They based its grid-like street plan on Philadelphia's, with numbered north-south streets running inland from the river after River Street, the city's first commercial center.
The optimistic spirit of the town is apparent in the street plan adopted in 1811, a grid of blocks, avenues, streets, and lots extending to the northern reaches of the island.
The Manhattan street plan deviates from its basic grid only twice-once, of course, below 14th St., in the twisting welter of alleys & side streets & diagonals that make up the financial district SoHo & the Village; and again way uptown, above about 193rd St., where the grid suddenly tilts east around Inwood Hill Park & the main thoroughfares have names like Vermilyea, Post & Isham.
The plan called for a rectangular enclosure with a grid street pattern, 3.2 miles (5.1 km) north to south and 2.8 miles (4.5 km) east to west.
Anglo-Saxon Hertford is an example of town planning as demonstrated by its organised rectangular grid street pattern.
He compares the non-geometric street plan in medieval Bruges, impenetrable to strangers, to the "transparency" of New York's grid of numbered streets and avenues.
Soon, elaborate street plans, with parks, grids, and slashing diagonals resembling those of Versailles, would be traced over a terrain that still housed more bears than people.
That same year, Don Baltasar and his brother-in-law donated their properties to the town, and an engineer assisted in the urban planning, which included grid streets and a parish church.
But Madrid Río is a project whose audacity and scale, following the urban renewal successes of Barcelona, Spain's civic trendsetter, can bring to a New Yorker's mind the legacy of the street-grid plan, which this year celebrates its 200th anniversary.
She recalled the tale of John Randel Jr., a traffic engineer charged with implementing the city's 1811 street grid plan, noting that he had been pelted with vegetables by unhappy property owners.
