not long before his identity was exposed. Despite these vehement objections and his call to arms, Moore later made a great deal of money by sub-dividing his estate and developing it section-by-section along the gridded streets. Ironically, it was the landowners like Moore, who fought the grid most insistently, who made the most money from exploiting it.
  Edith Wharton bemoaned "... rectangular New York ... this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness," while her friend Henry James wrote that:
  New York pays the penalty of her primal topographic curse, her old inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition and distribution, the uncollected labor of minds with no imagination of the future and blind before the opportunity given them by their two magnificent water-fronts. This original sin of the longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet meanly intersected, and of the organized sacrifice of the indicated al
caption: Thomas Janvier, an illustration from In Old New York (1894)
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