The British army stationed itself comfortably in Manhattan, drilling on Bowling Green, holding balls and wenching, a situation that may have contributed to the lingering mistrust of New York by patriotic Americans. An extensive fire-either from sabotage or accident; we may never know left much to rebuild after independence. The look of Manhattan, its aesthetic destiny, so to speak, was sealed in 1811 with the approval of the commissioners' grid plan. This arrangement aid out a pattern of crisscrossed parallel bars for all the city's future thoroughfares, from above Houston Street to just below Washington Heights, disregarding any topographical impediments that might get in the way. e prevailing wisdom among today's planners is that it is important to honor the land's contours, which only goes to show how visionary the city fathers were: they created a New York as eccentrically "intentional" as St. Petersburg, a madly rational scheme imposed on nature. Nor did they have any use for the circles, ovals, and other geometric interventions so loved by Europeans. The commissioners loved the ninetydegree angle, the forthright, egalitarian plod of rectangle after rectangle, extended indefinitely: they would have gridded the sea and stars if given the chance. One reason the city fathers liked the grid was that it facilitated the orderly sale and development of property. While one hears the Manhattan grid disparaged today as merely a capitalist device for realestate speculation, to me it is a mighty form, existential metaphor, generator of modernity, Procrustean bed, call it what you will, a thing impossible to overpraise. The architect Rem Koolhaas called it "the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization." It inspired Mondrian, Sol Lewitt, Agnes Martin, and that's good enough for me. Those who maintain it makes for monotony are at a loss to account for the vitality of Manhattan street life. They overlook this particular grid's power to invoke clarity, resonance, and pleasure through its very repetitions; they ignore the role of Broadway as a diagonal "rogue" street creating dramas of triangulation wherever it intersects an avenue (think, say, of 168th Street, 72nd Street, 59th Street, 42nd Street, 34th Street, 23rd Street...); and they forget variations in block length within the grid, which differentiate the petite, elegant poodle walks of the Upper East Side, say, from the long, punishing treks between avenue comers on the Upper West Side. The grid pulls you ever forward, along those avenues that are the only true "streams" recognized by the New York pedestrian. Interestingly, the 1811 plan had rationalized its failure to provide for parks and other recreational breathers by stating that the island's river waterfronts would yield sufficient relief. (The creation of Central Park, which opened in 1859, compensated in part for the 1811 grid plan's failure to provide for recreational spaces.