By thomas w. Santos

GEOGRPHY AND ARCHITECTURE
New York can sometimes feel like a chaotic place. There are so many people – more then eight million – so much traffic, so much energy. Yet one thing remains constant, and that is “the Grid”. From the beginning if its history, New York has had a plan. The founders of the city looked northward across Manhattan and envisioned an orderly layout of streets to run east to west and avenues to run south to north. Each street and avenue has a number, with letters used in a neighborhood on the Lower East Side nicknamed Alphabet City. The East Side is separated from the West Side by Fifth Avenue.
The boroughs are laid out in roughly the same way, but because they developed as separate cities, more of their streets have names, and the streets don’t all fit the Grid because some of them curve to follow the natural aspects of the land.
On New York’s systematic and symmetrical layout, there are beautiful buildings, famous bridges, and neighborhoods where history was named.


THE BOROUGHS