These colourful maps listed all the farms and structures and gives you a good idea of the incredible amount of work Randal did, and it’s no surprise that this task took up 11 years of his life.

I highly recommend heading over to The Greatest Grid, where they have the maps overlaid over the modern street map that you can compare and contrast with a little slider. Hours and hours fun there.

Randel’s team would mark out every intersection with a little marble post inscribed with the street numbers. Sometimes rocks made the erection of these markers impossible, so instead Randel and his team would blast a little hole in the rock, then insert a metal bolt into the rock and fuse it in with hot lead.

One of these metal bolts had to be used for the intersection of 66th st and 6th avenue. However after it was finally decided to allocate a large swathe of land to what would become Central Park, the intersection was never made, which means… you guessed it: You can still find the original bolt.

One of two bolts known to exist somewhere in Central Park. Source.

Also, it should be mentioned constructing the streets was pretty wild as well, whole hills were removed in order to get things level, and in a lot of cases, existing farm houses were left in some pretty awkward positions. Here’s the The Brennan farmhouse, at 84th and Broadway, in 1879 for instance.

Brennan Farm House, 84th and Broadway, 1879. Collection of The New-York Historical Society, #84696d source.

Interestingly, the poet Edgar Allen Poe lived in this house in around 1840 and it was likely where he penned his famous poem ‘The Raven’. A lover of the surrounding rugged terrain, he dreaded the impending new grid, writing…

“these magnificent places are doomed. The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath. Streets are already ‘mapped’ through them, and they are no longer suburban residences, but ‘town-lots.’”

It was a long gradual process, and even as late as 1903 large boulders were still waiting to be removed, as seen here between 93rd and 94th Streets, on a Riverside Drive.

Museum of the City of New York, Prints and Photographs Collection, X2010.11.3102

Anyway, what I really want to talk about is the points at which this new Commissioners Plan started intersecting with the older grids which were going in different directions…

Map of Christopher Street in the 1920s. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.

As any New Yorker knows, when that happens, you start to get a lot of confusing little triangular blocks. The point at where Christopher Street, Grove Street, Washington Place, West 4th Street and 7th Avenue all crash into each other is one of those spots.

This intersection wasn’t always so complicated. Prior to 1914, 7th Avenue stopped at Greenwich Avenue, however at about this time it was decided to extend 7th Avenue down to Varick Street in order to extend the subway. The plan was to go from this…

To this….

If you have a look closely, you’ll see a building called the Voorhis gets almost completely destroyed. The owner of the building, David Hess was (as you can imagine) PRETTY ANGRY about this plan and fought tooth and nail to get it overturned.

Sadly, for David Hess and his building, he failed and within a year the tenants had been removed and the entire plot of land the building stood on was seized by the city…

…or more accurately, almost the entire plot.

You see, David Hess’s heirs, having studied the survey, later discovered that the city had missed a small corner of the property, a diminutive triangle about the size of a large pizza slice had somehow managed to fall just outside of that ruthless 7th avenue cut-through…

…and so was technically still in the possession of the Hess Family.

If you look closely, you can just see it on the map, that very little point just near the ‘S’ of ‘STATION’ sitting there left over, just beyond 54 Christopher st.