The grid was envisaged for the city and when geometry was overlaid on geography as is the case most times, geography suffered. Second Avenue Manhattan 1861 Source-©įorm emerging out of and sculpting culture and ideals And when there were only a few hundred thousand people in Manhattan, a city was imagined for a billion. In March 1807, DeWitt Clinton undertook the task of ordering the chaotic northward growth of the place by a special commission laying a foundation for the new city by settling the ongoing property issues and land commodification. The draft Mangin–Goerck master plan of 1799 was presented to the Council in 1803 for approval, but political disorientation andĬonflicts led to the cancellation of the new map of the city. The surveying of the common lands was undertaken by Goerck to create sellable lots of land by the Common Council who owned them. The natural landscape of New York was unadulterated till the 1800s was a land of high and low grounds with plantations and abundant natural resources, like the North American continent’s diverse geography.

The wartime destruction and aftermaths looming in shadows created uncertainties in the city and economic space, and the underlying civic disorder forced the commissioners of free America to envision a future of the place and imagine they did. New Amsterdam Source-©2020 Getty Images.Įvents during the American Revolution made the island defenseless as it challenged the largest maritime empire in the world.

19th-century illustration of Henry Hudson’s Halve Maen being greeted by the native Indians Source-©2020 Waterfront Alliance. One wonders here about the existence of the place in case the first colonizers here would have been English or Spanish would we have seen another Boston or Philadelphia, or any other city in America and no New York. That lay the foundation of what the place in the future would be, a money -driven- capitalist approach, a commercial culture that makes political democracy seem perfectly normal. The proposition to the natives where land got traded for an amount of a few gilders, a situation that the natives thought to be temporary, marks the essence of what the city today is – it’s a real-estate deal. On the southern tip of this vast unexplored island was established the first settlement New Amsterdam which later upon English colonization became New York. IncĪn island with a natural harbor laden with rich natural resources, a perfect geographic setting in the vast American continent was the habitation of the native Indians for a long time till the day a Dutch marine vessel sailed into its harbor in the early 1600s. Manhattan Street Source-©2003-2020 Shutterstock. Manhattan Source-©Hebstreit designstudio 2015 – 2020.

Manhattan grid map