When a town was created people came and joined, until all of the plots of land were filled. Then a group of people would branch off and create their own town, and when that was full the cycle would repeat itself. The center of a town was always a green or "common." This was the most important part, and it contained the meetinghouse, which was the place of religious prayer as well as social and civic events. Near the meetinghouse was the parsonage, which was always the nicest residence in town. All of the other houses were then placed around the common and on the other various streets. These towns evolved much more naturally than others because of the lack planning that went into them. Cities were normally planned for reasons of economic wealth, which the Puritans had no desire for. This evolution can be seen in this original city plan of Boston.
These small plot farm based towns were very different from the large Southern plantations due to the fact that the Puritans had little desire for personal economic growth. They felt that the productive unit should be the community and not the farm. As Winthrop said, "Wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man."(2) This led the Puritans to concentrate most of their efforts on glorifying shared possessions rather than personal possessions. "Although each farmer was self-sufficient in providing sustenance for himself and his family, he held his property in freehold from the town, shared a common pasture with the other members of the community, and had an equal voice in town meetings."(3) The houses, for example, were all very similar in their simplistic and plain natures. They felt that no house should be more glorious or important than another. The meetinghouses on the otherhand, were magnificent structures that towered above any other building in town, both in stature and in quality.
image courtesy of http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/Cities/imgb/digcapt.html
The key to the original residences of Boston was to follow a pattern. This pattern was extremely basic and was very similar to the style of English rural Architecture in the late 16th century. Almost all of the houses in Boston, with the exception of about a dozen masonry buildings, were made out of wood. This was due to the fact that wood was in a great abundance in the Boston Area. Another explanation for the large percentage of wood houses was that most of the Puritans were originally residents of Essex county, England, where wood was primarily used to build houses, and when they came to the New World, they used their limited knowledge to construct wood houses. The only slight variation in houses was size, which depended on the sizes of the family that lived in them. The houses were also very down to earth and contained no decoration in order to follow Puritan regulations.
Image of an English Church, courtesy of me
When the Puritans came to this New World, their overwhelming desire to be different from England led them to change many things, one of which was their place of worship. They decided that they didn't want their religion to be associated in any way with the Anglican religion, so they changed any noticeable links between the two. The first major thing they changed was the name. They felt that a "church" was too British, and that a "meetinghouse" was a more suitable name because it housed not only religious events, but political and social affairs as well. The next thing they changed was the overall structure. The church was commonly a long rectangular room with the pulpit in the middle of one of the shorter sides, while the church entrance was on across from it, on the other side of the numerous sets of pews and the long aisle. The meetinghouse, however, was to be a "four square" hall, which had walls that were much closer in length. The pulpit was then placed in the middle of one of the longer sides, and this made the room very wide rather than very long. These major changes were very significant because they remained for many years the only American architectural innovation.
Image of a New England Meetinghouse, once again, courtesy of me
When New Amsterdam was officially founded in 1660 the settlers decided to take refuge in the southern tip of the island. This was mainly because it was an easy space to defend and a good place for a fort. They also chose this region to inhabit because, at the time most of the residents were traders, and this was an excellent port. Up to this point there wasn't any organized system of transportation available. Instead, farmers built roads to their individual plots of land, which were also not organized in any particular manner. Although no system was formally organized, something gradually developed anyway. By looking at southern Manhattan, it is possible to see that the crosstown streets are all parallel. This is due to the fact that all of the merchants created direct roads to water in because they needed fast, easy access to their trading ports.
The next major step of New York's Development occurred when the Delancey property, which included the land north of Division Street to the East River, were sold. Then in 1806 the city requested state legislator to appoint commissioners to lay out a plan to develop this land. The figured that the most efficient way to sell the property would be to break it up into a grid system that split up the lands, completely ignoring geographic hazards such as hills, waterways, and marshes. The plots were also broken up equally, which they figured would satisfy a greater number of people, and in turn sell faster. The planners divided the vast property by a multitude of streets to satisfy the overwhelming number of merchants that wanted their property to have street frontage. The majority of the streets were also East-West rather than North-South, because the merchants were more concerned with access to the ports and harbors. This plan, or Commissioners' Plan as it was called, was finalized in 1811, and was very important to the American Dream and the New York Dream because it attempted to put all men at an equal plane. Each person had an equal plot of land, and they could do with it as they pleased.
"The 1811 Commissioners' plan reflected an age which was not given to
conspicious consumption or lavish display. It assumed that the 20 or 25-foot
frontages of the small lots bought by mechanics would be adequate for the modest
and republican ruture foreseen. Large irregular lots would have created more
interesting urban life, bu excluded mechanics from important areas of the housing
market."(4)
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(2) Robert A. Divine, T.H. Breen, George M. Fredrickson, and R. Hal Williams. America Past and Present Volume I, (Published by Addison Wesley Longman Publishers Inc., US, 1999.) page 47
(3) William H. Pierson Jr. American Buildings and their Architects:
The Colonial and
Neoclassical Style, (Published by Doubleday& Company Inc., Garden City,
1970.) page 54-55
(4) EricHomberger. The Historical Atlas of New York City, A visual Celebration of nearly 400 years, (Published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC, New York, New York, 1994) page 68