Not M&D, but Randel

[kelber at mindspring.com]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/04/marguerite_holloway_s_the_measure_of_manhattan_a_biography_of_john_randel.html

"He refused to survey or write on the Sunday Sabbath, and once resorted to paying an especially disorderly employee not to drink. He invented his own instruments when he found existing ones insufficient for the task, and had tantrums over surveying mistakes of piddling importance. Repeatedly set back by winter, wind, and rain; slowed by robbery and broken instruments; arrested and sued for cutting down trees; and once assaulted by an old woman wielding cabbages and artichokes after drawing a street through her kitchen—the surveyor’s main obstacle was his own finicky perfectionism."

Brooklyn and Queens, on the other hand, consist of multiple grid systems, often colliding in acute angles. A strange hybrid of the obsessively rigid and the anarchic. If parallel grids are soul-numbing, and curved streets are restful to the imagination, what are the effects of zigzagged streets?

Laura