Stuff You Should Know - The Manhattan Grid

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

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On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff You Should Know,

another in our endless annals of New York City edition. That's right. This is a pretty interesting episode, I think, and my favorite part about it, this was Dave Ruzar, one of our writers helped put this together, and Dave is clearly annoyed about this whole thing, and I think it's hysterical how many times he gets annoyed by the laziness of the commission.

I have to say, I agreed with Dave, too. I was annoyed by it as well. I think it's always annoying when you see somebody like have a great opportunity and just pee it away, you know what I mean? Yeah, and we should also point out, Dave got a lot of his information from a really wonderful book called City on a Grid,

Colon, How New York Became New York by Gerald Keppel. Not Gerald McRaney, different Gerald. Right, or is it Koppel? I think it's Keppel if it's K-O-E. That's what I was going with, was Keppel. Yeah, I'm gonna get this book, though. This is right at my alley, because you know I'm obsessed with the history

and the sort of formation of New York City as we know it today. Yeah, where'd you get the idea for this episode? Just my constant desire to learn about Manohatta and how that became eventually Manhattan that we know and love. Okay. I'm just fascinated by it, I love it.

I love everything about it. This is definitely a big chapter because what we're talking about is the plan called the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 that basically laid out Manhattan as we know and understand and love it today. Everything north of Houston Street, I should say. Yeah, and here's sort of a quick primer,

is Manhattan above Houston is almost a perfect grid. Broadway kind of screws everything up, but you know, great street, but it's just Broadway's like, I'm not following any rules, so I'm gonna confuse people. But aside from that, it's pretty much a grid of 11 numbered avenues that run north to south, generally speaking. Then you've got Lexington Park and Madison avenues.

And then 200, and this was at the time, numbered streets running roughly east to west. And if you wanna get a little more granular than that, the southernmost street in the east villages, east first, as you would imagine, the northernmost is 220th Street as we live and breathe today in Inwood. Well, that's on the island, technically in Manhattan,

if you're talking about the borough, it goes up to 227th, I believe. Right, and if you wanna go through the Bronx, you go all the way up to 263. Man, that's crazy. You've got so many streets. That's so many streets. You've got an- That's 263 streets.

You've got an east and west signifier, which says, and this is sort of a dummy's guide to getting around New York for the first time too, if you broke your smartphone. And you also don't wanna walk around just staring at your smartphone the whole time. No, you're gonna miss a lot. Yeah, so try and get a little intuitive feel,

because it's really easy to get around if you know this stuff. East and west will signify whether you're east or west of Fifth Avenue. And then here's a little trick too. Odd numbers streets run west, even numbers streets run east. So if you come out of a subway

and you know which way north, south, east and west are, then you will never do the thing that I always do and walk in the wrong direction trying to go up or down. Yeah, because that's the thing. Like if you know what direction you're facing and you know where you're trying to go and where you are right now, you can basically make your way anywhere

in Manhattan above Houston Street. Yeah, and if you're like me and you have no idea ever what's north, south, east and west in New York- I don't either, I don't either. I had an easy time in LA because LA has- The sun? Well, they have that, but they also have geographical landmarks that make it super easy

to tell which way north and like the Hollywood sign and the hills and stuff like that. Is that real? Is the Hollywood sign real? What do you mean is it real? I'm just kidding. Okay. So that makes it a lot easier in New York

when I come out there, all those big tall buildings. I can never come out and say like, well, that's north. But if you know that stuff and you know that the even numbered streets run east, the odd ones run west, then you won't walk in the wrong direction for a block and then get there like I do and go, oh, we should have gone the other way.

Yeah, because depending on what direction you're walking, if you're walking north or south, going the wrong direction on a block isn't that bad, but if you're going east or west, it's real bad. Well, because- Sure. Very long blocks going east to west and that's all part of that commissioner's plan that was laid out in 1811.

And on the one hand, we've kind of hit upon the pros and the cons of it that it's easy to get around, which is really saying something because New York is absolutely huge, but you could make it from one end to the other without a map, just knowing that it's on a grid and how the grid's laid out even roughly.

