7 ms·

On a related note, I've been obsessed recently with grid cities. Queens, New York in particular flummoxes me. Locally every point conforms to a grid, but global

On a related note, I've been obsessed recently with grid cities. Queens, New York in particular flummoxes me. Locally every point conforms to a grid, but globally they don't all conform to the same grid. Brooklyn is comparatively easy as it consists of 4-6 large grid areas stitched together (depending how much slight bending you forgive). Big swaths of Queens like Astoria and everywhere north of Queens Blvd are also simple enough. But that region from the border with Brooklyn I just can't ever seem to summarize succinctly. Any pattern that might form gets interrupted by either a cemetery, a park, train tracks, and in some cases (I've found out) former train tracks that were ripped out 100 years ago. I've considered theories like the streets being radially biased towards important junctions like Jamaica / Flushing. I've considered outlining major obstructions to see if those are the source of borders. I've looked around for the master plan on street numbering in Queens to no avail. This should be easy, like Manhattan Queens has numbered streets. It conforms to an approximate grid, yet no one ever plots out exactly what this grid is and where the defects in it occur. WTF IS QUEENS GRID?!?!

galaxyLogic 4y ago
On a related note, lots of businesses on Manhattan still don't get it. They advertise their location as something like: 58th St 369 instead of saying: 58th St 369 btw. 6th and 7th Av It would be so much easier for their customers to reach them if they stated between which streets, or which avenues their particular street-number is located. I don't get it why they don't get it.
- WillAdams 4y ago
  "True" New Yorkers seem to have memorized which numbers are between which numbered Avenues --- at least my son has done this since moving there first for college, then a job.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    This is one of those 90/10 rule things where just learning a post-it note worth of trivia covers you for over 90% of instances. I'm sure he's competent at navigating especially in the ordinary places reachable by ordinary subway ride. The corner that flummoxes me is that inexplicable void in the map. The big empty part of the subway system sandwiched between the EFMR and JMZ lines. That curious combination of Newton Creek, Highland park, an archipelago of like a dozen large cemeteries, more than a few heavy industrial zones, and freight rail tracks. I've seen parts of the map in this no mans land where numbered Ave's just straight up skip over a half dozen other numbers which I know exist elsewhere on the map. However the grid was zippered together, there is a seam in it and this is it.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      There is actually an official algorithm for estimating the cross streets given any address within the Manhattan grid. I don't know if it still is, but it used to be published in fine print on bus system maps. It's a little too complicated to memorize, but you could easily keep it on a note card in your wallet and do the calculations in your head or with your phone calculator.
      - IIAOPSW 4y ago
        Right. Manhattan grid. That's easy. I'm talking about the grid in Queens. In particular the middle of Queens. It becomes extremely non-grid conforming in a way a calculator rule can't fix.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I can do this in Amsterdam as well, but there it is a lot more complicated, especially on the canals. But I usually can aim for the right block just knowing the house number, and even/odd says which side of the street or canal to be on.
    - galaxyLogic 4y ago
      New York is simpler because it is the New Amsterdam, or Amsterdam 2.0
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Building numbers ascend in the same direction as streets / avenues and usually the hundreds digit is incremented at the corner so that building 369 is (ideally) between 3rd and 4th. Something similar to that. Double check me on this. Its been a while but the relation between building number and location on the grid is def linear.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    I just wonder if engineers could come up with a simpler scheme, when you already have such a great grid on Manhattan.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  I'm with you 1,000%. Yes I know there are formulas you can memorize to figure out cross streets but you're a business, you're supposed to be trying to make this easy for me. If you're located on a grid and you advertise an address without giving cross streets, I guess you don't actually want my business.
- moret1979 4y ago
  Aren't addresses in Manhattan mostly east or west of 5th Ave, each avenue incrementing by 100? Meaning 369W is between 8th and 9th, while 369E between 2nd and 1st?
- swah 4y ago
  Avoiding Google Maps for any reason ?
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    That would mean turning my phone on, right?
chasing 4y ago
Much of NYC started off as small, independent towns and villages with their own grids. Bushwick. Williamsburg. Flushing. Their grid were determined by things like angle of the coast, internal geographic features, or just random chance. As they grew, they grew together and fused as best they could.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Flushing all conform to a reasonably sized jigsaw piece of locally consistent grid. Bushwick is a Cheese wedge between Fulton and Broadway. Williamsburg is approximately several (smaller) pizza slices with the crust along the coast line. Flushing is basically true north/south grid. Large fractions of Brooklyn and Queens are consistent-enough to approximate most of the landmass as perhaps a dozen jig saw pieces. Nothing you said is news to me. But this border area, primarily Ridgewood and Maspeth, it refuses to be consistent enough to draw a jigsaw piece over it.
