The Grid: How Manhattan Is Organized and How to Read It Like a Local

Manhattan is a navigational puzzle that solves itself. Most cities of comparable density require maps, apps, a good sense of direction, and the willingness to ask strangers for help. Manhattan requires none of these things, provided you understand one governing principle: above 14th Street, almost everything is a grid, and the grid is logical enough that a visitor who grasps it on their first morning can navigate the island confidently for the rest of their stay without ever being genuinely lost.

The grid is the single most useful piece of information a visitor to New York can possess. It is more useful than any specific address, any neighborhood boundary, any restaurant recommendation. Once you understand how streets and avenues are numbered and which direction they run, you can locate any address in Manhattan, estimate how long a walk will take, determine which subway train to take, and describe your location to a cab driver or a friend with complete precision. The grid is the language of the city, and learning it takes approximately ten minutes.

This guide explains how the grid works, how to use it in practice, and — for those who want the fuller picture — how it came to exist: the political argument, the engineering survey, and the act of extraordinary urban foresight that imposed a rational order on an island that, in 1811, was mostly farmland, forest, and the ambitions of a growing republic.

Part One: How the Grid Works

The Basic Structure

Manhattan is a long, narrow island — 13.4 miles from the southern tip at Battery Park to the northern tip at Inwood, and at its widest point only 2.3 miles across. The grid takes advantage of this shape by running its longer dimension — the numbered streets — east-west, and its shorter dimension — the numbered avenues — north-south.

Streets are the east-west thoroughfares. They are numbered sequentially from south to north, beginning at 1st Street in Greenwich Village and running up to 220th Street in Inwood. The rule is simple: as the street number increases, you are moving north. As it decreases, you are moving south.

Avenues are the north-south thoroughfares. They are numbered sequentially from east to west: First Avenue is on the East Side, near the East River; Twelfth Avenue (also called the West Side Highway) is on the West Side, near the Hudson River. The rule is equally simple: as the avenue number increases, you are moving west. As it decreases, you are moving east.

This means that any address in Manhattan above 14th Street can be located immediately once you know two things: the street number and the avenue number. 57th Street and Fifth Avenue is in Midtown. 125th Street and Eighth Avenue is in Harlem. 181st Street and Fort Washington Avenue is in Washington Heights. You do not need a map to know roughly where any of these are.

The Block Dimensions

Understanding the physical size of a Manhattan block allows you to estimate walking distances accurately, which is one of the most practically useful skills a visitor can develop.

North-south blocks — the distance between one numbered street and the next — are approximately 80 meters, or about 260 feet. This means that twenty blocks north or south is approximately one mile. The rule of thumb: twenty blocks equal one mile. A ten-minute walk at a moderate pace covers approximately ten blocks.

East-west blocks — the distance between one numbered avenue and the next — are considerably longer: approximately 250 meters, or about 800 feet, though this varies significantly by avenue. The distance between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is longer than the distance between First and Second Avenues. The practical rule: one avenue block equals approximately three street blocks in walking time.

The asymmetry matters for navigation. Walking from Fifth Avenue to Ninth Avenue (four avenue blocks) is roughly equivalent in distance to walking twenty blocks north or south. A visitor who understands this will not underestimate the walk from the East Side to the West Side of Midtown, which is a genuinely long distance despite involving only a handful of avenue crossings.

The Street and Avenue System in Practice

To find a location, you need the cross street. In New York, addresses are given in one of two ways: as a numbered address on an avenue ("350 Fifth Avenue" — the Empire State Building), or as an intersection of a street and an avenue ("34th Street and Fifth Avenue"). The intersection format is more useful for navigation because it immediately tells you where you are on both axes of the grid.

When someone gives you a numbered address on an avenue without a cross street — "meet me at 756 Fifth Avenue" — you can calculate the approximate cross street using the avenue address formula (see below), but the cross street is always the more useful piece of information.

To determine direction, count. If you are at 42nd Street and need to reach 59th Street, you are going seventeen blocks north. If you are at Seventh Avenue and need to reach Third Avenue, you are going four avenue blocks east. The calculation is arithmetic, and the grid makes it constant.

Uptown, Downtown, Crosstown

New Yorkers do not use compass directions. They use the grid's own directional vocabulary, which is more precise for urban navigation and which you will hear from every cab driver, subway announcement, and street-level conversation.

Uptown means north — toward the higher street numbers. "Go uptown" means go north.

