New York, drawn from its own streets.

New York on paper

Manhattan was laid out on a grid before most of it was built, and the print shows the consequence with no comment needed — avenue after avenue running the length of the island, cross streets at even intervals, the whole array turned at an angle to the page because the island is turned at an angle to the compass. Then Broadway runs through it diagonally, inherited from a road that predates the plan, and everywhere it crosses an avenue the grid opens into a square. Those junctions are the punctuation of a New York print.

Central Park is the other large event: a plain rectangle of park, half a mile by two and a half, drawn as an empty block with the grid interrupted around it and the transverse roads crossing it at four points. South of the grid the pattern collapses into the older streets of Lower Manhattan, bending and narrowing towards the point, which is the clearest before-and-after of city planning on any map.

The rivers do the framing. The Hudson on the west and the East River on the right of the sheet are broad and flat, and the bridges cross them as thin determined lines from a city that runs on a grid into cities that do not: Brooklyn's streets meet the water at their own angles, Queens has another grain again, and the piers notch both shores. At twelve kilometres across the frame holds the island from the Battery to Harlem with Brooklyn, Queens and the New Jersey waterfront at the edges. Come in to two kilometres and it becomes a neighbourhood of countable blocks — which, in a city where people give their address as an intersection, is the print that means something.