The Erie Canal
America in the early 1800’s was still a young continent. There few roads and traveling by land was slow and
difficult. It was also dangerous along the way. Settlers who traveled to the west in covered wagons usually
didn’t return. They stayed in the West or were robbed and many times killed by thieves wanting their
merchandises. Also, settlers in the West needed goods made in the East and at the same time, farmers in the
West needed to sell their wheat and other crops to the cities in the East therefore they were in need of a better
and safety way to send goods.
In 1817, DeWitt Clinton; the governor of New York at that time; initiated what was called the first man-made
waterway built in the United States called the Erie Canal. By 1825, the canal was finished taking eight years to
build and costing around seven million dollars. It crosses New York State from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Troy
near Albany on the Hudson River linking the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. The Erie Canal made the
shipment of freight more quickly and cheaply than ever before.
The Grid System
By 1800, there were over 70,000 people living in New York City and it kept on growing by the beginning of the
nineteenth century. New York had become the largest city in the United States. The city council realized that
something had to be done for that rapid growth. In 1811, a map was designed to help organizing that growth. It
divided New York City above 14th Street into blocks. These streets ran in straight lines from north to south or
from east to west. Wide streets, that were called avenues and numbered from one to twelve, ran from north to
south, and the narrow numbered streets ran from east to west.
This grid system was a major step in the development of New York City because it helped to create an
organized way to run the city by helping business to allocate their merchandise in a faster way throughout the
city, by helping visitors to find their destinations easily, and by inviting merchants from other places to take
New York City as their headquarter. The Grid system marked the end of “little old New York” and the
beginning of the new modern Manhattan.
Bibliography
Feder, Chris W., and Gloria Sesso. New York City: Then & Now. Comp. Teresa Fitzgerald. Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn Company,
1976.