Pity poor Matamoras, PA, population 2,600, located on the Delaware River where Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey all come together. The town has only two named streets: Delaware Drive (parallel to the river), and Pennsylvania Ave. (perpendicular).
Other streets parallel to the river are numbered: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on, up to 10th. The avenues, perpendicular to the river, start with Avenue A in the north, and continue to Avenue S, in the south. Pennsylvania Ave., the main drag, is between “K” and “L”.
What a boring little town!
For another egregious example, consider Springfield, OR. The main street, imaginatively named Main Street, runs E-W, between South A Street and A Street. The other names are predictable: B Street, C Street, and…well, you get the idea. And, surprise, surprise, the N-S streets are numbered, from 1st all the way up to 75th Street (it seems there are no avenues in Springfield). Now Springfield, with nearly 60,000 people, does have a few more named streets than Matamoras (K Street has been renamed Centennial Blvd.), but not many.
Where does this sad state of affairs come from? I will guess it started in Washington, DC, where Pierre Charles L’Enfant was imported from France to design the city. He brought with him the malign influence of the French Revolution: an irrational belief in hyper-rationality. And so Washington is on a strict grid, with lettered streets running E-W, and numbered streets N-S.
Superimposed on this grid are streets named for states, most famously Pennsylvania Ave. To a very crude approximation, the States form a separate, looser grid offset by 30 degrees, though in reality they go every which way. Allegedly they provide grand vistas, and I guess they do. You’d have to tear down the Treasury Department to get the full effect.
In my view, the lettered grid streets are boring, and the state streets are unpredictable. Thus Washington is simultaneously hyper-rational and nearly unnavigable – the worst of both worlds. Beyond the federal triangle it isn’t a very attractive city, either.
So now consider New York City, or specifically, Manhattan. This appears even worse than Washington, what with all roads numbered. N-S roads (parallel to the primary axis of the island) are called Avenues, and are numbered from 1st Avenue in the east, the 12th Avenue along the Hudson. The E-W roads (along the island’s minor axis) are also numbered, designated Streets, starting with 1st Street (just north of Houston), and ending at 220th Street, at the northern tip of the island. Thus the corner of 33rd St. and 3rd Ave. is a perfectly legitimate address, as could be 8th Ave. and 88th St.
But it is even worse than this. The widest point of the island is on the Lower East Side, and hence there is a chunk of real estate east of First Avenue. Not wanting to give tenement houses imaginative addresses, the Avenues are lettered: Avenue A, Avenue B, Avenue C and Avenue D. (When I first visited New York as an adult in the 1970’s, this area was too dangerous to walk around even during the day. In recent years I’ve explored the Lower East Side on foot with no problems and great enjoyment.)
But unlike Matamoras, or Springfield, or even Washington, New York City works. Why?
The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 that platted the city of New York turns out to be a work of great genius. The key insight is asymmetry, or more accurately, anisotropy. Or, in colloquial terms that any New Yorker will understand, the difference between long blocks and short blocks.
For in Matamoras, Springfield, or Washington (or Chicago, or almost any other city you can name), the blocks are square. But not in New York – there the blocks are rectangular at a ratio of approximately 3 to 1. The long blocks, between the Avenues, are approximately 6 blocks to the mile. The short blocks, between streets, are approximately 20 blocks to the mile. Note the word “approximate.” The Commissioners were smart enough to build in slight variations based on circumstance – no hyper-rationality here.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this fact. To pick a modest example, consider the Empire State Building. That building occupies half a city block between 33rd and 34th Streets on the west side of 5th Avenue (extending half way to 6th Avenue). This half block lends the building its unique aspect ratio – approximately 1.5:1 (close to the Golden Ratio). Think how much more interesting the architecture is than a building (e.g., the Sears Tower) forced into a square block. A square Empire State Building wouldn’t look the same at all.
The Avenues, few and far between, are all broad boulevards with magnificent views. Consider 5th Avenue, looking downtown to the Washington Square Arch, or uptown toward Rockefeller Center. Indeed, every Avenue, from First through at least Ninth, rewards the pedestrian with a fantastic view. On this, New York beats Washington. (West of 9th Avenue, the wag might argue, just gets too close to New Jersey to be nice.)
Instead, do you want a little side street? Pick a number – almost any number will do – between 1 and 220, and walk cross town. Pleasant, quiet and interesting neighborhoods await. There are a few numbers – 14th St., 23rd St., 34th St., 42nd St. – which, by the Commissioners’ design, are wider traffic thoroughfares, and impressive in their own right.
New York has two other features worthy of note. One is Central Park, between 5th Avenue and 8th Avenue, from 59th Street to 110th Street. The facetious address I listed above (8th Avenue at 88th St.) doesn’t quite exist, for the Avenue along that stretch is known as Central Park West. But allowing for that difference, at 88th St. it would be a very elegant address indeed.
The second feature is the country road along the Hudson that the Commissioners rechristened as a fantastic parade route. Today we know it as Broadway. It does not follow the grid, but instead starts at Battery Park and meanders its way north and west the entire length of the island. It intersects the grid at memorable locations: Union Square, Herald Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle, and more. Please don’t forget the Flatiron Building at 23rd St. (Madison Square).
There’s more: I haven’t talked about Lower Manhattan at all, nor any of the wonderful things you can do, see and eat. But I’m out of space, so I’ll leave it here for now. I’ve never lived in New York City. Now that I live nearby, I take the train and walk the Commissioners’ streets as often as I can. Hope you can do that, too: New York is the greatest city in the world.
Daniel Jelski is Dean of Science & Engineering State University of New York at New Paltz.
Comments
33 responses to ““A” is for Avenue”
This is a subject I think about a lot, so thanks very much for addressing it in this article.
As an NYC native, I’ll give my views. For many years I found the numbered grid boring, because the streets have no names, only numbers. Also, it makes for a boring physical layout: you can enter the subway at 96th street, and re-emerge at 23rd street, and the identical street grid makes it look like you hardly traveled anywhere. You always know what to expect geographically, which I don’t care for. The positive side of a large and monotonous numbered grid is that it does make NYC very easy to navigate, especially for visitors.
The biggest problem with the grid that covers most of Manhattan is this: you can’t go more than a few hundred feet on a side street without hitting an avenue. The avenues are so fast and wide, and attract people and traffic from all over the city, that it detracts from a sense of “neighborhood.” For this reason, the idea that NYC is a “city of neighborhoods” doesn’t exist in Manhattan above 14th street. You never have two side streets intersecting, which creates a more intimate and human setting. The proximity of so many busy avenues in NYC is what makes the city supercharged, but also stressful and less intimate.
Good point about Broadway and Central Park – I just wish that NYC had a few more of these. However, herein lies the second problem with the NYC grid: the avenues have no focal points (except on avenues that dead-end at Central Park, or cross Broadway, or one-off exceptions like Fifth Ave. at Washington Square). Washington DC’s diagonal avenues are better because of the traffic circles at most big intersections: they all have monuments, or sitting areas, or are just attractive places to walk around, and they provide visual focal points, and points of orientation. It’s a shame that NYC’s avenues go on ad infinitum without any focal points, save a few aforementioned exceptions. Washington’s diagonal avenues are also superior in that they generally provide a faster option for traveling between two far-away points.
Just my two cents. I really like your article topics, Daniel. Particularly your observations about New Jersey a month or two ago.
I enjoyed the article, and also Jay’s comment, which captured what I’ve always sensed about Manhattan but couldn’t quite put into words, specifically the lack of neighborhood feel and the unrelenting sense of activity and movement, creating the “supercharged” atmosphere as you put it. Great insights. As a native Chicagoan who now lives in NJ, I would like to add some additional comparisons that I have observed.
You mention the Sears tower as forced onto a square block – yes, both the building and the block are square, but I don’t think the latter caused the former. The tower doesn’t occupy the entire block, but is actually set back from the street a bit and is surrounded by landscaping and such. Which brings up another big difference between Manhattan and other cities like Chicago – in Manhattan all the buildings front right up to the street and all touch each other with almost never a break – very few setbacks, plazas or even alleyways or parking lots separating buildings. The only break in the built environment is the street grid itself. This almost oppressive density gives the city its unique intensity other cities lack.
My other observation is the address system: here Chicago wins hands down. I once saw a little cardboard pocket slide-rule with mathematical equations on it that you could use to locate addresses in Manhattan – surely a sign the system is way too complicated. In Chicago, the general rule is every 4 blocks is a major street, every 8 blocks = 1 mile. The zero point for all addresses is the intersection of State and Madison, with addresses increasing out from there in all four directions, N/S/E/W, with 100 address numbers per block. Because of the regular grid, each street then has the same address # for its entire length, and this is labeled on the street signs themselves – for example Division is 1200 N, or 95th street is 9500 S, or Pulaski Rd is 4000 W. So based on the address and the # of the cross street, you always know where you are.
Anton – thanks for your kind comments. You too make an excellent point about the byzantine NYC address system, which is a subject that the author might have focused more on. The bottom line is that if a city is going to subject a citizenry to a monotonous numbered grid system, at least give them the loan benefit of an easily navigable address sytem!
Washington, DC, for whatever its faults, has an extremely logical address system. For example, a hypothetical address of “1150 K Street” would be between 11th and 12th Streets. The addresses on the numbered streets aren’t quite as easy pinpoint, but you just have to know which block is the 900, 1000, 1100, etc., and the same pattern holds on every parallel street. If only NYC could be that simple.
Lastly, Anton, you make a great point about the lack of space or alleys between buildings in NYC. It does contribute to the feeling of “oppressiveness.” Another big issue in Manhattan is that the sidewalks are generally too narrow for the scale of the buildings and the density of pedestrians. This is where I get the most envious of traditional wide European boulevards, like the Champs Elysee. Broadway is the most pleasant in its width, but Lexington Avenue, especially in midtown, is by far the worst. I always feel claustrophobic walking along it. I never hear sidewalk width come up as one of the “quality of life” issues that Mayor Bloomberg is so fond of championing, but if sidewalks could be widened by 50-100% in either side (or buildings were set back farther), it would very greatly improve the pedestrian experience.
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Jesse Ventura, while MN governor, said Saint Paul’s streets must have been laid out by a “drunken Irishman” because they were all named and not numbered (except a few downtown). Minneapolis, on the other hand, is all numbers except a few routes. It’s interesting that this article takes a completely different approach than the governor.
St. Paul streets are crooked, as are the streets in any river town; but away from the river, the grid is very uniform. The east/west avenue blocks are precisely one furlong in length (220 yards). The house/ building numbers, however, do not necessarily match up with the blocks. You may go three blocks before the house numbers change from, say, 300 numbers to 400 numbers, for example. The north/south streets have shorter blocks, so that the blocks are rectangular, not square, as in Chicago. Mel Williams
Good point about Broadway and Central Park – I just wish that NYC had a few more of these. However, herein lies the second problem with the NYC grid: the avenues have no focal points (except on avenues that dead-end at Central Park, or cross Broadway, or one-off exceptions like Fifth Ave. at Washington Square).i like this article!
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I’m not really sure why Springfield and the smaller cities named their streets the way they did. Must have been Washington DC’s influence. In any case, boring as they are, they are understandable and it didn’t take them a long time to figure things out, which is good in and by itself. Ken Norton repossessed cars for sale insider tips – repossessed cars for sale basics
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