Selects: The Manhattan Grid

**Chuck Bryant** (0:01)
Hi, everybody. It is on our COVID timeline, June 18th, 2020 And I am here to introduce the episode on The Manhattan Grid. I loved, loved this episode. I think as most people know by now, I in particular am pretty obsessed with not just New York, like I love New York as a town, but the inner workings of New York and the garbage collection and the mail delivery and building that city up from the ground up, which is what this episode relates to, is how they laid out that Manhattan Grid. And here's one thing I remember from it, and here's a fun tip if you're traveling to New York.
They use spikes in the ground, I think iron spikes, to map out that grid, and you'll learn that in this episode to follow.
You know, so they knew where the streets and the street corners would meet up in that big rectangle. And to this day, you can still find some of those. The only place I know about them, I'm not sure if they're on the streets anymore at all. It seems highly unlikely, but I know you can find them for a fact in Central Park here and there in the rocks, those big giant boulders there, because I learned about these, and when I was in New York, sometime between June 18th, 2020, when we released this, and now, I can't remember, I feel like it was a few years ago, I saw one of those spikes. And I think I talked about that on a later episode, but it thrilled me to no end, and I geeked out and told everybody I was with what that was and what it represented, and it was a real thrill for me. No lie, just a spike in the rock. I thought it was super cool, so check this episode out on the Manhattan Grid.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:39)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

**Josh Clark** (1:48)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff You Should Know, another in our Endless Annals of New York City edition.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:01)
That's right, this is a pretty interesting episode, I think, and my favorite part about it, this was Dave Ruse, one of our writers, helped put this together, and Dave is clearly annoyed about this whole thing, and I think it's hysterical how many times he gets annoyed by the laziness of the commission.

**Josh Clark** (2:26)
I have to say, I agreed with Dave too, I was annoyed by it as well, I think. It's always annoying when you see somebody have a great opportunity and just pee it away, you know what I mean?

**Chuck Bryant** (2:38)
Yeah, and we should also point out, Dave got a lot of his information from a really wonderful book called City on a Grid, Colon, How New York Became New York by Gerald Keppel.

**Josh Clark** (2:52)
Not Gerald McGraney, different Gerald.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:55)
Right, or is it Koppel? I think it's Keppel if it's K-O-E.

**Josh Clark** (2:58)
That's what I was going with was Keppel.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:00)
Yeah, I'm going to get this book, though. This is right up my alley because I'm obsessed with the history and the formation of New York City as we know it today.

**Josh Clark** (3:08)
Yeah, where did you get the idea for this episode?

**Chuck Bryant** (3:11)
Just my constant desire to learn about Manahatta and how that became eventually Manhattan that we know and love. I'm just fascinated by it. I love it. I love everything about it.

**Josh Clark** (3:24)
This is definitely a big chapter in it because what we're talking about is the plan called the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 that basically laid out Manhattan as we know and understand and love it today. Everything north of Houston Street, I should say.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:39)
Yeah, and here's sort of a quick primer.
Manhattan above Houston is almost a perfect grid. Broadway kind of screws everything up.
But, you know, great street, but it's just Broadway's like, I'm not following any rules. So I'm going to confuse people. But aside from that, it's pretty much a grid of 11 numbered avenues that run north to south, generally speaking. Then you've got Lexington Park and Madison Avenues. And then 200, and this was at the time, numbered streets running roughly east to west. And if you want to get a little more granular than that, the southernmost street in the East villages, East First, as you would imagine, the northernmost is 220th Street, as we live and breathe today, in Inwood.

**Josh Clark** (4:34)