side. >> i guess i don't have any other questions. but it is hard for me to accept serious responsibility was assumed by the top management of jpmorgan especially in light of e-mails that say that these decisions were at least according to miss ina drew fully discussed and the vetted by the top managements of jpmorgan. ..

>> even greater. slow-growing developing countries have had for decades lower fertility rates. japan and europe particularly and russia. and now china's starting to feel the impact of its one-child policy. we're better off than the rest of the developed world, but our fertility rate has dropped to below break even, to 1.8, the lowest drop in the last three years in recorded history x. unlike most of the world, though, we have a tried and true way to deal with this demographic time bomb. demography does not have to be deathsny if you change course. and the path that we could take is to allow for a strategic reform of our immigration laws so that we can bring young, aspirational people that will rebuild the demographic pyramid to make our entitlement system secure and jump-start our

economy in a way that will create an uplifting of our hopes and dreams, but also directly impact, immediately impact economic growth. >> u.s. economic growth and immigration policy. former florida governor jeb bush on immigration wars tonight at 8:15 eastern. part of booktv this weekend on c-span2. >> we have allowed a human rights nightmare to occur on our watch. in the years since dr. king's death, a vast new system of racial and social control has emerged from the ashes of slavery and jim crow. a system of mass incarceration that no doubt has dr. king turning in his grave today. the mass incarceration of poor people of color in the united states is tantamount to a new caste-like system, one that shuttles our young people from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand new, high-tech prisons.

it is a system that locks poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color, into a permanent second class status nearly as effectively as earlier systems of racial and social control once did. it is, in my view, the moral equivalent of jim crow. >> get ready. week tv's first -- booktv's first online book club meets at the end of the month. read "the new jim crow." and then on tuesday, march 26th, at 9 p.m. eastern, join us live online at twitter and facebook with your questions and comments on "the new jim crow." >> you know, i actually found the hidden history kind of by accident because there is a down spout like a drain that's in old town, and a friend of mine pointed it out and said you know al zapped drink ya was part of the original district of columbia. and i thought that was kind of

intriguing, and i thought, you know, since that time i've sort of been kicking it around in my head that that would be a really good project to look at that 50-year time frame. when i was doing the research for the book, i found three places that i would really like to take you to give you a sense of what it was like to live in alexandria, d.c. one of them is jones point park, this is where you'll find the orangal boundary marker for the southernmost tip of the district of columbia. the other is the dueling ground where a very famous duel took place between secretary of state henry clay and virginia senator john randolph. the other place i was really interested in taking you is the infamous slave pen at the franklin and armfield slave dealers. the union army invaded alexandria. one of the first places they came was here to this slave pen because it was an infamous slot in slavery. so when the union soldiers came

here, they came town here to the -- down here to the basement and found slaves actually shackled to the wall here in this spot. >> this weekend many from alexandria, virginia, as booktv, american history tv and c-span's local content vehicles look behind the scenes at the history and literary high of alexandria, virginia. and sunday at 5 on american history tv on c-span3. >> you're watching booktv. and now marguerite holloway recounts the life of john randall jr. he utilized tolls to plot the unwieldy terrain. this is about an hour and a half. [applause]

>> thank you both very, very much. and i'm very excited that michael is here because at the end when there are questions, if there are any that i can't answer, we can direct them to him. so as has been suggested, john randall did a lot of very different things. he was involved with the grid, he was involved with an elevated elevator, he had a whole life outside of new york city that i'm going to talk about a little bit. but to give you some background because i think it's also relevant very much for some of the work i'm interested in today, he also had a legacy that extended beyond just the maps and sort of understanding property and the history of new york city. he's contributed data that has been very, very important for scientists who are working on projects today. and that actually is how i became interested in randel in the first place. there's the book, there's randel. later in life.

