page_title: Commissioners' Plan of 1811
section_title: History of the gridiron
hierarchical_section_title: Commissioners' Plan of 1811 / History of the gridiron
caption_attribution_description: English: Holme, Thomas (1683). A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia (map): In the province of Pennsylvania in America. London: Sold by Andrew Sowle in Shoreditch. In 1682, William Penn appointed Holme surveyor-general of Pennsylvania and charged him with the task of laying out the "greene country towne" that Penn envisioned along the Delaware River. The site that Penn acquired for the city of Philadelphia stretched two miles east to west across a tract of land situated between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers; all told, the rectangular grid of land comprised twelve thousand acres. Holme imposed an orderly grid plan on the site, with streets organized around a large square in the center of the town and four smaller squares, one in each quadrant. The grid also included two main streets, Broad and High (present-day Market), which were kept wide in hopes of preventing the kind of fire that destroyed London in 1666. Completed in 1683, this map was used for both reference and promotional purposes to show the unique layout of William's Penn emerging city. From the Historical Society of Pennsylvania: https://hsp.org/education/primary-sources/a-map-of-the-original-city-of-philadelphia
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 gridiron layout of a town or city is not new. It is, in fact, "the most pervasive city design on earth" and can be found in "Italy and Greece, in Mexico, Central America, Mesopotamia, China [and] Japan." It can be found in the Old and New Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt, and in Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley in 2154 BCE with a population of 40,000 people, where many historians claim it was invented, and 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 Hippodamus – often 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.
  The grid plan, or "Hippodamian plan", 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. However the rapid expansion of cities In the British Empire necessitated adoption of new neoclassical urban plans in particular the Scottish Enlightenment 'New Towns' of Edinburgh of 1767 and Glasgow of 1781 were particularly influential in the English-speaking countries. In some European cities, such as Amsterdam and Paris, destruction of parts of the city by fire, warfare and other calamities offered an opportunity for the grid system to be used to replace more evolutionary street layouts, especially in outlying areas, while the central city, often sheltered behind medieval walls, remained organic and undesigned.
  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 beginning – in Philadelphia's case, William Penn specified the city's orthogonal pattern when he founded it in 1682, although its 400-foot (120 m) 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. New Amsterdam, however, had not been laid out in a grid pattern by the Dutch. The streets of lower Manhattan were more organic, and incorporated Native American trails, cow paths, and streets that followed the topography and hydrology of the swampy land.
  By the time of the passage of the federal Land Ordinance of 1785, the grid plan was firmly established in the US. The Ordinance required newly created states west of the original thirteen, to have rectilinear boundaries, rather than boundaries shaped by natural features, and within the new areas, beginning in the Northwest Territory, everything was to be divided into rectangles: townships were six miles by six miles 
caption: "A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia" (1683) by Thomas Holme, the first map of the city.
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