ABSTRACT
Of the human acts that have shaped the magnificently unnatural geography of the city and created its unique sense of place, two stand out: the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 and the zoning resolution of 1916, with its later revisions. The first imprinted Manhattan with a two-dimensional plan, a rectangular grid defined by broad north-south avenues and multiple east-west cross streets and by its standard units, blocks of two hundred feet by six hundred to eight hundred feet. The second—zoning—determined the city's three-dimensional form by restricting uses by district and, especially, by limiting the maximum mass of a building allowed on a given site. The early-nineteenth-century Commissioners' Plan was a simple blueprint for the expansion of the city that delineated a separation between two types of space: public and private. The concept of gray space can also be applied to the 1961 zoning ordinance and later revisions, which encouraged plazas, vest-pocket parks, indoor atria, and other amenities.
