Surveyor's Bolt

You're more likely to hip over it than to hail it as a historical ariat but that four-inch-high bolt protruding from a striated boulder in Central Park holds the key to what Rem Koolhaas would call Manhattan's "three-dimensional anarchy." If the nation's second-largest metropolis is the City of Angels, New York is the City of Angles--a rigid, no-frills 90-degree street grid that avoided the narrow, crooked, Dutch-inspired downtown streets that fed conflagration and disease. Instead, the grid spurred unprecedented development and spawned defiant jaywalking, taxicab geometry, and vehicular gridlock (a term popularized during the 1980 transit strike by Sam Schwartz, who became the city Traffic Department's chief engineer).Thank John Randel, Jr., the visionary city surveyor hired by street commissioners sanctioned by the state. In 1811, when New York City barely bulged above what became Houston Street (not for nothing was it called North Street then), Randel fancifully but meticulously mapped a two-thousand-block matrix on forests, farms, salt marshes, country estates, and common lands north for nearly eight miles to what would become West 155th Street. (In 1846, Randel would be among the first to propose an elevated railway over Broadway.)Randel's inexorable northward march was greeted ambivalently. He was vilified by everyone from Clement Clark Moore--who, before making a fortune parceling out his Chelsea estate and staking claim to "A Visit from St. Nicholas" handed the street commissioners "men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome" - to Henry James, who later condemned the grid as a “primal topographic curse.”"To some, it may be a matter of surprise that the whole island has not been laid as a city," the commissioners wrote. "To others, it may be a subject of merriment that the commissioners have provided space for a greater population than is collected at any spot on this side of China." They forecast that the 1811 city of some 60,000 would mushroom to 400,000 in fifty years, but by 1860, New York was bursting with more than double that number.Historians have called his nine-foot-long map "the single most important document in New York City's development." Its geometric embodiment of Cartesian coordinates created a high-stakes chessboard. It paved the way for rational development, driving streets through private property (of the nearly two thousand buildings north of Houston Street, over a third had to be razed or transplanted) and imposing flat equal lots as a great leveler. The grid would prove surprisingly resilient, eventually accommodating motor vehicles, sidewalks, stoops, two thousand additional acres of landfill, superblocks like Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center, and the Hudson Yards, and the most striking example of urban ideality, Central Park. Randel crafted his own tools, filled field books with hundreds of pages of detailed notes and sketches, and to mark the intersections he envisioned, installed 1,549 three-foot-high marble monuments and, where the ground was too rocky, 98 iron bolts secured by lead. Nowhere, wrote Edward K. Spann, an urban historian, "was the triumph of the grid as decisive as in America's greatest city." At least one of those bolts remains, peeking from a boulder in Central Park.TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS