City on a Grid [antikvár]

-Si Introduction There will come a time . . . when nothing will be of more interest than authentic reminiscences of the past. —^Walt Whitman, Brooklyn Daily Standard, June 1861 But in analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry, November 1836 IF A PICTURE is worth eighty thousand words or so, one image captures what this book is about. And if every picture tells a story, this image tells two. The photograph was taken during the winter of 1882-83 from the roof of a millionaire brewer's new brownstone mansion at the crest of Prospect Hill, on the east side of Fourth Avenue between 93rd and 94th Streets. This was an evolving neighborhood of New York City, which then consisted of Manhattan only (the boroughs came a little bit later). The avenue and streets on this segment of the island had been laid in the 1850s, but development had been stalled by the loud and dirty locomotives of the New York and Harlem Railroad, running since the 1830s on surface tracks through what was then and for decades after countryside. Only after the tracks were sunk belowground and covered during the mid-1870s did scattered squatter shacks, small factories, and aging farms give