Reader’s Corner: ‘City on a Grid’

Before the grid: How 2nd Avenue and 42nd Street looked in 1861. (New York Public Library)

Not long after the Revolutionary War, New York was still just a few hundred buildings clustered at the lower end of Manhattan. But the city’s leaders knew that eventually they’d be spreading northand needed to figure out how that would look. So they put together something called theCommissioners’ Plan. It showed an imaginary city spreading north in evenly measured blocks that acted almost as a rebuke to...