Manhattan's Grid Development

New York City's population expanded North, developing Manhattan Island as a functional grid throughout the 19th century. The New York City grid was created in a time of rapid urbanization. New York City's population boomed in the late 1700s with mass immigration and the Industrial Revolution. From 1790 to 1800, the population doubled from 33,000 to 60,000 people and reached 100,000 people a mere 10 years later.

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This dense population was located in the southern tip of Manhattan below today's Houston St. an area close to New York's port, a driving factor for rapid economic mobility through the importation and exchange of goods. Through collaboration over a short period of time due to the ever increasing population, an 1811 map of New York City showed the first planned grid outline of what exists today (more or less) up to 155th street. This urban plan was decided amongst three commissioners, Gouverneur Morris, Simeon De Witt, and John Rutherfurd, who were appointed in 1807 with an 1811 deadline. They commissioned John Randel Jr to survey the land over the next fourteen years, completing his work in 1820 (Ballon 2012, 27).

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With an urgency to create a development plan due to urbanism and immigration pressures, this orderly grid was driven by economic interests of the government and private companies, creating a system that could bring the most profit by outlining commercial space and a functioning street system to circulate the importation of goods and services. The meticulous spatial grid meant the destruction of dwellings and businesses that already existed along dirt roads that did not line up with the plan, particularly farmland. With an entire island dedicated to the grid, urban farming was no longer feasible, limiting direct access to farmed produce and goods. This farmland was where the majority of free Black occupants resided, thus causing displacement amongst marginalized communities for the benefit of prominent white New Yorkers.

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North of Houston Street, Manhattan was divided into the Harlem Commons, which spanned from Houston up to a diagonal divide between today’s 79th and 93rd streets, and the Common Lands, from that diagonal divide to Manhattan’s northern tip (Koeppel 2015, 20). Today’s Inwood, residing at the Northernmost tip of Manhattan, was the last area of development in the Common Lands, let alone all of Manhattan island. Stretching river to river north of Dyckman St. (the 200th street of the grid), the neighborhood of Inwood remains one of the hilliest and untouched neighborhoods, with Inwood Park on the westside taking over roughly half of the neighborhood’s area.

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Inwood is home to a handful of Revolutionary War battles in the 1770s, vast farmland through the 1850s, and Indigenous Lenape tribes until the early 1920s. Late to urban development, Inwood and its bordering neighborhood Washington Heights were archaeological interest points at the turn of the 20th century for relic-hunters interested in procuring Revolutionary War and Lenape artifacts. Those amatuer archaeologists have left extensive records of their excavations and findings, including the Inwood African Burial Ground.