John Randel Jr.

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811, based on the surveys of John Randel Jr.

John Randel, Jr. (1787–1865) was a surveyor from Albany, New York in the United States who completed a full survey of Manhattan Island from 1808-1817, in service of the creation of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which determined that New York City – which consisted at the time of only Manhattan – would in the future be laid out in a rectilinear grid of streets.

Early life

Randel was born in Albany, New York on December 3, 1787. His formal education encompassed only primary school, after which he was apprenticed, possibly as early as age 12 although more likely at 16, to Simeon De Witt, who was the Surveyor General of New York State. De Witt was familiar with Randel, as both families were from Albany, a city of only 7,500 at the time, and Randel's father had served with De Witt's brother in the American Revolution.

Randel had participated as an assistant on two surveys of a New York county by 1807, and had also mapped the road between Albany and Schenectady, New York.

Mapping Manhattan

Despite his meager experience, through a recommendation by De Witt, one of three commissioners charged with developing a plan for the future layout of New York City's streets, and approval by Gouvernor Morris, one of the other commissioners and the unofficial president of the commission, Randel, at age 20, was hired to replace the commission's original chief surveyor, Charles Frederick Loss, who had proved to be incompetent. He began work in June 1808, and was ordered to conduct a detailed survey of Manhattan island to help produce the plan of New York City's future streets. The final map, the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid out the streets of New York from 14th Street to 155th Street into a rectangular grid, without accommodating the island's terrain. It seems that Randel's survey of New York's topography informed very little of the Commissioners' street plan. Randel also published a detailed series of "Farm Maps" that overlay Manhattan's natural topography with the intended grid. After the publication of the Commissioners' Plan, Randel was retained by the Common Council of New York for the next 10 years to make an atlas of the city, filling in the details of street locations which had been left off the official map. His work was said to have shown "astounding precision."

There was a controversy regarding the publication of the map of the Commissioners' Plan. Randel had begin to prepare a map to go to the engraver, using his original papers, when he found out that the council had given William Bridges, one of the handful of city-recognized surveyors, the right to do so. Bridges simply copied one of Randel's previously published maps, which were in the public domain, introducing errors as he did so. Bridges published and copyrighted the resulting map as a private venture, leaving Randel out in the cold. Randel's future litigious behavior may have been founded on his being wronged in not receiving the proper credit for his work on the Manhattan map.

File:Benjamin Wright.jpg

Benjamin Wright

After Manhattan

Sometime in the early 1820s, Randel publicly accused Benjamin Wright, the future "Father of American Civil Engineering", who was, at the time, the Chief Engineer of the half-completed Erie Canal, of making engineering decisions based on politics, thus wasting time and money. Although Randel had evidence to back up his charges, they came to nothing, and turned Wright into Randel's professional enemy. A few years later, in 1823, Randel became the lead contractor for the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company, after having lost out on the position of chief engineer to Wright. There Randel developed of using the Atlantic Ocean as the canal's reservoir, but also underestimated the cost of the canal by 82%.

Wright did everything he could to get Randel fired from the job, claiming that Randel had abandoned his duties. Randel was fired in 1825, but filed a lawsuit against the canal company and Wright, which went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Eventually, Randel won his case, and received $226,885.84 in 1834 (equivalent to $5,377,951 in 2021), a tremendous amount for that time. The award almost put the company into bankruptcy. The decision has been called "one of the most famous lawsuits" in the history of the state of Maryland.

File:View of Broadway in the city of New York with the proposed elevated rail-way invented by John Randel, Junr. C.E. crop.jpg

Randel's plan for an elevated train on Broadway

With his settlement he built Randelia, a magnificent 1,000-acre (400 ha) estate in Cecil County, Maryland, just west of Chesapeake City, Maryland, and just south of the mouth of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. There, he lived out the rest of his life, devising ideas such as the elevated railway, well before they became a reality, writing letters to newspapers in search of recognition for his work on the Manhattan grid – which he called "the pride and boast of [New York City]" – developing a plan for the extension of the grid above 155th Street accommodating elevated trains, which was never used; and filing lawsuits against numerous people. Work, however, dried up for Randel, due in part to his litigious nature but also to his increasing eccentricity and self-righteousness. "I am a ruined man," he wrote at the age of 48, and when he died in 1865 at the age of 74 – leaving behind his wife, Letitia – he was insolvent. His grave has not been located.

References

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading

• Holloway, Marguerite (2013) The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393071252

• Koeppel (2015), pp.96-97
• Koeppel (2015), p.96
• Koeppel (2015), pp.90-94; 96
• Koeppel (2015), p.97
• Augustyn & Cohen (1997), pp.100-106
• Koeppel (2015), pp.97-98
• "Exhibit of the shocking oppression and injustice suffered for sixteen months by John Randel, Jun., Esq., contractor for the eastern section of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, from Judge Wright, engineer in chief, and late majority of the Board of Directors..."
• Augustyn & Cohen (1997), pp.110-111
• Koeppel (2015), p.98