Postcard Thursday: Secret Gardens

The iconic photo above, from Woody Allen's Manhattan, was taken at the edge of East 58th Street, in a tiny park that abuts a private enclave known as Sutton Square.

James explored Sutton Square -- where 5 townhouses happen to be on the market at the moment -- for a story in today's New York Post.

You can read the piece at: http://nypost.com/2017/05/11/what-its-like-to-live-on-one-of-nycs-secret-gardens/

For the next couple of weeks, we are on the road exploring sites associated with pioneer author Laura Ingalls Wilder (of Little House on the Prairie fame) and renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. If those topics interest you, be sure to follow James on social media to see photos from along our route.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/james_nevius/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JamesNeviusAuthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JamesNevius

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Read more about NYC history in

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

The Manhattan Street Grid Turns 200

Readers of Inside the Apple know that we are big fans of the Manhattan street grid, in part because it has made the city so easy to navigate on foot. Today, the grid plan--technically the "Commissioners’ Map and Survey of Manhattan Island"--turns 200 years old.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

With the population rapidly increasing and without any plan for regulating property sales and population growth, it seemed very possible that the city would simply collapse underneath its own weight, with too many people crammed into the area of the city below Chambers Street but not enough food, water, or sanitation to go around. 

The grid plan was overseen by a commission headed by Gouverneur Morris, the eminent politician who’d written the preamble to the Constitution. The survey itself was carried out by John Randel, Jr.; he and his team walked out every block of the city from Houston Street to 155th Street in Harlem, charting over 2,000 city blocks in all. It was enough room, as was noted at the time, “for a greater population than is collected at any spot this side of China.”

The goal was to create a regular pattern of east-west streets; along the avenues, exactly twenty of the blocks made up a mile. In turn, these blocks could be divided into regular lots, 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep. Each lot would back up precisely to its neighbor, with no room behind for service alleys or carriageways. Not only did eliminating alleys allow for bigger, more desirable lots, it reflected the reality that very few in New York would ever have the means to own a horse and carriage. Thus, there was no need for rear stables.  

As so few people had access to horses and carriages, the Commissioners’ Plan reinforced that New York was a city for walking. The plentiful east-west streets connected the two rivers where most commerce took place, with the wide north-south avenues designed for transporting goods and people over longer distances. Until the opening of the subway in 1904, the grid served this original purpose well. Even with the coming of horse-drawn omnibuses, trolleys, street cars, and private vehicles, New York was simply easier to walk, and the vast majority of the city’s workers lived within relatively easy walking distance of their jobs.

Yesterday's New York Times had a few good articles about the grid, including an interactive feature where you can compare Manhattan today with Randel's 1811 plan, which is hours of fun.

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Read more about the Manhattan street grid in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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Manhattan Gets Its Name

The celebration of New York's 400th anniversary is winding down, but today -- October 2 -- marks a significant moment in the city's history: the 400th anniversary of Robert Juet (Henry Hudson's first mate) writing down the name Manna-hata for the first time.

The 1609 voyage was Juet's second with Hudson and there was no love lost between the two men. On their previous voyage together, Juet had organized the crew against Hudson, but it had stopped short of mutiny. Why exactly Hudson re-hired Juet in 1609 is unclear, but Hudson clearly recognized the mate's talents, including that of a diarist. Juet kept a clear and concise record of their trip -- still grumbling in places about Hudson's leadership -- and his chronicle of their trip up and down the Hudson River is the first European account of the area.

As they voyaged back from the Albany area, the Half Moon anchored on October 2, 1609, near the palisades. In his log, Juet wrote:

[W]e saw a very good piece of ground; and hard by it there was a cliff that looked of the colour of white green, as though it were either a copper or silver mine; and I think it to be one of them by the trees that grow upon it; for they be all burned, and the other places are green as grass; it is on that side of the river that is called Manna-hata.

Thus, on October 2, 1609, Manna-hata had its name written down by Europeans for the first time and Manhattan was born.

(Hudson sailed one more time, in 1610, looking -- as always -- for a northwest passage to the Pacific. On this voyage, Juet finally led the crew in an uprising and Hudson was cast out of the ship in a small boat, never to be seen again.)

"Super City: New York" on the History Channel

On Monday, September 22, at 9:00pm (and repeated later in the week), the History Channel is showing a special called Super City: New York. It's been a little tough finding out information, but the blurb states (with some touch-and-go grammar) that the show:

"Peeling back layers of time shows Manhattan Island as it looked when it was discovered by Henry Hudson in 1609, then examines how people and nature have changed the landscape and speculates on the city's future."

We are intrigued.

UPDATE

Now that we've seen the show both in September and its recent December re-airing, we thought a little review was in order.

According to the show, to be a "Super City," a place must be "a marvel of engineering, infrastructure, and commerce." New York is certainly all those things, though the program gave pretty short shrift to the commercial aspects of the Big Apple.  (Perhaps they are saving that for the sequel.)

At two hours, the special seemed to drag a little--especially during the sections about skyscraper building, which didn't seem to offer anything new. But on the whole, this is an enjoyable foray into the city's natural history and its incredible infrastructure.

Some interesting tidbits we gleaned:

• When most of the world's landmass was just one continent, dinosaurs walked from New Jersey to Africa, and the Jersey side of the Hudson is teeming with dinosaur footprints.
  
  
• The palisades are the edge of a lake that formed when Africa ripped away from North America.
  
  
• A beaver pond once stood in the area that is now Times Square. (This, and many other good facts, are courtesy of Eric Sanderson and the Mannahatta Project at the Wildlife Conservation Society.)
  
  
• Rebuen Rose-Redwood, a geographer at Texas A&M and an expert on the 1811 survey that mapped Manhattan's grid, has found at least one original survey pin in Central Park. (We are going to search for the pin when the weather gets warmer and--if feasible--add it to one of our tours.)
  
  You can also read this article about Rose-Redwood and how his discovery of the pin was recreated for the TV cameras.
  
  
• A 55-mile long pneumatic tube system that once delivered 200,000 pieces of mail per hour between the post office and downtown office buildings.
  
  

Many of these aspects of New York's history, including the city's geology, geography, and infrastracture, all appear in  our book, Inside the Apple, which is coming out in March. To pre-order a copy at Amazon, follow this link -- or go to our home page to find other online merchants.

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