The making of New York

A trading post, a grid, and a century of arguments about what a city is for

A The city began as a commercial outpost rather than a colony, and the distinction shaped everything that followed. A Dutch trading company established a settlement at the tip of the island in the 1620s not to plant a society but to handle furs, and it staffed the place with employees drawn from wherever they could be found. Within two decades a visiting priest reported that eighteen languages were spoken there among a few hundred people. Religious uniformity, the organising principle of the English settlements to the north, was never seriously attempted, because it would have interfered with business.

B That indifference to conformity was not tolerance in any modern sense — the company's directors were quite prepared to expel troublesome sects, and were overruled from Amsterdam on the grounds that a port which turned away useful people would be poorer than one that did not. The argument was economic and the outcome was a settlement in which no group was large enough to impose its practices on the others. The most consequential decision in the city's history was taken in 1811 by a commission asked to plan the empty land north of the built-up area. It produced a rectangular grid of twelve avenues and one hundred and fifty-five streets, imposed without regard to the hills, streams and farms it crossed, and extending far beyond any plausible need. The commissioners defended the plan on grounds that were frankly commercial: straight-sided rectangular plots are the easiest to buy, sell and build on, and the city's business was expected to be property. Aesthetic objections were dismissed, open space was minimal, and the whole of Manhattan was converted, on paper, into merchandise. The plan has been criticised ever since for monotony and defended for the same quality, on the grounds that a uniform framework leaves the buildings within it free to be anything at all, and that a city expecting to be rebuilt every few generations is better served by a neutral grid than by a design expressing the taste of 1811.

C Water determined how large the city could become. A settlement drawing on wells and a polluted pond suffered repeated epidemics and could not fight fires, and by the 1830s the constraint was absolute. The response was an aqueduct carrying water more than sixty kilometres from a dammed river in the north, delivered by gravity alone, which reached the city in 1842 and was celebrated with a procession. The pattern recurs throughout the city's development: growth is limited by an unglamorous system — water, sewers, transport — and resumes when the system is rebuilt at a scale that seems extravagant at the time and inadequate within thirty years.

D The grid's omission of open space was corrected at considerable human cost. A large park was laid out in the 1850s to a design chosen by competition, in a landscape that appears natural and is almost entirely constructed: the lakes are excavated, the outcrops were blasted, and the transverse roads are sunk below the sightlines so that traffic crossing the park cannot be seen from within it. The land had not been empty. It held several settled communities, including a village of free Black landowners with churches and a school, which were cleared by compulsory purchase, and whose existence was omitted from the park's official history for more than a century.

E Transport turned a city on one island into a region. Elevated steam railways arrived first and were detested for the noise, smoke and darkness they inflicted on the streets beneath them; the first underground line opened in 1904 and made the northern half of the island and the outer boroughs practically habitable for people working downtown. The relationship was reciprocal: lines were often built ahead of demand, through farmland, by companies who understood that the land beside a station is worth more than the land without one. The subway also fixed the city's social geography for a century: a five-cent fare that did not vary with distance made the outer boroughs accessible to people on low wages, and the districts that grew around the stations were built at densities that assumed nobody would own a car.

F Regulation arrived because of a single building. A vast office block completed in 1915 rose sheer from its lot for forty storeys and cast a shadow across several blocks, provoking a law the following year that required buildings to step back as they rose, in proportion to the width of the street. The result was not a restriction so much as a style: the stepped silhouette that defines the city's inter-war skyline was a direct consequence of a zoning formula, and architects competed to extract the maximum permitted volume from it.

G The twentieth-century arguments were about what a city is for. One school, exemplified by an administrator who built expressways, bridges and housing on an enormous scale over four decades, held that a city is a machine for moving people and goods and should be rebuilt to do it efficiently. The other, articulated by a writer living in a neighbourhood he proposed to drive a road through, held that a city is a dense social fabric that planning destroys and cannot recreate. The road was not built, the fabric survived, and the argument was not settled; both positions have been vindicated somewhere in the city and refuted somewhere else, which is the ordinary fate of general theories about a place with eight million people in it.