Downtown means south — toward the lower street numbers. "Go downtown" means go south.

Crosstown means east-west — traveling along a street rather than an avenue. A crosstown bus runs east-west; a crosstown trip takes you from one side of the island to the other.

Midtown is not a direction but a location — roughly 34th to 59th Streets — but it functions as a reference point: things described as "uptown" are generally above Midtown, and things described as "downtown" are generally below it, though the terms are relative and context-dependent.

The uptown/downtown vocabulary extends into the subway system, where platform signs indicate direction by "Uptown" and "Downtown" rather than by borough or compass point. Knowing whether you need the uptown or the downtown platform is the first piece of directional knowledge required for any subway trip.

Odd and Even Street Numbers

On numbered cross streets in Manhattan, building numbers follow a consistent rule:

• East of Fifth Avenue: addresses begin at Fifth Avenue and increase as you move east. 1 East 42nd Street is at Fifth Avenue; 200 East 42nd Street is further east, toward the East River.
• West of Fifth Avenue: addresses begin at Fifth Avenue and increase as you move west. 1 West 42nd Street is at Fifth Avenue; 200 West 42nd Street is further west, toward the Hudson River.

Fifth Avenue is the dividing line between East and West addresses on cross streets. This means that "East 57th Street" and "West 57th Street" are the same street, meeting at Fifth Avenue, but they carry different addresses and can be far apart in actual distance.

One-Way Streets

With a few exceptions, Manhattan streets are one-way:

• Odd-numbered streets generally run westbound (toward lower avenue numbers, toward the Hudson).
• Even-numbered streets generally run eastbound (toward lower avenue numbers, toward the East River — or, put differently, toward the East Side).

The mnemonic: odd goes west, even goes east. This rule holds for most of the grid; the major two-way exceptions are the large crosstown thoroughfares — 14th Street, 23rd Street, 34th Street, 42nd Street, 57th Street, 72nd Street, 79th Street, 86th Street, 96th Street, 110th Street, and 125th Street — which are wide enough to carry two-way traffic and function as the grid's major east-west arteries.

Avenue Directions

The avenues are also predominantly one-way:

• Even-numbered avenues generally run southbound (downtown): Second Avenue, Fourth Avenue, Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas), Eighth Avenue, Tenth Avenue.
• Odd-numbered avenues generally run northbound (uptown): First Avenue, Third Avenue, Fifth Avenue (with exceptions in Midtown), Seventh Avenue, Ninth Avenue, Eleventh Avenue.

There are significant exceptions: Lexington Avenue (northbound), Park Avenue (two-way), Madison Avenue (northbound), and the named avenues like Broadway, which cuts diagonally across the grid and operates under its own traffic logic. Fifth Avenue is one-way southbound south of 34th Street and south of Central Park.

Part Two: The Named Avenues and Special Cases

The numbered avenues are the skeleton of the grid, but many of Manhattan's most significant thoroughfares have names rather than (or in addition to) numbers. Understanding these named avenues is essential for navigation above the basic grid level.

The Major Named Avenues

Broadway is the great exception to the grid — the diagonal street that pre-dates the 1811 plan and runs at a southwesterly angle from the northern tip of the island all the way to the Battery. Because it intersects the grid's right-angle streets at an oblique angle, Broadway creates a series of triangular intersections — including the Flatiron Building site, Times Square, and Herald Square — wherever it crosses a significant avenue. Broadway is both a street name and a cultural institution, and its deviation from the grid is one of Manhattan's most visually interesting features: the triangle buildings, the widened plazas, the moment where the rational order of the grid is interrupted by something older and more organic.

Park Avenue runs north-south on the East Side (effectively the continuation of Fourth Avenue above 14th Street) through the center of the Upper East Side, bisecting the blocks between Lexington and Madison. It is two-way, carries significant vehicular traffic, and has the specific character of a boulevard designed for wide lanes and central planted medians north of Grand Central Terminal.

Lexington Avenue is one block east of Park Avenue, running northbound. Madison Avenue is one block west of Park Avenue, running northbound. Together with Park and Third Avenues, they form the dense avenue network of the East Side.

Fifth Avenue is the formal spine of Manhattan — the avenue that divides East from West, runs through Midtown's luxury corridor, forms the eastern edge of Central Park, and continues north through Museum Mile and East Harlem. In terms of navigational significance, Fifth Avenue is the single most important address in Manhattan.

