For all the chaos that prevails these days in New York, there is one aspect of the city which remains the very soul of rationality, and that is its street-plan. The rectilinear network of numbered streets and avenues affords instant orientation to the visiting out-of-towner. It is not, to be sure, flawlessly Euclidean in its geometry: Fourth Street and Eleventh Street, for instance, intersect in Greenwich Village, and not at infinity as one might expect. Still, even a rube from the Midwest or Scandinavia can find his way around most of the city without too much trouble.

Literary Review

Mar 1990

Categories

Jim Holt

Jim Holt Gives Us His Measure

Jim Holt Remembers Teenage Telephone Conversations with B F Skinner

Jim Holt Guides Us Around Greenwich Village

Jim Holt sets out to Review Quentin Crisp

Jim Holt on the Discreet Charm of Some Disnoids

Jim Holt looks for Something to Read in New York

Jim Holt Returns to the Bathroom for a Smoke

Holt’s Confessions of a New York Winedrinker

Reasons to be Cheerful

Interview: Christopher Hitchens on his new book about the Special Relationship