The Manhattan Grid Mechanics for a Non-Resident

The Numbering

In 1807, the New York State Legislature appointed a three-man commission to lay a grid over the island of Manhattan from Houston Street north to 155th Street; the commission hired a surveyor named John Randel Jr. and delivered the finished plan in 1811.¹ The commission’s plan specified twelve avenues running roughly north to south and numbered cross-streets running east to west, from 1st Street in the East Village to 220th Street near Inwood. The geometry was simple and it was enforced: the island was divided into blocks of roughly two hundred feet east to west and eight hundred feet north to south, and these blocks were to be the organizing unit of all future construction. Randel spent years making measurements in what was then largely open farmland, setting cast-iron bolts in rock and wooden stakes in soil to mark the grid’s intersections. By the late nineteenth century, the city had grown to fill it.¹

The avenues ran east to west in a fixed order. From First Avenue on the far east side of the island, the sequence moved west through Second, Third, then Lexington — inserted between Third and Fourth to relieve the pressure of the growing East Side — then Park (the upper portion of Fourth Avenue, renamed above 32nd Street), then Madison (inserted between Fifth and Park by the city in 1836, beginning at 23rd Street), then Fifth, then Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth.² The numbered avenues ran the length of the grid with reasonable continuity; the inserted avenues did not. Madison began at 23rd and ended at the Harlem River. Lexington began at Gramercy Park, at 21st Street; below it, the same corridor continued south as Irving Place. These interruptions were not marked on the street signs.

Fifth Avenue was the spine of the east-west system. A West 42nd Street address was west of Fifth; an East 42nd Street address was east of it. House numbers on the cross-streets began at Fifth and ran outward in both directions, so that a resident of East 47th Street and a resident of West 47th Street both had a “1” or a “2” near the avenue and a higher number as they moved away from it. The system was legible. Uptown meant north; downtown meant south; crosstown meant east to west. The subway used the same vocabulary: the uptown 6 train, the downtown 4, the crosstown shuttle at 42nd. Midtown was roughly 34th to 59th Street, the territory of office towers and national media companies and the expense-account lunch. A New Yorker walking from 42nd Street to 86th Street had walked roughly 2.2 miles. This calculation — automatic to a resident — was invisible to anyone who had not made it a hundred times.

The avenue numbers, by contrast, indexed to nothing a stranger could use. The cross-streets were transparent: their number told you how far you were from Houston Street, and the distance between any two was approximately the same. The avenues did not work this way. The building number on an avenue bore no discernible relationship to the nearest cross-street. 1271 Sixth Avenue was at 50th Street. 444 Madison Avenue was at 49th. 350 Madison was at 45th. The relationship was derivable, but only by formula, and the formula was different for each avenue.³ Old New Yorkers carried the conversion table in their heads, or in the seat pocket of the cab, or in the back of the Hagstrom Manhattan street map that the newsstands sold for a few dollars and that most working residents owned. The man at the newsstand on 42nd Street in October 1991 who pointed north without looking up had not consulted the formula. He had driven the city long enough that 1271 Sixth Avenue had become a fact as unambiguous as the address on his own building.

South of 14th Street, none of this applied. Greenwich Village, the West Village, SoHo, Tribeca, the Financial District — these neighborhoods had been laid out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the irregular geometry of colonial settlement, and the grid’s commission had left them alone.¹ The streets in the colonial section had names rather than numbers — Bleecker, MacDougal, Sullivan, Thompson, Hudson, Greenwich, Washington — and they ran at angles determined by old farm boundaries and cow paths rather than by the surveyor’s transit. West 4th Street, moving west from Sixth Avenue, crossed West 10th Street, then West 11th, West 12th, West 13th. The intersection of West 4th and West 10th was a physical place; it was also, by the logic of any numbered system, impossible. A non-resident standing at that corner felt the impossibility without being able to explain it.

The colonial section was the part of the island most heavily populated by the editorial class — by writers, editors, and publishing professionals who had moved there in the 1960s and 1970s and stayed, or who had arrived in the 1980s and paid more for the privilege. It was the most stable residential geography in the city across the period, least disrupted by the forces that were remaking the outer boroughs and the middle of Manhattan. The Village had always been the part of the city described, by the people who lived in it, as charming. The word carried the implication that the streets did not go where they were supposed to.