Sixth Avenue, officially renamed Avenue of the Americas in 1945 in honor of the Pan-American Union (a name that New Yorkers have acknowledged in signage and largely ignored in speech for eighty years), runs northbound through Midtown and the Village.

Seventh Avenue becomes Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard above Central Park (110th Street) in Harlem; Eighth Avenue becomes Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem; Lenox Avenue (also called Malcolm X Boulevard) is the name for Sixth Avenue in Harlem. This renaming of avenues as they enter Harlem reflects the neighborhood's political history and the honors paid to figures of the African-American civil rights tradition. For navigation, the underlying grid numbers remain useful (Lenox Avenue = Sixth Avenue = even-numbered = southbound, with exceptions).

Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue are the major north-south avenues of the Upper West Side, running between Central Park West (the western edge of Central Park, essentially Eighth Avenue above 59th Street) and Broadway. West End Avenue runs parallel to the west.

Riverside Drive runs along the edge of the Hudson River, from 72nd Street to 181st Street — one of the most scenic drives in Manhattan and the address of some of the finest prewar apartment buildings in the city.

Central Park West — the western boundary of Central Park, between 59th and 110th Streets — is effectively the continuation of Eighth Avenue and is numbered as such in the grid, but the name "Central Park West" is used universally and has the particular prestige of one of the most celebrated residential addresses in the city.

The Diagonal: Broadway as Landmark

Because Broadway cuts diagonally across the grid, it produces a specific set of famous intersections and plazas:

• Times Square: Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street — the most famous intersection in the world.
• Herald Square: Broadway and Sixth Avenue at 34th Street — Macy's.
• Madison Square: Broadway and Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street — the Flatiron Building.
• Union Square: Broadway and Park Avenue South at 14th Street — one of the city's most important public spaces.
• Columbus Circle: Broadway and Eighth Avenue at 59th Street — the entrance to Central Park and Lincoln Center.

At each of these intersections, the diagonal of Broadway meeting the right-angle of the grid creates a triangle or a widened plaza — the characteristic public spaces that distinguish New York from other gridded American cities.

Part Three: Below 14th Street

The grid ends — or rather, never began — below 14th Street, and this is important to know because lower Manhattan is where the rule breaks down. Greenwich Village, SoHo, TriBeCa, the Financial District, the Lower East Side, and Chinatown all developed before the 1811 Commissioners' Plan, and their street patterns reflect the organic, pre-rational growth of a city following topography, property lines, and the paths of old farms and estates rather than a surveyor's logic.

Below 14th Street:

• Streets are no longer numbered sequentially but named: Bleecker Street, Spring Street, Canal Street, Wall Street, Fulton Street, Broad Street.
• The street pattern is irregular — streets meet at angles other than 90 degrees, change names mid-block, and dead-end without warning.
• The East-West / odd-even rules do not apply.
• Navigation by address alone is much harder; the intersection format becomes essential.

Greenwich Village is particularly irregular — a neighborhood of named streets, many of them running diagonally or curving in ways that perplex even experienced navigators. West 4th Street and West 10th Street intersect in the Village, which is geometrically impossible in a proper grid but is a real and findable location on Sixth Avenue. Waverly Place meets itself at two different points. Gay Street is a short curved alley. The Village rewards getting lost in a way that the grid above 14th Street does not.

SoHo and TriBeCa are slightly more regular but still follow the named-street system. The canonical SoHo grid — Prince Street, Spring Street, Broome Street, Grand Street — runs east-west; Broadway, West Broadway, and Wooster Street run north-south. The pattern is recognizable but not numbered.

The Financial District is the most irregular of all, following the original Dutch and English street plan laid down in the seventeenth century along the lanes of early New Amsterdam. Wall Street, Broad Street, Exchange Place, and Beaver Street run in directions determined by the paths of the original Dutch settlement and the shoreline of an island that was considerably narrower than it is today (much of lower Manhattan south of the original shoreline is landfill).

Practical note for tourists: When your destination is below 14th Street, use a navigation app. The grid will not save you here, and the named streets require either local knowledge or technological assistance. The good news is that the neighborhoods below 14th Street are compact enough that being lost is a relatively minor inconvenience — you are rarely more than a few blocks from a street you recognize.

Part Four: The Address Formula

For avenues in Manhattan, there is a formula — widely known among New Yorkers but rarely explained to visitors — that converts a building's street address number into the approximate cross street. The formula is not perfectly precise, but it is close enough to be genuinely useful when you have an avenue address but no cross street.

