None of the three developers planned to live in Memphis so Winchester’s son, Marcus, was sent to act as their sales agent. His finished product was a rectangular town site containing 362 lots, laying parallel with the riverfront. On January 12, 1819, the three inveterate land speculators agreed to lay out a town site and hired surveyor Williams Lawrence to do it. General James Winchester joined their partnership later and is generally credited with bestowing the Egyptian namesake on the new town (although it would often be referred to as Chickasaw Bluffs in media accounts). John Overton purchased the land from Rice’s brother (Rice had been killed in a battle with native Americans) and sold half interest to Andrew Jackson, a frequent investment partner. By 1819, the mouth of the Wolf River had retreated to today’s Auction Avenue as a result of Mississippi River erosion. In 1783, the rivers met near what is today is the foot of Jefferson Avenue, and the Mississippi’s current struck the bluff at what was to become Union Avenue. The development scheme for a new city had been around since the 1790s when John Rice obtained a 5,000-acre grant that included a riverfront essentially as it is today but with a tongue of land separating the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers in front of the bluff where the town would be laid out. In 1795, the Spanish built their own fort and that was followed by an American fort in 1800-1803 which remained an army outpost until about 1812. A fort had been built by the French in the area in 1739, almost 60 years after they claimed the territory for their country. However, by the time the first lots in Memphis were sold in 1819, explorers had been criss-crossing the area for several centuries. It was the earliest version of Memphis comprehensive planning – think Memphis 1.0.īy 1819, the date celebrated as the founding of Memphis in this year’s bicentennial, there were of course people already living in the rough wilderness encampment that was to be named Memphis by developers Andrew Jackson, Marcus Winchester, and John Overton. Crawford is ultimately highly critical of grid patterns, arguing that “straight lines and repetitive shapes, the hallmark of centralized planning, are ultimately dull and unsatisfactory.In truth, celebrating Memphis’ 200 th anniversary this year is largely ceremonial, ignoring earlier settlers and forgetting that the city was the first city west of the Alleghenies to be a planned community. They were also used to establish formal order and spatial focus on particular functions of urban life - civic, religious, governmental, etc.”įor a detailed look back at the history of urban streets, see also “ A Brief History of Urban Form, Street Layout Through the Ages,” by J. Grids were most often used when there was a large amount of territory to occupy in a short time. “By and large, ancient grid plans were expressions of military organization, colonial conquest, or political/economic domination. Lal wrote, ‘Well-regulated streets oriented almost invariably along with the cardinal directions, thus forming a grid-iron pattern.'” Obeserving the urban planning of the Indus Valley civilization, archeologist B. Mohenjo-Daro was the largest of many grid-plan towns and villages that existed in the region from 2600-1900 BC. Each block was subdivided by small lanes. “By 2600 BC, Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley (present-day Pakistan) was built with blocks divided by a grid of straight streets, laid out in perfect right angles, running north-south and east-west. Indeed, until landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted popularized the more curvilinear pattern of streets in suburban Riverside, Illinois in 1868 (below right), the grid pattern dominated our suburbs as well.īut did you ever think about where the grid street pattern originated? If you want to find out, take a look at an informative blog posting, “ A Brief History of Grid Plans, Ancient to Renaissance,” by Laurence Aurbach, on the Ped Shed web site.Īurbach traces the origins of grid streets back to the Indus Valley: If you walk through most North American cities you’ll find yourself on that very familiar grid of streets - usually intersecting at 90 degree angles.
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