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Sto caricando le informazioni... City on a Grid: How New York Became New York (2015)di Gerard Koeppel
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"City on a Grid tells--for the first time--the fascinating story of the creation and long life of New York City's distinctive street grid: its many streets crossed at right angles by a few parallel avenues laid upon a rural Manhattan two centuries ago. The grid made New York what it is today, and defined the urbanism of a rising nation. When it was first conceived at the start of the nineteenth century, the grid was intended to bring order to the chaos of 'Old New York'--the quaint, low-scale, but notoriously dirty and disorderly place of jumbled colonial streets that had sprouted from the southern tip of the island from its earliest days. Turning the swamps and hills of Manhattan into the city we know today was a project on the scale of building the Erie or Panama Canals or the Transcontinental Railway. Like those epics, it is a story filled with larger-than-life characters. And the hundreds of rectangular lots and buildings the grid inevitably produced gave a sense of stability and rational purpose for a young city evolving into greatness. Now, then, is the time to tell the grid's story: the events that led to it, how the commissioners and their surveyor came up with their plan, and how the lengthening life of the city has been utterly shaped by it. Whether one loves or hates New York's grid, little has been written to explain how it came to be, who did it and why, and what it has meant for New York and the cities and nation that have looked to New York as the model for American urban life. Until now"-- Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)307.1Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Communities Planning & DevelopmentClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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If it were half the size (or a third), focussing on the good bits, that would have been quite a book! But by including every fact about everything and everyone he just lost me. Here's an early tidbit:
"In April 1790, the Council formerly offered L'Enfant ten acres at the northeasterly corner of the Common Lands, roughly between today's 68th and 70th Streets east of Third Avenue. Remote as it might have been from the city, this land did border the well-traveled Post Road and was just up the road from the Dove Tavern, a popular public house established in 1763 (and the locus of Nathan Hale's hanging in 1776) at today's 66th Street and Third Avenue."
And guess what? He turned them down! A whole paragraph about nothing. How about "The Council offered him land but he turned them down." I don't need all these details about what the rejected offer was, and what it was near, and what things happened in a place that was near the place that was near the land that he didn't accept.
If you love detail upon detail, don't wait. But for the average reader, I expect this is more chore than cheer.
(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!) ( )