But the problem is, it's on a grid and a grid is one of the least organic shapes around. And because this grid stretches over almost all of Manhattan, most of Manhattan for sure, it's viewed by a lot of people as kind of soulless and canyon-esque, because you're just totally surrounded almost constantly by big imposing buildings, all at these right angles,

which it feels like a very built environment. And until Central Park came along, which we did an episode on in what, the 1850s or 60s, like that was it, that was New York. There was nothing but that built environment. I got a few more of my things. Oh, okay, let's have them, buddy. Manhattan's about 13 and a half miles long.

And then, so this grid makes sense, but then once you get north of 59th Street, you start to get like Atlanta does and a road will just change names out of nowhere. Atlanta's very famous for that. People get very confused here. It is very confusing also because the road will change names, but one of the names, Peachtree, will still be there,

but it's a totally different street. Right. And it does not help things. That's right. So north of 59th, avenues on the west side change names, but avenues on the east side do not. So eighth becomes Central Park West, ninth becomes Columbus Avenue,

10th becomes Amsterdam Avenue, and 11th becomes West End Avenue. What about Avenue of the Americas? Well, that's six, right? Or is that seventh? Oh man, I thought, I think it's six. That's my understanding. But that's really not a name change.

That's just, that's something that tourists call it. Right, I remember you making fun of me when I called it that. Did I really? Yeah, it was really. That sounds about right. It was really jarring. And then to get people really confused, between third and fifth avenue,

there are three avenues instead of what you would think would be one because Lexington Park and Madison fall between those. Yep. In the south of 23rd, you've got your lettered avenues. Okay. A, B, C, and D, which is alphabet city. So you wouldn't need to ever pull out a map.

You just have to stand in the middle of New York and listen to the first like 10 minutes of this episode and you'll find your way, no problem. All right, should we get into this? You said people don't like the grid. There are a lot of people. I mean, what did Walt Whitman call it? Icky, I think.

No, I think he said he called it one perpetual dead flat. Yeah, and streets cutting each other at right angles are certainly the last things in the world consistent with beauty of situation. How about this one from Edith Wharton? Rectangular New York, this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains, or perspectives,

hide bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness. Yeah, I like hide bound. That's great. That's a great word. And mean ugliness definitely captures like a certain sense of New York depending on your mood or mindset, you know? Yeah.

There's one guy named Peter Marcus who's an architecture critic. He said that the grid layout of Manhattan was one of the worst city plans of any major city in the developed countries of the world. Right, but some people love it. Some people said it was pragmatic. Some people said it really accommodated

for the one thing it needed to accommodate for, which was massive growth. Right. Let me see here, an architect named Raphael Vinaly, who's I think a modern architect, not modern, I just mean current architect, but he may do modern work who knows. He said the grid is the best manifestation

of American pragmatism, pragmatism, in the creation of urban form. And then in 1978, a Dutch architect named Arama Koolhaas said that the grid was the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization, clearly talking about the growth. Yes, but a courageous act, that's like architect talk right there.

So, but for the most part, from what I understand, and definitely Dave says the same thing, most New Yorkers, especially born and raised New Yorkers, are not happy that that's how their city is laid out, that there's a lot of room for improvement. Is that your experience too? Sure, I mean, Central Park is great, but as we'll find out, they did not,

they didn't really plan for green spaces, and New York has done their best to kind of carve them out since then, but let's get into this commission. Well, let's talk about grids first, do you want to? Yeah, all right. Do you want to take a break and then talk about the grid story?

Yes. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. There is like a touch of love and shock. So, New York didn't invent the grid as much as they like to boast that they did. They did not. In fact, a grid layout of a city goes back to that Indus Valley civilization

that for some reason keeps popping up in the last like year or so. It does. I guess they're gonna make a comeback or something like that. But they've just been coming out all over the place. But one of the, what was it, Chuck? Was it, did they invent the zipper?

