The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor

by Marguerite Holloway

Overview

"Randel is endlessly fascinating, and Holloway’s biography tells his life with great skill." —Steve Weinberg, USA Today

John Randel Jr. (1787–1865) was an eccentric and flamboyant surveyor. Renowned for his inventiveness as well as for his bombast and irascibility, Randel was central to Manhattan’s development but died in financial ruin. Telling Randel’s engrossing and dramatic life story for the first time, this eye-opening biography introduces an unheralded pioneer of American engineering and mapmaking.

Charged with “gridding” what was then an undeveloped, hilly island, Randel recorded the contours of Manhattan down to the rocks on its shores. He was obsessed with accuracy and steeped in the values of the Enlightenment, in which math and science promised dominion over nature. The result was a series of maps, astonishing in their detail and precision, which undergird our knowledge about the island today. During his varied career Randel created surveying devices, designed an early elevated subway, and proposed a controversial alternative route for the Erie Canal—winning him admirers and enemies.

The Measure of Manhattan is more than just the life of an unrecognized engineer. It is about the ways in which surveying and cartography changed the ground beneath our feet. Bringing Randel’s story into the present, Holloway travels with contemporary surveyors and scientists trying to envision Manhattan as a wild island once again.

Illustrated with dozens of historical images and antique maps, The Measure of Manhattan is an absorbing story of a fascinating man that captures the era when Manhattan—indeed, the entire country—still seemed new, the moment before canals and railroads helped draw a grid across the American landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393089806
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/11/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Marguerite Holloway, the director of Science and Environmental Journalism at Columbia University, has written for Scientific American, Discover, the New York Times, Natural History, and Wired. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Prologue: Big Rock 1

I In Which Reuben Skye Rose-Redwood and J. R. Lemuel Morrison Set Out to Find the Imagined City 3

II In Which John Randel Jr. Affixes the City to the Island 14

III In Which Rose-Redwood Surveys the 1811 Grid and Morrison Surveys Today's 135

IV In Which Randel Keeps Seeking the Most Eligible Routes 173

V In Which Mannahatta Lifts Off 253

VI In Which Is Described "the Ingenuity of the New" 281

Epilogue: Randel's Rock 297

Acknowledgments 299

Notes 307

Bibliography 329

Index 353

Editorial Reviews

Between 1808 and 1865, John Randel Jr. altered the landscape of New York City by proposing, surveying, and establishing the current grid system of the modern city; during the same years, the inveterate and peripatetic genius also surveyed and divided portions of upstate New York, “trudged hundreds of miles, laying out turnpikes and surveying routes for several of the country’s earliest railroads,” and “sounded the Hudson River south of Albany” in order to determine how ships might navigate the waters more easily. In this fascinating biography of a figure mostly eclipsed by the city’s other sculptor, Robert Moses, Holloway traces Randel’s life and career from his work mapping the grid of “Mannahatta” to his plans for an elevated rail line and his constant efforts to improve the tools of his trade. Randel invented a number of devices—including a water level, a theodolite, and various measuring rods—for use in surveying parcels of land. The figure that emerges from Holloway’s admiring portrait is a man who obsessed over precision, “hoped his ideas would improve the world,” “loved finding solutions” to problems, and who strove to see how best to move from the present into the future. 63 illus. Agent: Elaine Markson, Markson Thoma Literary Agency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"In gracefully efficient prose, Marguerite Holloway, who heads Columbia University’s Science and Environmental Journalism program, gives the reader a vivid sense of the challenges facing Randel, the social context that informed his epic undertaking, and the will and ingenuity that he brought to the task…an enlightening ode to a man who made sense of a budding metropolis."

The Daily Beast - Kevin Canfield

"As elegant as the maps it celebrates, Marguerite Holloway’s lively biography tells the story of the man who pinned a grid to Manhattan."

Edward Dolnick

"Marguerite Holloway’s portrait of the surveyor’s surveyor in his cartography-obsessed time shows us how much the physical city has changed and, most crucially, how much it hasn’t."

Robert Sullivan

"Marguerite Holloway has uncovered [in the life of John Randel Jr.] a quite marvelous tale, and has told it just magnificently."

Simon Winchester

"The Measure of Manhattan allows us to appreciate, for the first time, the extent to which the rationality of the grid plan can be attributed to the irrationally obsessive man who ‘affixe[d] the city to the island,’ in Holloway’s words."

Slate - Richard Kreiner

"A far more intimate experience than going to the museum…Holloway’s relationship to the city is personal, and she is aware that the city itself was made by people, for them to live in."

Village Voice

"The Measure of Manhattan offers a fascinating look at a forgotten episode in American history. Marguerite Holloway brings to life the man who in a very real way made New York what it is today."

Elizabeth Kolbert

"Marguerite Holloway has created an enchanting web of biography and science, as magical as the grid that John Randel devised to give birth to modern Manhattan."

Andro Linklater

"This outstanding history of the Manhattan grid offers us a strange archaeology: part spatial adventure, part technical expedition into the heart of measurement itself, starring teams of 19th-century gentlemen striding across the island’s eroded mountains and wild streams, implementing a grid that would soon enough sprout skyscrapers and flatirons, Central Park and Fifth Avenue. Marguerite Holloway’s engaging survey takes us step by step through the challenges of obsolete land laws and outdated maps of an earlier metropolis, looking for—and finding—the future shape of this immeasurable city."

BLDGBLOG - Geoff Manaugh

Holloway (science & environmental journalism, Columbia Univ.) here sheds light on a lesser-known but significant figure of American history. Randel (1787–1865) was a surveyor and cartographer whose fame rests largely on his 1811 establishment of a grid plan that resulted in the streets and property lines that profoundly transformed New York City and its growth, enabling it to logically expand into the great cosmopolis it is today. Holloway also highlights Randel's other engineering endeavors, such as the building of canals and railroads in the young country, and inventing tools that revolutionized both surveying and mapmaking. But, like many visionaries, Randel found his efforts not fully appreciated during his lifetime; he was often distracted by bitter professional rivalries as well as by lawsuits he waged against those he felt were cheating him. Despite his prolific and successful career, he died almost penniless and forgotten. VERDICT While Holloway's thorough coverage of Randel's efforts in Manhattan makes for a compelling narrative, much of her coverage seems patchy, an unfortunate result, given her exhaustive research to resurrect her subject's life. Nonetheless, she is to be commended for reminding us of the undeniable significance, to this day, of Randel's work not only for New York, but for infrastructure development across the United States. Recommended for anyone interested in American civil engineering, urban planning, or New York biographies.—Richard Drezen, Jersey City, NJ

Library Journal

Sturdy biography of an important, long-overlooked figure in the early development of the United States. "His was the era of laying lines of the land--lines for communication, for transportation and goods; lines for establishing nationhood, statehood, and individual ownership." So writes Holloway (Science and Environmental Journalism/Columbia Univ.) of John Randel (1787–1865), a master surveyor who improved on the tools of his trade while taking on some of the toughest surveying challenges of his time, the most important of them being the imposition of a grid system on the then-rugged topography of Manhattan. Frederick Law Olmsted is better known for his contributions to the making of Central Park, but Randel figures there with a surveyor's bolt set in rock; he also figures across the island for leveling hills and filling earth, among the earliest efforts at terraforming. A lover of math and data, Randel went on to work in the nascent railroad industry and to lay out canals between the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay, though for various reasons his work was less successful than on Manhattan. Holloway serves up a suitably vigorous life of the man, who was always on the go, and she does not assume that readers will share his interests and knowledge--she provides useful little lessons in geometry, in how geosynchronous positioning works, and the like. There is much to like in this book and its now-restored subject. A solid contribution to the history of the early republic.

Kirkus Reviews