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Map of New York
A long, narrow island covered end to end by a grid, with a four-kilometre green rectangle in the middle. From above, Manhattan is as recognisable as its skyline.
What you see on the map
The grid. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 spread numbered streets running east to west and avenues running north to south across the whole island, ignoring hills and streams. The blocks are long and narrow, and on the map they form an unmistakable striped pattern.
Central Park. A perfect rectangle 4 km by 800 m that interrupts the grid, with its lakes, the reservoir and the curving paths that Olmsted and Vaux laid out deliberately so it would look nothing like the city around it.
Broadway. The old Native American trail that crosses the grid diagonally and, where it meets the avenues, opens bow-tie squares: Times Square, Herald Square, Columbus Circle at the corner of the park.
The rivers. The Hudson to the west and the East River to the east, with Roosevelt Island in between and, opposite, the edges of Queens and New Jersey. The water is filled with shore lines and cuts the island out crisply.
Which scale and paper suit it
1:30,000 on a 30 cm square, as in the picture, covers 8 km: from Midtown to Harlem, with the whole of Central Park in the middle. At that scale the city is drawn as blocks, here with their outline, which is what shows the grid.
1:12,000 on A3 goes down to a neighbourhood: Lower Manhattan, where the city predates the grid and the streets bend, or the Village, which ignored it too.
A 50 × 70 portrait poster at 1:40,000 takes in almost the whole island, from the Battery to Inwood: its elongated shape calls for tall paper.
Make it yours
Open the example and move the frame: Brooklyn, with its rotated grid, or the southern tip of Manhattan, with Wall Street and the harbour, deserve a map of their own.
Change all the colours at once with a theme (black ink, sepia, coral, night, blueprint) and download it as PNG. With a free account, also element by element, at 600 dpi, as vector PDF and as SVG.