I don't think it was a zipper. What was it? Indigo? Uh, I don't know. There's been a number of them. But anyway, at least 5,000 years ago, the Indus Valley civilization was using the grid layout to create Mohenjo-Daro,

which was a 750 acre city on a grid. And then shortly after that, the Greeks said, I really like this. In fact, there's a Greek thinker and mathematician named Hippodamus, who's known as the father of city planning. And he was bully for grids too. Yeah, if you have a grid, it's still these people still call that the Hippodami

and plan, which is kind of great all these years later to still get recognized for your grid work. Yeah, if you're ever talking to somebody and they refer to a grid as a Hippodami and plan, that person knows what they're talking about. Or listens to this show. It's one and the same basically. I knew you were gonna say that.

Let me see, the conquistadors of Spain, they kind of had a habit of coming in, conquering, and then having their template in place to create these grids, as what they call the law of the Indies. And they would sort of just come in, set up shop, you got a town with a big central plaza, and then a grid surrounding that central plaza.

Right, and they use that for everything from Lima to Los Angeles. And this took me back in my mind to, what was the name of that colonial town in Guatemala that we visited? Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. It was wonderful. Driving me crazy, it really was wonderful.

It was one of the most beautiful towns I've ever been in. But it had like a central plaza with a fountain. It was a much smaller town, but now that I think about it, it was laid out on a grid too. And it was part of that law of the Indies that you were mentioning, that it was just like, this is how you build a town.

And apparently the reason that they used that law, like in town after town after town, that they just basically took over and said, this is ours now, it's Spain's, is applying a grid was kind of a metaphor for applying order and civilization to a formerly disordered and wild indigenous town. Which makes sense from a colonizer's perspective,

but I'm sure it sucked from the indigenous person's perspective. Like everything else. Yeah, that's what this stupid right angle stuff. So New York City comes along, Philadelphia had been laid out in a grid by William Penn, very deliberately though. And that grid was kind of roomy and spacious

because William Penn did not like the congestion of London. No. But again, Philly very much purposeful. Same with DC too. Yeah, boy DC has a kind of a crazy grid. Yeah, but once you understand it, it makes total sense, numbers and letters wise and directions.

Yeah, but it takes a little more, it takes more getting used to the New York too from my experience and what I understand. Yeah, for sure. So the commissioner's plan of 1811 is really sort of the demarcation point between what was first New York, New Amsterdam and then what we now know as Manhattan

because anyone who's ever seen, almost had games of New York, gangs of New York, knows that those were crazy days down there in lower Manhattan and things just sort of sprouted up organically from the river upward as far as the layout and the design. And you know, you can still feel that when you go down to lower Manhattan,

which is why I love the villages now. I think it's just, I mean, I like the simplicity of the grid, but I think what I love about lower Manhattan is how organic it feels. It's a jumble. And I mean, it's a jumble for a reason because those streets largely follow

these original organic paths that the Dutch settlers and earliest English settlers basically said, oh, we need to get from the waterfront up, you know, to the common lands or whatever. So here's a good path. And this path happens to meander around a salt marsh and we avoid having to go up a hill by going around this way.

So it's kind of like meandering. And it's definitely locked in time from those streets down there in lower Manhattan. I like it too, but it is very easy to be like, are you sure we're going the right direction still? It's very easy to get lost in those because it isn't at all a grid. Yeah, I've spent enough time in lower Manhattan now

to where I can land market. Like it's just familiar enough to me to where I kind of know like this block and that block. So I know where I'm going. And you mentioned something important. I don't think we've even kind of said that New York was not all this just big one, big flat slab 13 miles long that we love today

because you can walk forever without ever getting out of breath because it's not Seattle. New York was swampland and it had hills and marshes and creeks and rocks. And it was kind of wild East Coast territory. Yeah. And I mean, the reason that those marshes and the ponds and hills and stuff aren't there anymore

is because of this 1811 commissioners playing it basically said tear it all down, fill it all in, build this over it. And they did. That's the most astounding thing is they did that they, you know, as we'll see, they passed a law that basically said, we're going to appoint a commission of three people.