jacquesm 4y ago
You're looking at the remnants of what used to be a bunch of unconnected Dutch settlements. New York (formerly New Amsterdam), Brooklyn, Flushing and Harlem are all named after their original Dutch counterparts, Amsterdam, Breukelen, Vlissingen and Haarlem respectively. And there is Coney Island (Konijnen eiland) and Staten Island (named after the Staten Generaal, a Dutch government body). Once NYC expanded and engulfed all of those separate settlements the grids ended up merging and some of the connecting roads and railroads between the settlements were incorporated into the city.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Yeah I know the history. But believe it or not those grids are easy. You can make all the grids of Brooklyn out of like 6 Jigsaw pieces. There's a directly south portion that leads to the lettered Ave's all the way to CI, a "Manhattan South" portion that hugs the coast, a "Carnarsie South" portion that hugs the coast East of Coney Island, Bushwick Cheese slice, and Williamsburg offset from there. Easy Pz. The grids of Queens north of the subway are also pretty easy to split into a manageable number of jigsaw pieces, namely Astoria (follows Manhattan convention), everywhere East of LGA up to and including Flushing (true north). Its the border zone between BK and Queens that just refuses to admit a nice, simple, summary pattern. Pretty much everywhere due East of Newton Creek and/or along the lower Montauk is a mess.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Most likely this is because that particular region either had unfortunate geographical components or because the settlements there were much smaller and therefore not nicely aligned. You see a very similar thing if you look at the map of Amsterdam. The bigger developments are all nice and orderly and result in clearly recognizable patterns, but whenever the 'new' butted into the old it becomes messy. Quite a few small towns found themselves suddenly as components of Amsterdam after being engulfed. New York in a way is relatively orderly because all of that happened in a short time. It's fascinating stuff. Good luck with your search, I'm curious if you ever will find out what caused it.
    - 4y ago
codazoda 4y ago
In Utah we use blocks from Main Street and State Street (to really over simplify). So, I live at 4475 W and 5500 S. Which is to say that I’m about 45 blocks West of Main Street and 55 blocks South of State street.
- nesyt 4y ago
  State and Main run parallel to each other (in SLC at least). The zero point for north/south in SLC is S Temple, not State.
heleninboodler 4y ago
I've always been very impressed with Seattle's relative rigor when it comes to the grid. True, the grid has one very strange aspect that's hard for newcomers to understand: it's actually nine separate grids[1], eight of which have directional qualifiers (NW, N, NE, etc) with the unqualified one covering downtown as the origin of the whole system. But most of the city and surrounding areas are pretty well committed to this grid, to the point that entire other cities are built off this "downtown seattle is the grid origin" concept (e.g. the city of Shoreline to the north starts at 145th and goes up from there). And further to the north, there's a repeat of this grid system centered on the city of Everett and extending into its surrounding cities. One other aspect I find fascinating about Seattle's system is that there's some redundancy built into the address specification: whether the street is oriented north-south or east-west is not only indicated by whether it's an Ave (N-S) or a Street (E-W), but whether the grid qualifier is specified as a prefix or a suffix. So when you find a partial address on some album art [2], for example, you can deduce that "4718 38NE" is talking about 4718 38th Ave NE and not 4718 NE 38th St. [1] theoretically nine grids, anyway. As an example, I'm not sure if there's actually an "E" grid. The central grid goes all the way to the water on the east, and when continued on the other side of the lake in Bellevue, the NE and SE grids touch each other. [2] https://musicbrainz.org/release/36fab830-fc17-48d7-9d7e-194f5f162847 https://musicbrainz.org/release/36fab830-fc17-48d7-9d7e-194f...
- com2kid 4y ago
  I love navigating around Seattle so much. The grid does take a few jumps, NE 85th St in Seattle doesn't exactly line up with NE 85th St in Kirkland, (travelling straight across the lake, NE 70th St in Seattle lines up with NE 85th St in Kirkland), but in general if given an address (the first 2 or 3 digits of a house's number indicate cross street) you can navigate to almost anyplace in King County with just a compass. FWIW there are neighborhoods that are E. The CD, Madison Valley, basically everything south of 520 until Yesler. You also didn't mention that part of the city grid is on a 45 degree slant due to the city founders not being able to agree which grid system to use. :)
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
NoboruWataya 4y ago
See also: Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian, one of his several grid-like paintings, this one clearly inspired by Manhattan: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Piet_Mondrian%2C_1942_-_Broadway_Boogie_Woogie.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Piet_Mon...
- jonstewart 4y ago
  This is The Thing about Manhattan: it’s a very rigorous grid (except for some parts below Houston) but then it has this big diagonal — but irregular — gash across the grid. Manhattan without the grid would be London or Lisbon or any other Old World river city warren; the grid gives it its New World power. But without Broadway, it would be boring.
trylfthsk 4y ago
If only Detroit had stuck with Augustus Woodward's hexagonal grid plan.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