The general method: Drop the last digit of the building number, divide the result by 2, and add the avenue key number (which varies by avenue). The result is the approximate cross street.

For example, for a building at 630 Fifth Avenue:

1. Drop the last digit: 63
2. Divide by 2: 31.5
3. Add the key for Fifth Avenue: 18
4. Result: approximately 49th Street ✓ (630 Fifth Avenue is Rockefeller Center, at 50th Street)

Avenue key numbers (add after halving the adjusted address):

Avenue

Key

First Avenue

+3

Second Avenue

+3

Third Avenue

+10

Fourth Avenue

+8

Fifth Avenue (below 200)

+13

Fifth Avenue (200–400)

+16

Fifth Avenue (400–600)

+18

Fifth Avenue (600–775)

+20

Fifth Avenue (775–1286)

+Varies

Sixth Avenue

−12

Seventh Avenue (below 110th St)

+12

Eighth Avenue

+10

Ninth Avenue

+13

Tenth Avenue

+14

Lexington Avenue

+22

Madison Avenue

+26

Park Avenue

+35

Amsterdam Avenue

+59

Columbus Avenue

+60

West End Avenue

+59

Riverside Drive

+72

Broadway (below 754)

−29

Broadway (754–846)

−25

Broadway (above 846)

−31

The formula is approximate and works best in Midtown and the Upper West and East Sides. It is less reliable for addresses below 14th Street, where the grid does not apply, and for addresses above 110th Street, where the avenue numbering and naming system becomes more complex.

The simpler modern approach: Any navigation app will convert an avenue address to a cross street instantly. The formula is worth knowing as a party trick and as a backup when your phone is dead.

Part Five: The Grid's History

New Amsterdam and the Pre-Grid City

New York was not always gridded. The city that the Dutch established in 1625 at the southern tip of Manhattan — New Amsterdam — grew organically along the waterfront and the paths between it, in the pattern of any pre-industrial settlement where roads follow water, topography, and the lines of existing property. The streets that survive from this period — Wall Street (following the line of the original Dutch defensive wall), Broad Street (following the path of the original Broad Canal), Broadway (following the Wiechquaeskeck Trail, the Native American path that ran the length of the island) — are the physical traces of a city laid out without plan by the pressures of commerce, defense, and geography.

The English took New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York, but the basic street pattern of the lower city continued to develop according to the same organic logic. By the late eighteenth century, when New York had become the first capital of the United States and one of the most important commercial cities in the new republic, lower Manhattan had a recognizable street pattern — dense, irregular, following the lines of the original Dutch plan — but above its developed frontier, the island was largely farms, estates, and woodland.

The Population Crisis and the Need for a Plan

By 1807, the population of New York had grown from approximately 33,000 in 1790 to approximately 84,000, and the growth showed no signs of slowing. The city was expanding northward from its downtown core, and it was expanding in the same organic, incremental way that had produced lower Manhattan's confusing street pattern. Property owners were subdividing their farms and laying out streets according to their own preferences; the result was an increasingly chaotic patchwork of misaligned roads, dead ends, and incompatible lot patterns.

The New York State Legislature, recognizing that the unplanned growth of the city would eventually produce a metropolis as difficult to navigate as the lower city had already become, passed a law in 1807 authorizing the appointment of a commission to develop a comprehensive plan for the streets of Manhattan. The Commissioners' Plan would have the force of law: property owners could not lay out streets that conflicted with it, and when the city eventually extended northward to cover the full island, the grid would be the governing framework.

The three commissioners appointed were Gouverneur Morris, a statesman and one of the authors of the United States Constitution; Simeon De Witt, the Surveyor General of New York; and John Rutherfurd, a former United States Senator. The work of actually surveying the island and developing the plan was led by the commission's chief surveyor, John Randel Jr., who spent the years from 1808 to 1810 walking and measuring the length and breadth of Manhattan — an island that was, above its developed southern portion, almost entirely rural.

John Randel Jr. and the Survey

John Randel Jr. was twenty-one years old when he began surveying Manhattan, and the work he did over the following years was one of the more extraordinary acts of individual physical effort in the history of American urban planning. Randel and his team walked the entire length of the island, measuring distances, noting topography, marking the proposed street locations with wooden stakes and, later, with marble monuments set into the bedrock. They worked through summer heat and winter cold, encountered hostile landowners who objected to surveyors crossing their property (Randel was arrested multiple times on charges of trespassing), and produced a survey of Manhattan that was, for its time, a work of remarkable precision.

The survey required Randel to make specific decisions about the grid's orientation. He chose an orientation approximately 28 degrees east of true north, following the long axis of the island rather than the compass points. This orientation — known as the Manhattan grid's skew — means that the streets do not run exactly east-west and north-south in compass terms but at an angle that aligns with the island's shape. It is the reason that a New York sunrise and sunset occur at points along the horizon that seem slightly off for the latitude, and it is the origin of the phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge.

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811

The commissioners submitted their plan in 1811, accompanied by a report that is a remarkable document of early American urban philosophy. The commissioners explicitly acknowledged the objections that could be made to a grid — that it failed to account for topography, that it ignored the natural features of the island, that it imposed a mechanical regularity on a landscape of hills, streams, and varied terrain — and defended their choice on practical grounds:

"A city is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and that strait sided, and right angled houses are the most cheap to build, and the most convenient to live in."

The defense is utilitarian and unapologetic. The commissioners were not making an aesthetic argument but an economic and functional one: the grid would produce the most buildable, the most divisible, and the most legible urban fabric for a commercial city. The right angle was the angle of practicality.

The plan proposed twelve numbered avenues running north-south, 155 numbered streets running east-west (later extended as the city grew), and the blocks between them divided into building lots of standard dimensions. The streets were specified at 60 feet wide; the avenues at 100 feet wide. Broadway was retained as a diagonal — it was too well-established to be eliminated — and a few existing roads (the Bloomingdale Road, which became the Upper West Side's Broadway; the Boston Post Road, which became parts of the East Side street system) were incorporated into the plan. Otherwise, the topography of the island — its hills, its streams, its ponds — was largely disregarded.

The plan made no provision for parks except a military parade ground on the East Side (which eventually became Madison Square) and a market. The commissioners explained this omission by noting that Manhattan was "surrounded by such a large tract of water" that residents requiring fresh air could simply walk to the waterfront. This was one of the plan's more significant errors of foresight; the park deficit became apparent as the city filled in its grid, leading eventually to the creation of Central Park in 1858 as a corrective.

Manhattanhenge: The Grid's Astronomical Consequence

The 28-degree skew of the Manhattan grid produces, twice a year, a phenomenon that Neil deGrasse Tyson named Manhattanhenge in 1997: the precise alignment of the setting or rising sun with the east-west streets of the grid.

Because the streets run approximately 28 degrees south of true east-west, the sun aligns with them only when its position on the horizon corresponds to that angle. This occurs twice in the spring (around Memorial Day) and twice in the summer (around mid-July) for the setting sun, and corresponding dates in winter and fall for the rising sun. On these days, the sun sets precisely at the end of the east-west cross streets — visible in an unobstructed line from Eighth Avenue all the way to the East River — producing a corridor of golden light that fills the street canyons and is, when photographed from a mid-block position, one of the more spectacular urban optical phenomena available in any city in the world.

The canonical viewing spots for Manhattanhenge are the major east-west streets with clear sightlines: 34th Street, 42nd Street, and 57th Street are the most photographed. Arrive thirty minutes before the predicted sunset time, position yourself at the mid-block point of the chosen street with a view east toward the river, and wait. The alignment lasts only a few minutes; the light in the street canyons lasts somewhat longer.

The predicted dates for Manhattanhenge are published annually by the American Museum of Natural History.

Implementing the Grid: The Leveling of Manhattan

The grid was drawn on paper in 1811. Implementing it on the actual terrain of Manhattan took the rest of the nineteenth century and required one of the most dramatic physical transformations of a natural landscape in American urban history.

The Manhattan that Randel surveyed in 1808 was not flat. The island's terrain was varied: hills reached 100 feet above sea level in what is now Midtown; streams crossed the planned street lines; a significant ridge ran along the center of the island; ponds and wetlands occupied low-lying areas. The grid made no accommodation for any of this. The streets it proposed ran straight and level regardless of topography, which meant that the topography had to change.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the city grew northward block by block, the hills were cut down and the valleys were filled in to produce the level grades that the grid required. The rock that was blasted from the hills was used as fill for the low-lying areas. Streams were diverted into culverts and eventually underground pipes. The Collect Pond — the large freshwater pond in what is now the Civic Center area — was filled in between 1808 and 1817. Minetta Brook, which ran through Greenwich Village, was buried underground (it still flows, occasionally causing problems for the buildings above it). The Sunfish Pond and other small bodies of water in Midtown were similarly eliminated.

The Manhattan that exists today — flat from river to river, with relatively consistent grades on its cross streets — is not a natural landscape. It is an engineered one, shaped by a century of cut-and-fill work to conform to the demands of a grid drawn in a government office before the terrain was fully understood.

What the Grid Destroyed

The implementation of the grid was not without loss. Critics of the Commissioners' Plan have identified several significant sacrifices made in the name of geometric regularity.

Topography: The varied terrain of the pre-grid Manhattan — its hills, its views, its varied landscape character — was largely eliminated. The hills from which New Yorkers could see both rivers simultaneously were leveled. The streams that provided natural landscape features were buried. A more topographically sensitive grid, of the kind that San Francisco later developed with its steep streets following the hills rather than cutting through them, would have preserved more of the island's natural character.

Waterfront access: The grid's primary orientation toward north-south avenues meant that only the avenues running at the island's edges (the West Side Highway / Twelfth Avenue and the FDR Drive corridor on the East Side) provided direct waterfront access. The cross streets terminated at the water but the avenues — where the primary flow of pedestrian and commercial traffic ran — did not. The waterfront was therefore less integrated into the city's daily circulation than it might have been.

Central Park as correction: The most significant recognition of the grid's limitations was the creation of Central Park. By the 1840s, it was apparent that the grid's failure to reserve park space was producing a city of mounting density with inadequate access to open land. The campaign for a major central park was driven in part by the recognition that once the grid was built out, no such space would ever be available — every block would have a building on it. Central Park, carved from the grid in 1858 by the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, represents 843 acres of land that was explicitly removed from the grid's logic and dedicated to a different purpose.

The Grid's Success

Whatever its critics have said — and they have said a great deal, from Edgar Allan Poe's complaint about the "rectangular" monotony of the planned city to the twentieth century's rediscovery of the organic street patterns the grid replaced — the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 produced a city that works. The grid allowed Manhattan to develop with a density and efficiency that no other American city has matched; it made real estate development predictable and buildable; it gave New York a navigational clarity that has absorbed millions of immigrants, tourists, and newcomers across two centuries without ever making the city impossible to understand; and it produced the specific aesthetic — the long, straight streets, the avenue canyons, the precise geometry of a city block — that is as recognizable as any single building in the Manhattan skyline.

The grid is the reason you can give someone an address in New York and have them find it without further instruction. It is the reason the city's density has been able to increase continuously without becoming impassable. It is the reason a visitor who arrives in Manhattan without a map and without local knowledge can, by understanding a few simple rules, navigate a city of eight million people with confidence from their first day.

Part Six: The Quick Reference

For visitors who want the essentials in the most condensed possible form:

Streets run east-west and are numbered south to north. Higher number = further north.

Avenues run north-south and are numbered west to east. Higher number = further west (toward the Hudson). Lower number = further east (toward the East River).

Fifth Avenue divides East from West on all cross streets.

20 blocks north or south = approximately 1 mile. 1 avenue block east or west ≈ 3 street blocks in walking distance.

Odd-numbered streets run westbound; even-numbered streets run eastbound.

Even-numbered avenues run southbound; odd-numbered avenues run northbound. (Major exceptions: Park Avenue is two-way; Madison and Lexington run northbound.)

Uptown = north. Downtown = south. Crosstown = east-west.

Below 14th Street, the grid ends. Use a map.

Broadway runs diagonally and intersects the grid at famous plazas: Times Square (42nd), Herald Square (34th), Madison Square (23rd), Union Square (14th), Columbus Circle (59th).

Manhattanhenge occurs twice in spring (around Memorial Day) and twice in summer (around mid-July) — the alignment of sunset with the east-west street grid, best seen from 34th, 42nd, or 57th Streets.

The grid was drawn by three commissioners and one very determined surveyor in the early years of the nineteenth century, before the island it organized was fully settled, before the technology existed to implement it, and before anyone could know whether the commercial republic it was designed to serve would fulfill its ambitions. It was an act of faith in the future of a city, expressed in right angles. The future arrived, and the grid held. Two hundred years later, it is still the clearest map anyone has drawn of what New York is: a place where you can always find your way, provided you understand the numbers.