Myth #1: “Randel’s Matrix”

By Gerard Koeppel with Jason M. Barr

Popular wisdom has it that the grid plan was created by John Randel, Jr. In truth, it is not Randel’s plan but the plan decided on by the commission charged with coming up with a future street plan for the expanding city. The commissioners employed Randel as their chief surveyor to make surveys as they directed, then to draw the map of the plan. Further, the great grid plan didn’t even originate with the commissioners: they stole it from a smaller, mostly unrealized land-parceling plan from two decades earlier.