Hidden bolt of John Randel Jr in Central Park is lone reminder of his grid system
It is almost impossible to imagine a grid-less and uncrowded Manhattan.
Before the now famous concrete jungle was erected, New York's central island held just 100,000 people who lived among fields, shrubs and briars.
But authorities foresaw an influx. In 1808, John Randel Jr was radically commissioned to reorganize the city into a symmetrical, Cartesian format to accommodate an extra 900,000 residents.
To do so, the surveyor hammered up to 1,000 iron bolts at various potential intersections - hacking through the unkempt farmland with an ax.
More than 200 years later, just one rusty reminder of his arduous endeavor lingers: a single bolt.
Lingering reminder: This is the only verified bolt left from John Randel Jr's radical endeavor to map out New York's now famous grid system. He waded through the city's marshland to hammer bolts at cross sections
Its precise location is a close-guarded secret among city planning aficionados. Approximately, it sits in Central Park at what would have been the corner of 65th Street and Sixth Avenue.
Though more may lie undiscovered, and many claim to have found some, this one-inch-square, six-inch-tall stump is the only one confirmed by academics such as Reuben Rose-Redwood, a University of Victoria geography professor, and Marguerite Holloway, of Columbia University, who specialize in Manhattan history.
Rose-Redwood found the bolt after years spent pouring over maps and scouring the city with a metal detector.
Randel Jr spent two years from 1808 to 1810 designing blueprints to present to New York's authorities as he envisioned a mathematical system.
RELATED ARTICLES
Blood moon paints the sky red: Stargazers around the world... 
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio met with Cuban President...
Share this article
ShareOnce approved, he started the bolt-installing process.
It did not make him popular.
According to a New York Times profile in 2011, 'Randel and his colleagues were pelted with artichokes and cabbages; arrested by the sheriff for trespassing (and often bailed out by Richard Varick, a former mayor); sued for damages after pruning trees; and attacked by dogs sicced on them by property owners irate at the prospect of streets’ being plowed through their properties.'
Central Park's lingering bolt is a landmark of New York history representing a project that changed urban planning in America and set a standard for the world, remarks Holloway in her biography of Randel Jr The Measure Of Manhattan.
'This story of the once and future city,' she writes, 'begins at a bolt on a rock in a park on the island.'
A street planning map from 1821, 10 years after John Randel Jr's radical revision of the city's landscape
Randel Jr, Holloway explains, 'hiked the island's hills, waded through its creeks and marshes, and let the tide rise up to his shoulders for more than a decade as he laid down the grid plan.'
Indeed, the two-centuries-old system is still hailed as one of the most forward-thinking and innovative concepts in the history of urban planning.
As the global population swells and families rely on urban industries to make a living, cities are struggling to devise ways to put up more people.
Writing in Planet Of Cities in 2012, New York University urban planning professor Shlomo Angel held up New York and Barcelona, which also devised a grid system in the 19th century, as examples. Radical, he says, pays off.
The distinctive structure also created the New York state of mind, according to Rose-Redwood's analysis.
Symmetry was 'thought to discipline the mind', he remarked in his 2002 paper, 'such that one would take "the course which reason indicates".'
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pa3IpbCmmZmhe6S7ja6iaKaVrMBwrdGtoJyklWKAc4GRbnByZ4Sdsm60yJ2bnqZdl7ytwNJmhJqmmJbBta3NZqmepZmjsaa%2B0mawnpmiqHq0vMSnq2akka62r7OMoKminF2pxLB5wp6lra2inrK0ecCgpmegpKK5