The Renamed Avenues

No New Yorker who lived through the period referred to Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas. The rename had been official since 1945, when a mayoral ordinance rechristened the avenue in honor of Pan-American solidarity — bronze medallions of the Latin American nations were affixed to the lampposts, the name appeared on every street-sign blade, and every document issued by the city or the federal government used the official designation.² None of this had any effect on the spoken language. Sixth Avenue was Sixth. The official name was understood as the register of tourist brochures and corporate letterheads; using it in speech placed the speaker immediately outside the city, in the way that calling the IRT the “subway train” placed a character in a period drama set somewhere else.

Park Avenue South was a shorter-lived rename with a more transparent motive. The stretch of Fourth Avenue between 14th and 32nd Street had been given the new name in 1959, when the developers selling office space along the corridor concluded that “Fourth Avenue” did not carry the residential associations of Park Avenue proper.² The rename worked, commercially if not topographically: the section acquired glass-curtain-wall office buildings through the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1980s the name Park Avenue South had settled into common use, even if the connection to Park Avenue above 32nd Street was entirely nominal. Below 14th Street, the same physical street continued south as Fourth Avenue, then bifurcated into Lafayette and the Bowery as the colonial geometry resumed. The address 14 Park Avenue South was not the same city as 740 Park Avenue.

Madison Avenue had been cut into the grid by the city in 1836, threaded between Fifth and the former Fourth Avenue to absorb the expansion of residential Manhattan east of Fifth.² It began at 23rd Street and ran north to the Harlem River. By the 1950s it had lent its name to an entire industry — the advertising agencies that concentrated on its blocks between 40th and 60th Street gave the decade a usable shorthand — but the avenue itself in 1989 was mixed: agencies and magazine companies in the lower Fifties and Forties, prewar residential towers north of 70th, the occasional corporate flagship. A Midtown address on Madison meant something different from a Yorkville address on Madison, even though the street was continuous.

The Upper West Side’s avenue renames were older and more thoroughly absorbed. Ninth Avenue became Columbus above 59th Street; Tenth became Amsterdam; Eleventh became West End.² The changes had been made in the late nineteenth century by the neighborhood’s first residents, who found the numbered-avenue associations of the Lower East Side’s tenement geography unwelcome in the aspirational brownstone blocks north of the park. A 1989 address on West 82nd and Columbus Avenue was formally west of Central Park and north of 59th Street, and a cab driver who did not know to substitute the name for the number would take a passenger to a block that did not match. The break at 59th Street was unmarked. It was one of the facts the city did not explain.

Above 110th Street, in the blocks of central and west Harlem, three more avenues had been renamed through City Council action in the 1970s and 1980s. Sixth Avenue, which had already carried the name Lenox Avenue north of 110th since the late nineteenth century, was redesignated Malcolm X Boulevard in 1987.² Seventh Avenue became Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in the mid-1970s. Eighth Avenue became Frederick Douglass Boulevard in the late 1970s. The official signs in Harlem carried the new names. The question of which names appeared in magazine prose was not resolved uniformly across the industry or across the decade. Through the early 1990s, the standard practice in mainstream monthly publications was to use the older avenue names or numbers in body text and append the new designation in a parenthetical — “Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard)” — or to omit the rename entirely. By the late 1990s the convention had begun to shift, and the redesignated names appeared without explanation in a growing number of publications, though not consistently. A copy editor’s decision about which form to use was a small editorial choice with a legible social valence. The name on the sign and the name in the prose did not always agree, and the gap between them was a reliable indicator of which city a given publication imagined itself addressing.

The Editorial Triangle

For most of the decade, the American magazine industry occupied a remarkably compressed geography. Condé Nast sat at 350 Madison Avenue at 45th Street. Time Inc. occupied the Time-Life Building at 1271 Sixth Avenue at 50th. Newsweek was at 444 Madison Avenue. Hearst ran its titles from 959 Eighth Avenue in the West Fifties. The New Yorker, acquired by S.I. Newhouse in 1985 but operated separately from the rest of Condé Nast, maintained its offices at 25 West 43rd Street through the 1990s. The trade press called the rough rectangle formed by these addresses Magazine Row. A senior editor willing to walk at a reasonable pace could move from any one of these buildings to any other in under fifteen minutes.

