The Ugly Process

When I talked about the fake streets shown around the old reservoir, I gave a short description of how New York handled horizontal growth in the 1800s. Streets were first “mapped,” then “opened,” then “worked.” Most of the mapping took place early. The theoretical map was first publicly available as the Commissioners’ Plan as of 1811. That plan was modified in various ways, but the numbered avenues and streets in the plan (except for those eliminated for Central Park) exist today in their intended locations.

“Opening” and “working” the streets was the process of acquiring the land (some of which was part of various farms and other private property), physically constructing the streets, and then creating lots on any previously unowned adjacent land. Manhattan was, in its natural state, far hillier than it is today. Creating the streets included building up the elevation of the streets in low-lying areas and cutting through hilltops to keep the grades to what a horse and carriage could reasonably navigate. The work, of course, was all performed by muscle power, human and animal, and therefore was slow in completion.

People had constructed buildings – most often private houses – located so that they were aligned with the streets that did not yet exist but were shown on the maps. The public maps didn’t indicate the amount of change of grade that was planned at any given location, so there was no way to know in advance where your ground floor would end up relative to the street when the street was built. This leads us to the picture above, showing a newly-graded portion of Second Avenue in 1861. The houses on the left are either new or the owners were lucky; the poor owner on the right foreground had to build a rather tricky stair and fence to keep the house useable on its now-isolated mesa. A few other houses in a similar position are visible, as is a cut through the middle of a hill off in the distance.

This state of affairs was generally temporary. Once the streets were graded and paved, speculators began building houses and other buildings along them, and eventually almost all of the odd-elevation houses were torn down so that their lots could be regraded as well. But it took a while: the picture below is from Harlem in 1888: