Getting Giddy About Our Grid

The city"s original design team nets positive response's two centuries later By [Christopher Moore] Now that we can go back to ignoring Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire for another three-plus years, let"s concentrate again on city life. Especially since the hottest thing in cold New York this January is the grid. Yes, the grid, as in the way the streets were laid out in this city. It"s the toast of the town's and it only took 200 years. Through April 15, Tax Day, The Museum of the City of New York is presenting a new exhibition, The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011. This amounts to one of the city"s treasures, the museum itself, paying tribute to another, our urban design scheme. The Greatest Grid has a book, too, as so many exhibitions threaten to, and the oh-so-smart chair of the City Planning Commission, Amanda Burden, is an exhibition chairperson. All of this attention is part of a 200th birthday party for the grid, otherwise known as our way of life. Is that an overstatement? Probably not. Just visit those city streets and see the dynamism inspired at least in part by smart design. The grid, like so many valuable things about this crazy place, is easy to take for granted. At least one published writer has admitted a certain dislike for downtown streets sans numbers. The commenter insisted years ago that he likes â??living on the grid and pretty much nowhere else. Small-minded? Probably. But so many of us, when we stop and think about it, might agree. The grid looks especially good to a New Yorker after he makes the dire mistake of traveling somewhere else. Go to Washington, D.C., and get lost in the excessive diagonal nonsense. Bond with Boston, yes, but get ready to navigate around the Big Dig. Head to Los Angeles and engage in the old debate about whether there"s a there there. Or just stay in town and enjoy an afternoon in Greenwich Village. The streets keep bumping into each other down there. Charm and confusion combine. Right in the Village the numbered streets start, as does the delightful sense of knowing where you are. Say one thing about the whole of Manhattan: We"ve got a there. And the there goes on and on and on, with one neighborhood seeping into another. A thoughtful front-page New York Times piece last week by Michael Kimmelman, headlined â??The Grid at 200: Lines that Shaped Manhattan, championed how our city forefathers thought ahead. While admitting that our borough â??lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public space, Kimmelman smartly points to the advantages: easy navigation, endless street life and an easy way to speedily assess distances. The challenge Kimmelman makes us think about is clear: Can we â??live up to the grid? It"s a wow of a question in a wow of a column. It"s a political question too. Still, the grid is experienced personally, one pedestrian at a time. People here remain passionate about the streets they walk. In this big city, neighbors talk with a potent mix of enthusiasm and criticism about the changing streetscape. The comings and going of local businesses. Whether and where we can fit in another needed school. How the parks are being maintained, managed and utilized. Those of us in studio apartments think of everything outside the door as our backyard. Like Americans with picket fences, we urban dwellers care about what happens in our backyard. The grid deserves its birthday attention. Compared to so many European cultural capitals, our scheme is young. The layout we call home seems like it must have been around forever, especially since it is so entrenched in our collective consciousness, but in the grand sweep of time, the grid is in its early years. The mark, though, has been made. To celebrate this birthday, take to the streets. There"s always some sort of party happening out there. Christopher Moore is a writer who lives in Manhattan. He is available by email at ccmnj@aol.com and on Twitter (@cmoorenyc).