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.

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