It was a bold plan for the city’s growth—a tight, rectilinear network of streets overriding natural terrain and private property, extending far beyond the small early settlement at the foot of the island into its wilder open reaches. It seemed ruthless and unreal, visionary or hallucinatory. Farms, homes, hills, valleys, woods and streams had disappeared under a relentless geometric overlay of right-angled streets: the famous Manhattan grid.