They're going to come up with a plan and whatever they come up with is law. It can't be challenged in court. If we're not going to back it up and change it in any way. And they really didn't, as bad as the plan was in almost every way, they really stuck to it. But the thing that struck me, I had no idea about this

was that the 1811 commissioners plan was just a ripoff of another earlier surveying map that basically provided the basis of this, of the commissioners plan. Not even the basis of it. They weren't like, oh, we'll take this as a starting point. They just said, we'll take this, print it and put our names on it.

And that's ultimately what happened. Yeah, so pre-Revolutionary War, most of Manhattan was in that lower third of the island. And we got into big time debt because of the Revolutionary War. And so the city said in the 1780s, all right, here's what we got to do. We own tons of land, publicly owned land

and all this marshy, kind of reedy, rocky, pondy area. It's not developed. Let's sell this stuff off and make some dough. It's called the Common Lands. And we need somebody to get in there and just sort of survey this and plot it all out so we know exactly how to best sell this. Yeah, so they hired a guy named Kazimir Theodor Gork.

That's how I'm going with this Gork. Sure. It's not a cucumber, it's a gorkan. Do you remember Mr. Cabbage Head from Kids in the Hall? Sure. Bruce McCulloch. Well, this had nothing to do with that, right? Right.

So this surveyor actually went through the Common Lands. Like basically what we understand is all of Manhattan between Houston and North Harlem, he just went across and broke it into 500 acre parcels. He had a 66 foot chain on his surveying poles. And so he said, well, I'll just use that as the basic measurement for the widest streets. 66 feet is what it's gonna be.

I think he said 500 acre parcels. Weren't they five acre? Oh, yes, I'm sorry. Bigger, bigger. It is a little bit of a difference. They were five acre parcels, so that's even more work. That's 100 times more work than what I described. That's right.

He laid him out as a grid because he wasn't, like this guy wasn't out to say, here's how Manhattan should be built. Right, right. This is the best way to promote the future of growth in Manhattan. No, that was not his charge. His charge was like, hey, let's just divide this stuff

up and sell it. He had some interesting constraints. They had to be five acres. They had to have a central road that all of these could access fairly easily. And then he had a survey chain. It's crazy to think about, this was one of the things that informed

what is modern New York. His survey chain was 66 feet. So he said, all right, that's how wide the road is. Yeah, exactly. So I think that was the widest road, the central access road. He called that one middle. And now I believe that's Fifth Avenue is middle.

What was originally middle road back in 1796. Yeah, that's adorable. So he carved this place up into these plots that are 200 feet on the east and west boundaries of it. So going up and down, running north-south, but if you're on the plot, it would be on the east side of the plot and the west side of the plot.

If that was not confusing before, it is now. And then across or the width was 920 feet. And that was the, those were the plots. He said, here you go. This is, there's a bunch of them up there, but I've carved up all of these common lands and you can start selling them if you want. Yeah, did you mention the names of the other two roads?

Oh yeah, he said, I'm gonna put two more in of these 66 feet wide roads. And he had some very clever names for them. Yeah, one was middle, remember? The one to the east, he named east. And the one to the west, he named west. Yeah, which makes sense if you're looking at it from, if you're on the middle road to the east

is the east road to the west is the west road, but they run north-south. Right. Man, I hate directions. And like you said, that was fifth in the center. So that's now fourth, fifth and sixth Ave. Right. Or fourth Avenue, fifth Avenue.

And the Avenue is there. And Avenue is there to be missed. You know, you really know what's supposed to say that. What a jerk, I can't believe I said that. You didn't say it like that. I didn't. You just made sure that you waited until a crowd had gathered and really laid into me.

I think I remember it. Was that our first trip to New York? Probably. Yeah. Probably. That's funny. We've been back a couple of times since then as a team, huh? Yeah, I know.

I've got some really great memories of New York. I miss it. Yeah, it's been a while. 2021, we will see you again. Yes, we will, New York. Don't you worry. At least I hope so. There are no guarantees, right?

