Manhattan and the 1811 grid

A plan drawn before the city arrived

In 1811 a commission laid a rectangular street grid across almost the whole of Manhattan above the existing town, at a moment when the built city stopped well short of what is now Midtown. The plan was criticised at the time for its indifference to topography and its lack of squares, and it was adopted anyway because its purpose was administrative: a grid of regular parcels is the fastest way to survey, sell and tax land. Two centuries later the housing economics of the island still run on that decision.

The geometry that produced the buildings

The grid's blocks are long from east to west and short from north to south. Subdividing them produced lots that were narrow at the street and very deep - a shape that admits light and air at the two ends only. Nearly every distinctive Manhattan residential type is a solution to that constraint. The row house stacks rooms front to back along a narrow frontage, with the least-lit rooms in the middle. The tenement crams multiple households onto the same footprint and produced, in time, the regulations requiring air shafts and then genuine courtyards. The pre-war apartment house assembles several lots so that a courtyard becomes possible at all.

Assembly is the recurring theme. Because the base parcel is small, anything larger than a row house requires buying neighbours out, which is slow, expensive and occasionally impossible. That is why the island's building line is so irregular in height, and why a single holdout parcel can shape a block for decades.

Avenue and side street

The plan gave the avenues width and the side streets less of it, and use followed: commerce on the avenues, residence between them. The distinction has been remarkably durable. Frontage on a wide avenue carries noise and traffic and is worth more for retail; a mid-block side street address is quieter and is generally worth more per square foot for living. It is one of the few generalisations about Manhattan value that survives across neighbourhoods and price bands.

What was layered on afterwards

The grid governs the parcel; everything else was added later. Zoning arrived in 1916 and introduced setback requirements that produced the stepped profile of the 1920s towers; subsequent revisions traded bulk for plazas and then for other public benefits. Historic district designation, from the 1960s onward, froze the exteriors of large parts of the older stock and, in doing so, fixed the supply in exactly the areas where demand was about to rise most. A resident's practical experience of all this is a set of rules about what may be altered, extended or replaced - rules whose ultimate reference is still a lot line drawn by surveyors in 1811.

Why the history matters to a buyer

Because it explains the layout you are standing in. A dark middle room, an awkward through-floor plan, a building that is six storeys beside one of forty, a courtyard on one side of the street and none on the other: these are not accidents of taste but consequences of a parcel shape and the rules that were in force when each building filled it.