The lunch geography had compressed into the same rectangle. The Four Seasons on Park Avenue at 52nd Street remained the signal address for a certain kind of deal — an editor-in-chief entertaining a writer she wanted to hold, a publisher who needed a conversation to go well. Michael’s, which opened on West 55th Street in 1989, served essentially the same function for the generation that found the Four Seasons too formal. The Royalton on West 44th, renovated in 1988 by Philippe Starck and favored by a younger editorial and fashion contingent through the early 1990s, sat almost exactly at the center of the rectangle; it was close enough to all the major buildings that eating there carried no particular neighborhood allegiance. The Algonquin, also on West 44th, was the literary address — its Round Table associations were four decades old by 1989, but the name still did work, and the lunchroom remained in use by a certain kind of editor who wanted the history in the room. A senior editor at a major monthly could reach four of these from her own building without crossing a major avenue.

The residential pattern of the editorial class radiated outward from the rectangle in four directions. North along Park, Madison, and Fifth into the Upper East Side, where prewar co-ops on good blocks carried a social weight the rest of the city did not contest. North on the other side into the Upper West Side, where the 1970s and 1980s had brought a different kind of editorial professional — slightly more political, slightly less interested in certain dinner-party hierarchies. South into Greenwich Village and the West Village, the colonial section, which had been the most stable residential geography in the city for three decades and remained so: the irregularity of the streets had kept the developers away, and the result was a dense residential zone of brownstones and prewar walk-ups occupied at high concentrations by writers, editors, and academics who had arrived in the 1960s and never found a reason to leave. And, in the second half of the decade, west into Chelsea, where the galleries that had begun migrating from SoHo around 1994 had settled on the west side of Tenth Avenue between roughly 19th and 29th Streets, and where loft conversions were bringing a younger and less affluent editorial cohort into industrial buildings that still smelled of the fabric trade.

The bridges and tunnels ringed the editorial rectangle but did not penetrate it. The 59th Street Bridge connected the east side of Midtown to Queens; the Queens-Midtown Tunnel emerged at 37th Street, the Lincoln at 39th; the Holland Tunnel ran to Jersey City from Tribeca, five miles south; the George Washington Bridge, four miles north, served Washington Heights and points beyond. The toll fell on whoever crossed a river: a production assistant commuting in each morning from Hoboken or Weehawken paid it twice a day at the Lincoln or the Holland, and a cab carrying a masthead editor out to LaGuardia could cross the East River toll-free on the 59th Street Bridge or pay at the Midtown Tunnel if the driver preferred the more direct route down 37th Street. The choice of crossing was a small daily calculation the editorial rectangle’s own residents never had to make.

In the last months of 1999 and the first weeks of 2000, the rectangle began to break. Condé Nast had signed a lease on the Durst Organization’s 4 Times Square tower in 1996, and on June 21, 1999, the first staff — roughly two hundred employees from Brides, House & Garden, and Women’s Sports and Fitness — moved west from 350 Madison into 4 Times Square.⁴ Over the following winter, the rest of the company followed: Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, The New Yorker, Glamour, and the others vacated 350 Madison and relocated to the block of 42nd Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, a stretch that had stood largely vacant through the recession years earlier in the decade. The limousines that attended senior editors accumulated on 42nd Street in two long rows during the transition; the double-parked black town cars were the visible announcement that the geography of the trade had changed. The addresses that remained on Madison and Sixth — the Hearst building, Newsweek, the others who had not followed Condé Nast west — retained the old gravity, but the center of it had moved, and every cab driver who drove a masthead editor home from Times Square in the winter of 2000 knew an address that had not existed on the route two years before.

The Body in the Grid

The grid was rotated 29 degrees clockwise from true east to west.¹ This was a fact most New Yorkers did not consciously know and felt in their bodies every clear morning of the year. The avenues did not run north to south; they ran north-northeast to south-southwest. The cross-streets did not run east to west; they ran east-southeast to west-northwest. The practical consequence was that the long shadows of any clear winter morning fell along the avenues rather than across them — the sun rose south of due east, and its first light came down the avenue corridors at a low angle that tracked the grid’s rotated geometry rather than the compass. The late-afternoon sun in late May and again in mid-July dropped directly down the long axis of the cross-streets in the gridded zone between 14th and 57th Streets, bisecting the canyons twice a year in a phenomenon visible from far up the avenues: a wall of horizontal light at the intersections, the cross-streets briefly incandescent, the geometry of the city made legible by what it was doing to the light.