No, we will see New York again. All right. So do we take another break? I feel like there's still a lot. There's still a lot. We should keep going for now, I think. All right. So in 1807, this is when the New York state legislature said,

you know what, we need to, like we're growing here. It's clear that this Southern tip of Manhattan is just the beginning. So they passed a bill that they described as an act of relative, an act relative to improvements, touching the laying out of the streets and roads in the city of New York and for other purposes. Right, which made sense.

But like I said, this law, they decided to just vest absolute authority into these three commissioners and said, we're going to follow whatever they come up with, whatever they, that seems to them most conducive to public good, we're just going to take on its face that it is most conducive to public good and just go with it. That's crazy that it was just three people

and that it wasn't like 10 teams of three people submitting the best designs that then would be gone over and voted on, like. Yeah, like no one took this. No one took it seriously, weirdly enough. It's very odd. So who were these guys? So there were three commissioners appointed.

One was Governor Morris. His first name was Governor. He was one of the founding fathers. He wrote a lot of the constitution including the preamble. He had a peg leg. He lost his leg in a carriage accident, although there's rumors that it was something else,

but he was known as a, Dave puts it, an energetic philanderer, but he was apparently a very likable Benjamin Franklin-esque kind of dude who seemed to be fairly smart, but had really no understanding of surveying as far as I can tell. No, then his nephew in law, John Rutherford,

he was a landowner in New Jersey. In fact, I think the largest landowner in New Jersey at the time. And by all accounts, it looks like this was pure nepotism. He was late for meetings. He was not especially interested even to the annoyance of Governor Morris. All the reasons to not exercise nepotism,

this guy brought to the table is one third of this commission who's figuring out how to lay out the plan for New York City. That's right. The third guy, Simon Laban, no, no, no, Simeon DeWitt, excuse me. And this guy actually knew what he was doing. He was a really very respected, accomplished surveyor, worked with George Washington.

I think eventually became the, which I didn't even know was a thing, was the official surveyor for the Continental Army and then the surveyor general of New York State. Right, so he knew what he was doing, which makes his role all the more shameful that he didn't say like, oh, well, we really gotta get cracking.

It's been three years and we've got four years to do. Maybe he did though. Who knows? He might've been completely run over by these other two chumps. Oh, and he just got shouted down, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. Well, at the very least, Governor Morris was also

one of the founding members of the commission that created the Erie Canal, which was for a very long time considered one of the greatest public works projects in the history of America, certainly in the history of New York State. And that kind of energy and imagination and drive just did not make it to this 1811 commission

for the planning of New York. I wonder if he, I mean, this sounds cynical, but I wonder if he literally was like, man, that Erie Canal project really was a big bummer in how hard we had to work and let's just kind of, hey, look at these maps that this guy drew to sell off New York, let's just use those. Yeah, so that's, I mean, that's kind of what they did.

Like they had four years, or they took four years, I'm not sure how long they had, but they took four years from 1807 to 1811 to turn in their report. Four years of meetings, sporadically true, but they still met over this four-year period. They came up with an 11-page report to lay out these 13 miles in length,

not even square miles, of Manhattan, these common lands, all the way from House and Street up to North Harlem. They came up with 11 pages to explain their map, and their map really made sense as a grid, but again, they stole the grid from Casimir Gork. I can't remember what I called them before. Gork.

I'm going with Gork now. Okay, sure. But they didn't give him any credit for it whatsoever. No, I mean, I don't want to go so far as to call it a tracing project, but they borrowed pretty heavily. Like the streets and the avenues were basically the exact same.

When earlier you mentioned the blocks were 200 by 920 feet in Gorks. From Gork, right? Yeah, this had the exact same layout, and that was no accident. No, and they were in virtually the same spot. They did do some stuff. They didn't just take his map like you were saying

and trace it and call it their own. They made some changes to it. They created, instead of the three middle, east and west, they created 12 avenues running north-south, and not true north-south, but just for our purposes, north and south. And then they created 155 numbered streets. Yeah, but they added this stuff,

but it's sort of just copy-paste. Kind of, but the big thing is, so adding the 12 numbered avenues was a definite change to the Gorks. I'm never gonna say the same thing twice. But was it? Yeah, because he only had the three. I know, but he just had the three,

and they were like, well, we need more, so let's just do what he did all over the place. Sure, sure. Okay, all right. You know what I'm saying? That's fair. Yeah, these guys are definitely not a hill I'm willing to die on, so say what you will about them.

