The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor [Paperback]

Randel is endlessly fascinating, and Holloways biography tells his life with great skill. Steve Weinberg, Marguerite Holloway has uncovered [in the life of John Randel Jr.] a quite marvelous tale, and has told it just magnificently. A far more intimate experience than going to the museum&Holloways relationship to the city is personal, and she is aware that the city itself was made by people, for them to live in. This outstanding history of the Manhattan grid offers us a strange archaeology: part spatial adventure, part technical expedition into the heart of measurement itself, starring teams of nineteenth-century gentlemen striding across the islands eroded mountains and wild streams, implementing a grid that would soon enough sprout skyscrapers and flatirons, Central Park and Fifth Avenue. Marguerite Holloway brings to life the man who in a very real way made New York what it is today. Marguerite Holloways portrait of the surveyors surveyor in his cartography-obsessed time shows us how much the physical city has changed and, most crucially, how much it hasnt. As elegant as the maps it celebrates, Marguerite Holloways lively biography tells the story of the man who pinned a grid to Manhattan. An enchanting web of biography and science, as magical as the grid that John Randel devised to give birth to modern Manhattan. US