![]() ![]() Fires were pretty common in the early days of the city, and that danger, coupled with the rapid expansion of the city further and further up the island, resulted in streets being designated haphazardly as people grabbed land and constructed new buildings at a seemingly breakneck speed. The main city of New York was just the southern tip of Manhattan – a collection of warehouses, homes, docks, churches and government buildings. ![]() The Abridged History: the Dutch showed up, worked out a few shady deals to force the Manahatta tribe off of the island, and then spent the next 100 years competing with the British for control of New York harbor. And this is the short version of how it happened: New York 1.0Įarly New York was a bit of a crazy place. It appears Babylon even had uniform city blocks! So NYC isn’t the first or the only metropolis to try this, but it is, by far, the largest. ![]() New York is not the only city with a planned grid – New Haven, Washington D.C., Savannah and Houston all have variations of their own, as does the newer part of Barcelona and a handful of other European cities. As a follow-up to my last post about the difference between streets and avenues, I thought some of you might be interested to learn just how one of the biggest cities in the world got everyone to agree that all the blocks needed to be rectangular and uniform. ![]()
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