City on a Grid: How New York became New York

摘要

One of the striking truths of Gerald Koeppel's publication is that throughout the last 250 years of Manhattan street development there has been no prior book-length study on the highly recognizable New York City grid. In some respects, Koeppel's project has been sitting in broad daylight, just waiting to be explored from a different perspective. Numerous literary accounts of walking through the streets of Manhattan exist - from Walt Whitman to Henry Miller to Teju Cole -yet far more critiques have been laid upon the design of the right-angled grid. Uniquely different from the curved and angled streets of Paris, London, Philadelphia or Boston, for example, Manhattan's street design arose from historically traceable decisions that were made and sometimes aggressively enforced, often promoting commerce over public convenience. Tracing the path of progress, Koeppel relies on extensive archive research paired with the occasional twists and turns of New York's political history in order to provide a flowing narrative for the slow, but unstoppable, overtaking of the entire island of Manhattan.