The Map That Created New York City  Today is the 200th birthday
of the street map that spawned the Greatest City in the World.
The NY Times has a revealing story on how the grid, which mapped
11 avenues and 155 crosstown streets, transformed New York into
a city of right angles.  The urban planners had a ton of
foresight! Just think about the year 1811. James Madison was
president, it was before the War of 1812 and there were no cars.
Yet the city planners started creating a city that would
eventually accomodate millions of people, gazillion
advertisements and years of traffic. How and why? The NY Times
says:   "This is the purpose of New York's geometry," wrote
Roland Barthes, the 20th-century French philosopher. "That each
individual should be poetically the owner of the capital of the
world."  The city planners created straight and wide streets
because they didn't want crooked and narrow ones in case of
fires. They also wanted New York houses to be "straight-sided
and right-angled" as they were "the most c