I think they're lazy schmos too. All right. And then they took these cross streets that are formed by the surveying of these blocks and turned them into numbered streets. So avenues running north-south, they were the big ones, 155 numbered streets running east to west.

They widened the avenues. They said they're gonna be 100 feet wide. I guess they had a longer surveying chain. Bigger chain. All right. And then they widened some of the cross streets to, I guess, ease congestion. I think they widened 15 of them total.

Yeah, I think the other streets were 60 feet, and then 15 of them went to 100 at 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, 72nd, 79th, 86th, 96th. 106, 116, 125th, 135th, 145th, and 155th. Right. But why? Why those particular ones? There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason,

because if you notice, they didn't really hit their stride into keeping them separated by 10 cross streets until 86th street. So there's not really much rhyme or reason there. Well, they only did that for three of them. Right. Four of them.

And then the streets that they did choose to widen didn't necessarily make much sense one way or the other. Like for example, 71st street was already fairly wide. It was definitely wider than 72nd street, but they decided to make 72nd street the widened the widened cross street rather than 71st. And apparently no one knows why. The closest thing I could find

is there's some record in 1857 of somebody having to remove a big rock from 72nd street to widen it. That's funny. But that doesn't even explain or make sense because there was a bunch of houses that had to be torn down to make 72nd street widened rather than 71st,

which was already wide. And had almost no houses. Exactly. So these guys were just, when you start to compile all the evidence, we'll kind of pay more out. It really seems like these guys didn't even go to the common lands that maybe they were just working from GERC's map.

Or if they did go to the common lands, they took zero notes or paid zero attention and that all of this came from a place of laziness and ignorance. Like not knowing that 72nd was wider than 71st or vice versa would explain that decision more than anything else. Yeah, another example is if you've ever been

on the west side and you feel like, man, these avenues are big, it's because they are. The avenues on the east side are spaced at 650 and 610 feet apart or 610 feet apart. And on the west, they are all 800 feet apart for no reason. No reason at all. Yeah.

It doesn't make any sense. And again, it seems like they just foam us in. And what's even more astounding is that New York's founding fathers said, okay, we're gonna do exactly what you say without questioning it. Yeah and actually we kind of do have the reason if you read closely and we'll tell you

the secret reason right after this. zijn Heydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Heydude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Heydude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And inside me, I'm sure I won't be shocked. Is that for a cliffhanger? It was great. I'm still a little tense waiting for you to pay it off. All right, here's the real reason, everyone. And it all lies in this quote

that is pulled from their commission report. If it should be asked why the, why was the present plan adopted in preference to any other, the answer is, because after taking all circumstances into consideration, it appeared to be the best, or in other more proper terms, attended with the least inconvenience.

I think that's the magic phrase right there. That last phrase, attended with the least inconvenience, and Dave rightfully says what is obvious, which is inconvenient for the three commissioners. Yeah, because their plan was extraordinarily inconvenient for basically everyone involved. But there was, from the people who were in charge of making this, like building this grid or this plan

to the people who were already living in places that were torn down to make this grid. 40% of places were torn down to adhere to this plan, this 1811 commission plan. That's crazy. And again, when you start to add all this stuff up, it does seem like the least inconvenient for the three commissioners.

And the fact that if that is true, and they just included that as kind of like a cheeky little joke. This guys are, they're not necessarily burning in hell, but they're probably in purgatory somewhere. I also have a lot of respect for that kind of laziness at times. The kind that makes fun of itself in public documents?

Well, just is that upfront about the fact, like, you know what, I didn't really want to work too hard on this, so here it is. Right, so yeah, it was very inconvenient for everyone, but them, they did this because of the growth population they expected. So it sort of made sense, but they even got that wrong.