In late November, at 8:30 in the morning, the sun sat at roughly 13 degrees of altitude above the southeast horizon — barely ninety minutes above the horizon — and its light, filtered through atmosphere and the bronze-tinted single-pane glass of a Midtown office tower, arrived at a desk reading somewhere around 4,000 Kelvin: warm, amber, raking. The sun never climbed high that time of year; solar noon in late November yielded a maximum altitude of about 28 degrees, and the day ended at 4:32 in the afternoon. Nine and a half hours of usable light, the last hour past its useful warmth. A senior editor reviewing galley pages by the window at 4:25 on a late November afternoon was reading by what was already the light’s failing edge, the shadows of the building opposite lengthening across the desk, the avenue below darkening from the bottom up. The building’s geometry was carved by November light in a way the other months did not produce — the shadows of one tower laid across the face of the next, the avenue between them a corridor of slanted amber that lasted perhaps two hours before the sun dropped below the row of buildings to the southwest and the whole grid went to fluorescent.

In July, the grid was a different physical problem. On a day of 92 degrees and 85 percent humidity, the walk from the Lexington Avenue exit of Grand Central Terminal — where the main concourse ceiling’s celestial mural, restored during the terminal’s renovation completed in October 1998, opened above the crowd in its blue-green glory — to a magazine building on Madison was six blocks. Three of them were the long east-to-west blocks between avenues, each roughly a third of a mile. The air in the street was a wall. By the second block, the back of a shirt was sticking. Subway grates pushed warm air up from below. The lobby of a Madison Avenue tower was held in the low seventies in any weather, and the threshold between the sidewalk and the lobby was a physical event: an eighteen-degree drop in eight feet, the moisture on the skin briefly condensing, eyeglasses fogging. Women arrived at the elevator bank carrying dry blouses in tote bags. Men’s collars were translucent. The air conditioning was not a luxury. It was the reason the buildings were usable in summer.

The Blizzard of 1996 ran from January 6 through January 8. Central Park recorded 20.2 inches of snowfall over those three days — the city’s fourth-largest single-storm total since records began in 1869.⁵ Public schools closed, the first school closure since 1978. From a fourteenth-floor southwest-facing window on Sixth Avenue on the morning of January 8, the view was this: Bryant Park was a single white plane, its paths erased, its stacked chairs and tables buried or invisible. Sixth Avenue below was a corridor of unbroken white, marked only by a single set of bus-tire tracks running down its length. Steam rose in vertical columns from the manhole covers because there was no traffic to disperse it. The neighboring buildings were flat grey silhouettes against a grey-white sky. The snow on every windowsill was six to eight inches deep, and the effect of it, softening the hard geometry of the city’s setbacks and cornices, was to make the grid briefly illegible — the structures still there, their positions unchanged, but their edges gone soft, the avenue widths uncertain without the parked cars that normally defined them. The window was single-pane glass and cold to the hand. The room near the glass was sixty-two degrees. The people who had come in the day before and slept on office couches were quieter than usual.

On the night of July 6, 1999, at 10:11 in the evening, Con Edison shut off power to its Washington Heights and Inwood network after multiple feeder-cable failures during a heat wave in which temperatures had climbed past a hundred degrees.⁶ The outage lasted roughly eighteen hours. Inside Washington Heights, above 155th Street, the streets filled with people because the apartments without electricity were unbreathable; candles appeared in windows by eleven; a man sold flashlights from a cooler at five dollars each near 168th Street; an NYPD light tower arrived at the intersection of 168th and Broadway after midnight; the side streets by one in the morning were dark enough that stars were visible above the rooflines, an unfamiliar fact about a city in which the sky was never dark. From a south-facing fourteenth-floor window in a Midtown office at the same hour, looking uptown, the geometry of the grid was visible only in its absence. The Empire State Building was lit. The Chrysler was lit. The Trade Center towers, two miles to the south, were lit. Everything north of roughly 155th Street was a black shape against a slightly less black sky. A section of the city — the numbered streets, the avenues and their renames, the whole counted and named and surveyed fabric of it — had been deleted from the view.

It sat there in the window. The grid was not normally visible as a grid. It was absorbed into the background conditions of a city that used it without consulting it, the way a native speaker uses grammar. The blackout made it visible by removing a quarter of it. The avenue numbers ran on in the dark, the counting continued, the survey was still in force; the streets had not moved. Only the light was gone.