On a related note, lots of businesses on Manhattan still don't get it. They advertise their location as something like: 58th St 369 instead of saying: 58th St 369 btw. 6th and 7th Av It would be so much easier for their customers to reach them if they stated between which streets, or which avenues their particular street-number is located. I don't get it why they don't get it.

WillAdams 4y ago
"True" New Yorkers seem to have memorized which numbers are between which numbered Avenues --- at least my son has done this since moving there first for college, then a job.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  This is one of those 90/10 rule things where just learning a post-it note worth of trivia covers you for over 90% of instances. I'm sure he's competent at navigating especially in the ordinary places reachable by ordinary subway ride. The corner that flummoxes me is that inexplicable void in the map. The big empty part of the subway system sandwiched between the EFMR and JMZ lines. That curious combination of Newton Creek, Highland park, an archipelago of like a dozen large cemeteries, more than a few heavy industrial zones, and freight rail tracks. I've seen parts of the map in this no mans land where numbered Ave's just straight up skip over a half dozen other numbers which I know exist elsewhere on the map. However the grid was zippered together, there is a seam in it and this is it.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    There is actually an official algorithm for estimating the cross streets given any address within the Manhattan grid. I don't know if it still is, but it used to be published in fine print on bus system maps. It's a little too complicated to memorize, but you could easily keep it on a note card in your wallet and do the calculations in your head or with your phone calculator.
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      Right. Manhattan grid. That's easy. I'm talking about the grid in Queens. In particular the middle of Queens. It becomes extremely non-grid conforming in a way a calculator rule can't fix.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I can do this in Amsterdam as well, but there it is a lot more complicated, especially on the canals. But I usually can aim for the right block just knowing the house number, and even/odd says which side of the street or canal to be on.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    New York is simpler because it is the New Amsterdam, or Amsterdam 2.0
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Building numbers ascend in the same direction as streets / avenues and usually the hundreds digit is incremented at the corner so that building 369 is (ideally) between 3rd and 4th. Something similar to that. Double check me on this. Its been a while but the relation between building number and location on the grid is def linear.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  I just wonder if engineers could come up with a simpler scheme, when you already have such a great grid on Manhattan.
crazygringo 4y ago
I'm with you 1,000%. Yes I know there are formulas you can memorize to figure out cross streets but you're a business, you're supposed to be trying to make this easy for me. If you're located on a grid and you advertise an address without giving cross streets, I guess you don't actually want my business.
moret1979 4y ago
Aren't addresses in Manhattan mostly east or west of 5th Ave, each avenue incrementing by 100? Meaning 369W is between 8th and 9th, while 369E between 2nd and 1st?
swah 4y ago
Avoiding Google Maps for any reason ?
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  That would mean turning my phone on, right?

chasing 4y ago

Much of NYC started off as small, independent towns and villages with their own grids. Bushwick. Williamsburg. Flushing. Their grid were determined by things like angle of the coast, internal geographic features, or just random chance. As they grew, they grew together and fused as best they could.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Flushing all conform to a reasonably sized jigsaw piece of locally consistent grid. Bushwick is a Cheese wedge between Fulton and Broadway. Williamsburg is approximately several (smaller) pizza slices with the crust along the coast line. Flushing is basically true north/south grid. Large fractions of Brooklyn and Queens are consistent-enough to approximate most of the landmass as perhaps a dozen jig saw pieces. Nothing you said is news to me. But this border area, primarily Ridgewood and Maspeth, it refuses to be consistent enough to draw a jigsaw piece over it.

jacquesm 4y ago

You're looking at the remnants of what used to be a bunch of unconnected Dutch settlements. New York (formerly New Amsterdam), Brooklyn, Flushing and Harlem are all named after their original Dutch counterparts, Amsterdam, Breukelen, Vlissingen and Haarlem respectively. And there is Coney Island (Konijnen eiland) and Staten Island (named after the Staten Generaal, a Dutch government body). Once NYC expanded and engulfed all of those separate settlements the grids ended up merging and some of the connecting roads and railroads between the settlements were incorporated into the city.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
Yeah I know the history. But believe it or not those grids are easy. You can make all the grids of Brooklyn out of like 6 Jigsaw pieces. There's a directly south portion that leads to the lettered Ave's all the way to CI, a "Manhattan South" portion that hugs the coast, a "Carnarsie South" portion that hugs the coast East of Coney Island, Bushwick Cheese slice, and Williamsburg offset from there. Easy Pz. The grids of Queens north of the subway are also pretty easy to split into a manageable number of jigsaw pieces, namely Astoria (follows Manhattan convention), everywhere East of LGA up to and including Flushing (true north). Its the border zone between BK and Queens that just refuses to admit a nice, simple, summary pattern. Pretty much everywhere due East of Newton Creek and/or along the lower Montauk is a mess.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Most likely this is because that particular region either had unfortunate geographical components or because the settlements there were much smaller and therefore not nicely aligned. You see a very similar thing if you look at the map of Amsterdam. The bigger developments are all nice and orderly and result in clearly recognizable patterns, but whenever the 'new' butted into the old it becomes messy. Quite a few small towns found themselves suddenly as components of Amsterdam after being engulfed. New York in a way is relatively orderly because all of that happened in a short time. It's fascinating stuff. Good luck with your search, I'm curious if you ever will find out what caused it.
  - 4y ago

codazoda 4y ago

In Utah we use blocks from Main Street and State Street (to really over simplify). So, I live at 4475 W and 5500 S. Which is to say that I’m about 45 blocks West of Main Street and 55 blocks South of State street.

nesyt 4y ago
State and Main run parallel to each other (in SLC at least). The zero point for north/south in SLC is S Temple, not State.

heleninboodler 4y ago

I've always been very impressed with Seattle's relative rigor when it comes to the grid. True, the grid has one very strange aspect that's hard for newcomers to understand: it's actually nine separate grids[1], eight of which have directional qualifiers (NW, N, NE, etc) with the unqualified one covering downtown as the origin of the whole system. But most of the city and surrounding areas are pretty well committed to this grid, to the point that entire other cities are built off this "downtown seattle is the grid origin" concept (e.g. the city of Shoreline to the north starts at 145th and goes up from there). And further to the north, there's a repeat of this grid system centered on the city of Everett and extending into its surrounding cities. One other aspect I find fascinating about Seattle's system is that there's some redundancy built into the address specification: whether the street is oriented north-south or east-west is not only indicated by whether it's an Ave (N-S) or a Street (E-W), but whether the grid qualifier is specified as a prefix or a suffix. So when you find a partial address on some album art [2], for example, you can deduce that "4718 38NE" is talking about 4718 38th Ave NE and not 4718 NE 38th St. [1] theoretically nine grids, anyway. As an example, I'm not sure if there's actually an "E" grid. The central grid goes all the way to the water on the east, and when continued on the other side of the lake in Bellevue, the NE and SE grids touch each other. [2] https://musicbrainz.org/release/36fab830-fc17-48d7-9d7e-194f5f162847 https://musicbrainz.org/release/36fab830-fc17-48d7-9d7e-194f...

com2kid 4y ago
I love navigating around Seattle so much. The grid does take a few jumps, NE 85th St in Seattle doesn't exactly line up with NE 85th St in Kirkland, (travelling straight across the lake, NE 70th St in Seattle lines up with NE 85th St in Kirkland), but in general if given an address (the first 2 or 3 digits of a house's number indicate cross street) you can navigate to almost anyplace in King County with just a compass. FWIW there are neighborhoods that are E. The CD, Madison Valley, basically everything south of 520 until Yesler. You also didn't mention that part of the city grid is on a 45 degree slant due to the city founders not being able to agree which grid system to use. :)
- IIAOPSW 4y ago

NoboruWataya 4y ago

See also: Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian, one of his several grid-like paintings, this one clearly inspired by Manhattan: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Piet_Mondrian%2C_1942_-_Broadway_Boogie_Woogie.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Piet_Mon...

jonstewart 4y ago
This is The Thing about Manhattan: it’s a very rigorous grid (except for some parts below Houston) but then it has this big diagonal — but irregular — gash across the grid. Manhattan without the grid would be London or Lisbon or any other Old World river city warren; the grid gives it its New World power. But without Broadway, it would be boring.

trylfthsk 4y ago

If only Detroit had stuck with Augustus Woodward's hexagonal grid plan.