They were wrong by about half of what they thought the growth rate was gonna be. Yeah, that's the thing is they were saying like, okay, this affords enough population growth to afford a population greater than any other this side of China is how they put it. So they clearly did have at least growth on their mind in that if you build on a grid,

it affords for the most growth. It's the easiest to build on, right-angled structures are the easiest to build and settle and live in. But the thing is, is part of that law, the 1807 law that established the commission, charged them with creating public squares, although it said in size and form and all that

and number that the commissioners see fit. Unfortunately, the commissioners didn't see fit to make almost any kind of public gathering places, especially green spaces for mental health, I guess is what you would call it. Yeah, and their reasoning is kind of BS actually. I'm not sure which one it was. I guess it was Morris that,

I'm not gonna read the whole quote, but he basically said, hey, listen, we don't have the Sin River or the Thames winding through the middle of town, but what we do have are these two wonderful rivers that just kind of hug Manhattan, and that's enough because everyone's just gonna go hang out at the river all the time,

because it's beautiful and gorgeous, and you can swim in it and the East River and the Hudson River will forever be our green space, basically. Yeah, basically that the city had enough, it didn't need green spaces because of the East and the Hudson Rivers, and like in about 40 years,

people were like, no, we do, we need to build Central Park. Yeah, which was a savior because I think it says here on their original plan, only 5% of the grid was public green space, and 240 of those 400 acres was a parade ground. Yes, which I didn't know exactly where that was, do you? No, I'm not sure, I don't know. I mean, there's Washington Square Park,

there's some cool kind of central promenades and things like that, and then these, you know, New York's famous for these tiny little slivers of a park, kind of all over the place, but they're small. They are very small, especially compared to the surrounding areas for sure in the buildings. That's why the High Line was such a big deal.

Yeah, it was a big deal, and I remember not quite grasping why, no, I definitely do because there's just, people need that, people need green space, they need nature, they need to be like outside of a built environment, even if it's a built natural environment, you know what I mean?

Yeah, and Central Park is amazing and we love it, but that's a long way if you're in Southern Manhattan to get up there. Right, right, but basically these guys said, you don't need it, go hang out at the Hudson or the East River. It's so wonderful and lovely. So there were a lot of people, like we said,

that were really unhappy with this. This was a huge exercise of eminent domain. There were a lot of people on these lands already, remember Seneca Village that was destroyed to create Central Park, they managed to survive the 1811 Commission. I can't remember how long that was around, but I wanna say Seneca Village was around

for a good 50 years before it was leveled in the 1850s. So it would have been around on the common lands during this time, but like you said, about 39 or 40% of homeowners or established buildings had to be torn down. They filled in ponds, they filled in salt marshes, they completely altered the ecosystem of stuff that could have been built around or incorporated

had they stopped and thought about how to do that. They just leveled everything and built a grid over it. And so a lot of people were really, really unhappy about this. And they were particularly unhappy that the city administration was just sticking to this, no matter what. And there were a lot of lawsuits and all of them from what I understand were unsuccessful.

Oh yeah, for about 60 years, there were tons of lawsuits going on. And I know you said it was a big eminent domain act, but it was I think still the largest act of eminent domain in New York City. And that includes Central Park and how they get their water, which was another good episode. Yeah, because I mean, Central Park was huge,

but it's just a small sliver of this larger area. Yeah, this one quote from landowner, Clement Clarkmore, he published a pamphlet about the tyrannical commissioners plan and it says this, nothing is to be left unmolested, which does not coincide with the street commissioners, plummet and level.

These are men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome. Burn. Big time. Yep, so. Didn't matter though. No, it really didn't matter. They just went ahead with it blindly and thoughtlessly

and did. And again, like it did accommodate growth, although they underestimated the growth, but it took a little while for this stuff to fill up. This plan was delivered in 1811, but it wasn't until 1875 that enough people had started to move in that there were more New Yorkers living above 14th Street than there were living below it.

