“It’s true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and sidewalks that creates urban theater on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street.”
Michael Kimmelman (in the NYT) on “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011”
Photo: The view south from Park Avenue and 94th Street, around 1882.
