Book Reviews 299 The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randell, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor By Marguerite Holloway. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013, 384 pages, $26.95 Cloth, $ 16.95 Paper. Reviewed by Steven Carl Smith, Providence College Marguerite Holloway’s The Measure of Manhattan is a detailed examination of the life and career of John Randel and his obsessive, often sanctimonious, and occasionally litigious crusade to alter the landscape of New York and elsewhere in the early years of the Republic. Faced with the mounting challenges of a growing population, explosive commercial growth, rising poverty and crime, and the question of how to create usable dock space for an increasingly important harbor, Manhattan’s growing pains were complicated by what a group of some residents called in 1815 “the evil of confused streets”(48). Ambitious in its scope, yet intimate in the way that it chronicles the ordinary, everyday occurrences of a surveyor’s life in the new nation, The Measure of Manhattan is an attempt to unravel the entangled history of Manhattan’s adoption of “the grid,” a story that Holloway situates at the intersection of political, urban, book, technological , and transportation history. Randel’s surveying work—which he meticulously chronicled in a series of field books—had long-lasting implications beyond the early nineteenth-century. Indeed, according to Holloway, Randel “measured each block, each street, each avenue, with a precision that remains admired and relied on today by engineers, planners, and surveyors” (9). Ultimately, though, The Measure of Manhattan is as much a book about the material culture and technology of surveying, engineering, and mapmaking—then and now—as it is a story about Gotham’s early history . There is a good deal here to satisfy subscribers to this journal as well as a broad spectrum of general-interest readers. Born in 1787 to a sprawling, close-knit family of some means, Randel’s childhood was shaped by his experiences in the Albany Presbyterian Church, which extolled “hard work and honesty and exacting good behavior . . . from their flock” (24). Early on, Randel excelled in mathematics, physics, and astronomy, interests that he nurtured well into adulthood. Throughout his life, he embraced scientific and technological literature 300 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY and belonged, at various points, to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, the American Institute of the City of New York, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Due in no small way to his “obvious facility with math,” Randel quickly found work in New York as a surveyor. “Such jobs were plentiful” during “America’s surveying boom,” Holloway writes, “a time in which distinctly American approaches to the craft emerged in response to the country’s political and social needs and in response to its terrain” (30). During his early years in the profession , Randel came to know, through an Albany family connection, Simeon DeWitt, New York’s Surveyor General. DeWitt had a profound influence on Randel. According to Holloway, DeWitt “brought rigor to New York State’s approach to surveying and parceling land” for Revolutionary War veterans and he, like his protégé Randel, eventually embraced the “clean, clear” lines of grid boundaries which, Holloway writes, “embodied the spirit of the age” (36–7). Randel was, by all accounts, an influential figure in the rapid economic and territorial development that overtook the young republic in the early nineteenth century. In addition to surveying work that led to the implementation of the grid on the Island of Manhattan, he played an important role in taming the “wild terrain” of upstate New York, mapping the landscape and designing entire towns (9). Randel was also responsible for surveying the landscape for many of the country’s first railroads—often serving as the chief engineer—in addition to reshaping the landscape for several canal projects. And if this was not enough, Holloway writes that Randel advised the municipal governments in New York and Baltimore on how to develop and construct water delivery systems and proper sewage removal. Additionally, Randel was, according to Holloway, something of an inventor and visionary, deriving a number of extraordinary surveying instruments while also advocating for the design and...