Because remember, I mean, Lower Manhattan was where it all began. So that, I mean, it took a little while to fill in and it didn't even necessarily fill in uniformly. By that same year in 1875, there's still 40,000 vacant lots left in this grid plan. And that was like about half of the space. Yeah, I love that fact.

That's good. Dave has some nice facts here at the end. 1869, the very first apartment building in New York was built called the Stuyvesant. And they called them, I don't even think they called them apartments at the time. It was called a French flat or a French house. But prior to that, it was, you know,

tenement houses and houses. And so the Stuyvesant is built and everyone thinks it's silly that anyone would wanna live in the same building as other people. And they called it Stuyvesant's Folly. But that it was at 142 East 18th between Irving Place and Third. And it was a huge hit.

Like people made fun of it in the newspapers, but people signed up to live there almost immediately it filled up. It was demoed and replaced in 1960. But so this was 1869 very, it didn't take long though. In 1884, the Dakota was built, which still stands today. So apartment buildings kind of came into fashion. I think probably do just Stuyvesant's Folly.

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, it went over so well and so quickly that it really opened the way for more and more to be built. Pretty cool. So one thing that people point to is this commissioner's plan of 1811 is just like that same principle or the same significance that the Spanish coming in

and imposing a grid over an indigenous settlement was somehow taming the wild or the organic or something like that. There's a, this is the turning point between kind of unplanned, organic, much more harmonious naturally New York. And the planned modern New York that we know and love today.

This is where it went from one to the other, almost like flipping a switch. And granted for, it took decades and decades to realize this plan. But when it was delivered and when it was adopted, that was it, that change happened and the transition began. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I think so too.

What else is there for New York? I mean, we figure we got water, we got the subways covered, we got Central Park, we've got this. Oh yeah, yeah, let's see. There can't be much else as far as just the bones of, oh, I know what I wanna do is maybe how the mail and the trash work.

It's a miracle. Okay, all right, yeah. We did the Rockettes once even too. Oh, that's right. I mean, we've done a lot of New York topics. It's true. Or maybe we should move to a different city. Let's start talking about Des Moines.

Holy cow, dude. It almost simultaneously came out of my mouth. Des Moines? Yes. That's so weird. It is weird. It's in the zeitgeist apparently. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. Okay, well, if you wanna know more about New York, just start reading and then eventually travel there. They'll give you the all clear when they're ready. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Hey guys, my 16 year old son Owen is Probs your biggest fan for real. He also is narcolepsy.

I appreciate you taking on this topic and bringing some understanding of it to the masses. He was diagnosed when he was 10 and it affects every single aspect of his life. I think it has made him wise beyond his years personally and compassionate to other people with invisible struggles, but it still sucks. If you ever wanna read or hear firsthand accounts

from people with narcolepsy, check out Julie Flygare that is F-L-Y-G-A-R-E or Flygare, I'm not sure. How would you say that? Oh, I like the one with flavor the second one. Flygare, who is doing all kinds of advocacy for people with narcolepsy, including a scholarship foundation. She founded Project Sleep and Voices of Narcolepsy.

She also read a great book about her experiences with being diagnosed during law school called Wide Awake in Dreaming. When Owen received his diagnosis, I reached out to her for help. She sent Owen a care package with a book, a t-shirt, wristbands, a very kind card, et cetera, to let him know that he's not alone.

That is very sweet. It is. I think she deserves an award for the work she's doing. Anyway, great resource for sure. Thanks for the work that you do. I mean, could we get an award? You know?

We've won a webby before, I think. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Sometimes it's fun and entertaining, but sometimes and often it's really important and educational as well. Sincerely, the mom of your biggest fan, and that is from Brooke.

Thanks, Brooke. And thanks, Owen, for listening. It's really good to hear from you guys. And I feel like we should send Owen something, too. Sure. Let's do it, Chuck. We'll figure it out. All right.

We can't be showing up by this Flygare person. No, no, no. Send us your physical address and we'll mail you something. That's right. And in the meantime, thanks for listening and thanks for being a fan. And thank you for listening

and thank you for being a fan, too. And if you want to get in touch with us like Brooke did, you can send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts.