Gerard Koeppel’s third book, City on a Grid. follows his histories of the Erie Canal and New York City’s water system. Those earlier books were quite good, but share bookshelves with many others covering the same topics. Koeppel notes that Manhattan’s extensive grid has “never had a book,” so he wrote one, with the main story being “the creation and long life of the iconic street grid of New York” (pp. xii–xiii). Koeppel provides a brief history of rectilinear street grids in other cities that date back nearly 5,000 years and includes several cities in ancient Greece. The Spanish brought the grid to New World cities such as Lima and Buenos Aires, while William Penn introduced a grid to Philadelphia and James Oglethorpe laid out Savannah, Georgia, on one as well. Koeppel also mentions the desire of the Continental Congress that new states should have rectilinear borders and that new territories “should be divided up into rectangles” based on “townships six miles square” (pp. 5–6). The first attempt to bring order to street planning in Manhattan was the DeLancey family’s 1760s establishment of a rectilinear grid to facilitate subdividing and selling their 340-acre estate. As royalists, their property was confiscated after the Revolution, but their grid remained. Shortly thereafter, another family, the Bayards, who had acquired several hundred acres in southern Manhattan, hired Casimir Goerck to survey their property, which resulted in another grid that “remains as today’s Soho,” including 25’ x 150’ lots and along Houston Street (p. 25). The author then takes us north to the 1,300-acre Common Lands, which had been inherited from the Dutch and included roughly the area between 23rd and 90th streets between Second and Seventh Avenues. Faced with the need to raise revenue to repay its Revolutionary War debt, the city hired Goerck to survey and divide the land into five-acre lots for lease or sale. Goerck completed his work by December 1785 with lots laid out on both sides of a single northsouth road, but the poor topography of the land did not result in many sales.

中文翻译：

---

打造纽约市

Gerard Koeppel 的第三本书，网格上的城市。跟随他对伊利运河和纽约市供水系统的历史。那些早期的书相当不错，但与许多其他涵盖相同主题的书共享书架。Koeppel 指出，曼哈顿庞大的网格“从来没有一本书”，所以他写了一本书，主要故事是“纽约标志性街道网格的创建和长寿”（第xii-xiii 页）。Koeppel 提供了可追溯到近 5,000 年前的其他城市的直线街道网格的简史，其中包括古希腊的几个城市。西班牙人将电网带到了利马和布宜诺斯艾利斯等新世界城市，而威廉·佩恩则将电网引入了费城，詹姆斯·奥格尔索普 (James Oglethorpe) 也在乔治亚州的萨凡纳 (Savannah) 布置了电网。Koeppel 还提到了大陆会议的愿望，即新州应该有直线边界，新领土“应该根据“六英里平方的乡镇”（第 5-6 页）“划分为矩形”。第一次为曼哈顿的街道规划带来秩序的尝试是 DeLancey 家族 1760 年代建立的直线网格，以促进细分和出售他们 340 英亩的庄园。作为保皇党，他们的财产在革命后被没收，但他们的网格仍然存在。此后不久，另一个在曼哈顿南部收购了数百英亩土地的 Bayards 家族聘请了 Casimir Goerck 来勘察他们的财产，这导致了另一个“仍然是今天的 Soho”的网格，包括 25 英尺 x 150 英尺的地块和休斯顿沿线街道（第 25 页）。然后作者带我们向北到达 1,300 英亩的公共土地，它是从荷兰人那里继承下来的，大致包括第二大道和第七大道之间的第 23 街和第 90 街之间的区域。面对筹集收入以偿还其革命战争债务的需要，该市聘请戈尔克对土地进行勘测并将其划分为五英亩的土地以供出租或出售。Goerck 于 1785 年 12 月完成了他的工作，在一条南北向道路两侧布置了地块，但土地的恶劣地形并没有导致很多销售。