In Religious Geography of New York we've just covered the 19th century, and I have students trace the outline of Manhattan and come up with their own grid. (The famous grid was imposed in 1811.) On the board I draw some schemata of street constellations - the tangle of an ancient old town, étoiles as you find in Paris (or Washington
DC), a generic grid, and the beveled grid of Barcelona's Eixemple, which makes a square of every intersection. Only after students had shared their plans with vast parks, circles, museum districts, numbered neighborhoods, canals, submerged highways and the like, did I recall that we've just seen an example of regridding NYC with some of each on TV. The new NBC series "
Kings" (which I checked out because it's based rather explicitly on the Biblical story of David and Saul) takes place in a new city called Shiloh, rebuilt on the ashes of what must have been New York. Scenes of Shiloh are of Midtown Manhattan only, the most famous buildings (Empire State and Chrysler) removed by computer, and towering at the center a shiny glass pyramid based on the Freedom Tower planned for the site of the World Trade Center. Can a gridded city like NYC tolerate a center?
In Religious Geography of New York we've just covered the 19th century, and I have students trace the outline of Manhattan and come up with their own grid. (The famous grid was imposed in 1811.) On the board I draw some schemata of street constellations - the tangle of an ancient old town, étoiles as you find in Paris (or Washington 
DC), a generic grid, and the beveled grid of Barcelona's Eixemple, which makes a square of every intersection. Only after students had shared their plans with vast parks, circles, museum districts, numbered neighborhoods, canals, submerged highways and the like, did I recall that we've just seen an example of regridding NYC with some of each on TV. The new NBC series "Kings" (which I checked out because it's based rather explicitly on the Biblical story of David and Saul) takes place in a new city called Shiloh, rebuilt on the ashes of what must have been New York. Scenes of Shiloh are of Midtown Manhattan only, the most famous buildings (Empire State and Chrysler) removed by computer, and towering at the center a shiny glass pyramid based on the Freedom Tower planned for the site of the World Trade Center. Can a gridded city like NYC tolerate a center?