the book came out of an article that i was doing on an exhibit that was here at the museum of the city of new york in 2009. eric johnson of the conservation society had moved to knight from california. he'd been browsing, and he'd happened to cross this book, manhattan and maps, which is an extraordinary collection of of new york city's history in maps that paul cohen and robert augustine did. and he was looking through it, and he fell upon this page. many of you are familiar with story, but i just want to explain a little bit because of the connection to randel. he fell upon the british headquarters map, and it was done during the occupation. and eric sanderson is an ecologist, became just struck by the fact that there was so much topographical detail, and he suddenly started to see the

island in this very rich way. and he started thinking, wow, if there is all this topography and i could find out elevation and slope, i could start to figure out what plants lived where depending on which direction they were facing, maybe that would give him a sense of the different ecosystems, the animals that lived there. and so this really was the moment that set eric sanderson on the quest to recreate what manhattan looked like in 1609. he relied heavily on the british headquarters map, and he drew a reference, he found a lot of points that he -- you can see there's no data, there are no numbers, it's all shading. so you have to discern elevation from the darkness of the shading. excuse me. is and he used a lot of gps information, but he also had to turn to john randel. so as i was following eric sanderson around the island, he would tell me where the marsh

was, where the wild turkeys were, how the black bear might be over there, it was this amazing world that he really saw as he walked around, henedded up having to -- he ended up having to rely a lot on randel's data. he had recorded elevation in his notebooks and on these farm maps that i'm going to show you some images from later. he had marked elevations at different intersections. so, essentially, using all of that data but relying very heavily on randel, eric sanderson was able to put together the project. i became fascinated by the idea that sanderson was walking around seeing 1609, seeing this wild island and that about 200 years earlier there had been this young man walking around what was then a much wilder island. not wild in wilderness sense, but rural. not at all gridded. and that he was only seeing

lines and streets. and i thought that was just so amazing that across 200 years these people were walking the island with such an incredibly different vision. and i became really obsessed with john randel. and i started trying to find out as much as i could about him, and this -- the article ran, i think, in 2004. the book has just come out in 2013. you can get a sense of how long it took to track randel. and as you know, the main work that he is really famous for is the commissioner's plan. he made three copies of the plan, manuscript copies of the plan that was issued in 1811, and that's mostly what i found out about him initially. this is just to get at the idea. this is borrowed from the project, but heard what sanderson was saying on one side and maybe not quite what randel was saying on the other side, but at least closer to what he was seeing.

so my quest to find materials on randel took me on a wild goose chase. a bunch of people, paul cohen had written about him and had been very intrigued but had not found all that much material. i discovered a geographer who did a topographical reconstruction of the island also paced on randel's data. he had tried to find a lot of material on randel. ralph gray of the national, he wrote a book called "the national waterway," had tracked down a lot of randel who did work on the chesapeake canal, and he had discovered randel had been embroiled in this lawsuit. there were letters, some letters in albany, there were some down in delaware, there were some in maryland, there were some that i recalled from virginia. i think he had a relative in texas. there was stuff in new jersey. it was all over the place.

and it took a long time to get the elements. most of it, however, turned out to be in the new york historical society in these notebooks, these field books. and that covers mostly the period of time that randel was working on the island. so it's actually the era of randel's life that we know the most about, because we looked as these notebook withs. he was born in 1787, and he died in 1865, so he saw enormous changes over that time. and as i say, the most well documented period is when he was on new york island for about 12 years. and i'm going to read, i'm going to or the of go pack and forth -- go back and forth and read you a few passages from the book. this is about the notebook. randel's work on the island can be divided into three stages characterized by growing public and personal turmoil.

the fist period ran from 1808 until the end of 1810. randel measured along east/west and north/south lines using basic equipment. the streets were to run river to river to facilitate traffic to the docks and apparently to insure cross breezes to rid the city of stagnant, unhealthful air. using those measurements, randel produced three copies of the manuscript map. this is the famous commissioner's plan of 1813. the second stage ran from early 1811 to about 1817 when randel designed and used more sophisticated instruments is and equipment and during which time he inscribed scratched into the dirt and rock of the island the 1811 plan. randel recorded elevation, not just distance, as opposed to a regular land survey. during the last period from 1818 or so to 1831, randel, aided by

his first wife became a cartographer of the highest quality. most of what we know about randel's manhattan survey comes from the minute of the common council of the city of new york containing records of randel's reports on surveys on roads and streets. most of those records concern finances, contracts and deadlines. the more complete source resides in randel's field books donated by joseph webster, a former city surveyor and engineer. and if anyone's interested later, there's a story about how the notebooks p ended up at the new york historical society in the care of joseph webster. it's not a complete story, but it's an interesting one involving, as is often true with randel, finances, legal trouble and his wives. [laughter] almost all 45 field books are thick, brown and leather item is bound.

randel ordered them from an albany printer. they're simultaneously sparse and rich documents. in some places they are professionalism embody. figures, measurements, sketches and diagrams. others contain these careful records as well as tax rising insights into randel's personal life between 1808 and 1823 because he drafted letters, copied contracts, mentioned family and friends and recorded travels for work and pleasure and my favorite part, recipes. randel's field books are -- [inaudible] of visiting and revisiting, recording, checking, correcting, certifying. it is not unusual for one book to have contained industries from as many as four years. irregularities unsettled randel.

every field book attests to his precision and pursuit of perfection in his, his expenses, his schedules. even a rumination offered a window into randel's exact tuesday and his sense of humor. and i typed this out for you pause it's a long passage. -- because it's a long passage. fearing he will not have time to get it requests the lope of my horse and saddle -- the loan of my horse and sad saddle. he is going and returning 65 minutes and 32 minutes in getting and putting up the horse. the whole distance he could have walked in 43 minutes. [laughter] he is, therefore, 44 minutes longer going with the horse than he would have been without. by loaning the horse i have, therefore, damaged him 44 minutes of time which i will

allow him for. conclusion, it is bad policy to loan him my horse for my own convenience. [laughter] this is very typical of randel. so i just wanted to show you some of the pages from the notebooks. maybe you've seep some of them, but you get a sense of sort of the range and how fascinating they are to look through and sometimes also how mysterious. i have sat with a surveyier to worked very closely with reuben rose redwood on his topographical recreation of the argument, and he explained a lot of what was in the notebooks to me, but there were occasionally times when we couldn't figure everything out. here is one of his notebooks where he is -- he measured in rods and chains, usually rods and particularly as his surveys went along in years. and he would note the number of the rod, and then he would measure the angle of ascent or descent as he was sort of

following the rods measuring out. and you can see this one actually was in the great exhibit, looked quite familiar. but you can see in the first column and in the fourth column the rods, then you can see descent. there's an ascent down next to 33, and then you can see the angles. and he was charged with surveying the island on a level plane. but the island, as you know, is incredibly bumpy and undue lates and is very rough -- undue lates and is very rough, so he would have to calculate based on the length of the rods and the angle, and then a 90 degree angle, the side for the ground itself. and he would map it as level, and he left it to the people who had to open the streets and roads to the make what was not level level. this is a measurement from, i think he's starting at 78th street, and he's measuring down along, shoot, i cut it off the

top, i can't see. i cut it off the top with my printout too. he's measuring down an avenue -- [laughter] and he, he would sometimes measure from one side of a street down the block and then give the record. you can see it's very hard, the light is not good, but it's usually about 260 feet which is why our blocks if you walk 20 blocks, you end up walking about a mile. and for the most part the measures are very, very close to 260. sometimes when he would accumulate an error, he would then divide the block length, and he would make little adjustments to try and get them even for stretches of time. but you get a sense of his beautiful handwriting and his care. of this is what looks like an early study for one of the farm maps that i'm going to show you

later. you can see 122nd, 12 3w rld, 124th street and his rough sketches of blocks and some of the topography. they were very rough in places, the field books, but they also contained these incredible gems; this beautiful drawing of six houses. another one just, again, very beautiful drawings of property and gardens. they also contain, as i read to you, these amazing stories. and it's very inconsistent. some days he was in the mood to write, some days he was not at all. some periods when he was working on the farm maps he basically made notations every single day about what was happening with his family. in this he discusses his brother coming back, his brother william who surveyed with him coming back from new haven and the visit of a cousin from new jersey which i think was his first wife, matilda, who was one of his cousins.

and then i wanted to give you one of the recipes, irish butter. [laughter] the other recipe, i think, are also -- there's another collection of field books up in syracuse at the historical society, and some of the other -- that has notes mostly from his work upstate. but there are occasional recipes and occasional references to things going on in new york city. so i'll tell you a little bit about how randel came to be in new york. um, randel was born in albany, and he was born to a family, his father worked in bronze, was a jeweler, had worked, had fought in the revolutionary war. he had a lot of brothers and sisters. his brothers were carpenters, they were inventers, they were farmers. there seems to be a lot of innovation in the family and a very, very strong -- as is not surprising -- work ethic. and ranel appears -- randel

appeared to be extremely good at mathematics, he refers to in one of his notebooks one of his teachers who he's helping try to find a place in a new city outside of albany, and he talks about this incredible teacher. and it's very clear, um, that he had an afellowshipty for the teach -- affinity for the teacher in math, and it showed through everything that he did throughout his life. and he at the very young age of about 12 seems to have ended up as a survey surveyor or in the office of simeon dewitt. and this is a map that simeon dewitt did of albany roughly at the time that randel was born and was growing up. there's simeon. those of you who saw the great exhibit, i think, have seen both of these images. and initially, randel was

topping notes from fieldbooks that had come in from surveyors who were flung across the state and often compiling them into maps. at the same time, he was also doing his own maps of property in and around albany. and these people are not as familiar with these maps. i'm going to show you a series of them that are not just from the time that he was surveying on the island, but give you a sense of the range of what he was doing for the surveyor general and what he did off and on for many decades. this is a map for w.f. lewis. it says in albany. this is, again, i'm sorry about the darkness of the images. this was a map of the schuler estate. this is a map of attractive land in central new york state. much of the work that simeon dewitt had his surveyors doing at that time was mapping out

land that was going to be given to the veterans and, basically, pushing the native americans off the reservation, subdividing them into grids and then either selling or allocating the land as payment for services during the war. this is i think one of the maps from the salt spring reservation that randel did. again, you can see the divisions. this is a very beautiful map that he did of knew da castle -- oneida castle. he also surveyed turnpikes. and one of the ones he was doing right at the time that he started his work on new york island was the post road from albany down to city hall. and it's a 23-part map. it's incredible because you can just follow it along the way. he marks post offices, he marks taverns, i guess it makes sense that he marked post offices since it was the post road. he marks t.a.r.p.es, houses -- taverns, houses, mills, and you

can just sort of see how everything went all the way down to some tarrytown all the way down to city hall. and what's interesting to me, the timing of this. it was in, i think, august of 1810. so he had not yet handed in the commissioner's plan, and yet you can see that the grid is set, and he must have been working on those manuscript maps at that time. his work on the early maps and the later p maps was incredibly careful and precise, and it seems that he really had the admiration and trust of his mentor, simeon dewitt. and simeon dewitt, um, was one of the three commissioners who was appointed by new york state to come up with the plan for development on the island, what became the 1811 grid. and the act requiring or requesting that plan and

appointing dewitt and rutherford and governor morris was enacted in 807, but it appears not much work happened early in 807. in fact -- oh, i forgot. sorry. there are some beautiful maps of the hudson river. he was going to work on a canal. the hudson river kept silting up, and it was making it very difficult around albany to get boats into the port. so-a canal proposed to run alongside the hudson to albany, and some of the absolutely most exquisite maps is a series of 16 sort of following the river. again, we can't get a sense here of the color, but they're very beautiful, and there's 16, and they fit together very much like the farm maps do to create this long, long -- one long map. well, the

>> with a lack of saw lube rouse breezes. [laughter] so the act was passed in 1807, the three commissioners were appointed, and as i said, 1807 not much was happening.

there is one record of the summer being beastly hot, but there's also this really interesting letter that was in archives in philadelphia of governor morris to zimm monodewitt -- simeon dewitt chaining about the quality of the survey. and he says it turned out that the old maps are erroneous and that his work from them must be done over. he's talking about a city surveyor named loss. we cannot, indeed, remedy what is past, but mischief may be presented in the future. will you, my dear sir, pardon me for suggesting that an official representation from the surveyor general might not be improper. so it seems that dewitt came down, talked to loss, loss seems to have been jettisoned, and shortly after that we have a record of randel showing up on the island. i think since he's so food looking it's a very -- he's so good looking it's a very pretty

picture. [laughter] this seems to be a painting done by ezra ames who was a very famous portrait painter in albany who painted dewitt and many other of the politicians and or very wealthy members of the albany community. there is only this black and white photograph from a 1980 sotheby's catalog when a painting of john randel's brother abraham were sold. but it's been impossible for me at least even with the help of some lawyers and some kind people intervening to track where the painting is now. but, so i can't verify. it says by anonymous. i can't verify that it is, indeed, ames, but an expert at the albany bureau of art feels strongly that is in ames' style. i think the first painting i showed you of dewitt also was

an ezra ames. so as i described, he set off. for his first stage he had to measure, he had to survey the island because he had to put down this map on paper, and that meant sort of marking out the distances where the streets were going to go and, essentially, coming up with this blueprint. it is pretty clear that it was not randel's idea, the grid itself. that clearly came out of the commissioners. there's guidelines in the 18 to 07 act about minimum requirements for street widths. but he had to actually do the very practical work of figuring out how it was going to sit on the land. and i was trying to give you a sense. it's hard to see, but the grid -- maybe gave you a better -- yeah. you can see the grid starting sort of right, um, what was then north street. it angles up. the old city angles up into

chelsea, and then it basically starts on the top third of the map. and randel handed in, he did that work in two years, essentially. he had a lot of trouble as he did this work, and i, i'm sure some of you may have read some of the accounts. i think one of them was in the great exhibit catalog. but he had a, he had a difficult time with people on the island. randel lost face to extreme weather and to something he had not expected, run-ins with the law. the promise of a great metropolis did not delight many land openers. when they discovered that the city was about to run streets wherever it pleased regardless of individual proprior to haveship and that their houses and lots were in danger of being cut in two, they esteemed themselves wronged and outraged,

wrote martha lamb in her history of the city of new york. at the approach of engineers with their measuring instruments, maps and chain bearers, dogs were brought into service, and whole families sometimes united in driving them out of their lots as if they were common vagrants. on one occasion while drawing the line of an avenue directly through the kitchen of an old woman who had sold vegetables for a living, they were pelted with cabbages and art chokes until they were compelled to retreat. randel was frequently hauled off, and a former mayor had to post bail for him when the commissioners were not in town. as he noted, i was arrested by the sheriff on numerous suits insinuated against me as agent of the commissioners for trespass and damage committed by my workmen in passing over grounds, cutting off branches of trees, etc., to make surveys under instruction from the commissioners. i mentioned that the field books were one very rich source of

documents. there are also a lot of court cases brought against randel. those are very rich, too, and those are in the city archives, some of them. and that's where i found in the nice lawsuit brought by john mills in 1808 against randel for damages to his land in the 8th ward. and i have to read you just a little bit. part of what i love so much about this project was the language from the early 19th century in the newspapers, in the pamphlets, in the books was phenomenal. and the court cases were no less exciting. um, so randel's field book for august, this is when he went onto mills' land, records nothing unusual. whereas for mills august 26 was an apocalypse. [laughter] the standard language for a trespass suit of that time was hyperbolic. quote, force and arms to wit

with hands, swords, sticks, stones, knives and axes. randel with his feet, by walking, trod down and consumed and then felled, cut down and otherwise injured and destroyed 500 ash trees, 500 yew trees, 500 peach trees and the same amount of plum, cherry, nectarine, apple and pear trees and goose bushes. [laughter] randel felled, cut down, trampled down and otherwise destroyed 500 cabbages, 5,000 beets, 5,000 potato hills, 20,000 strawberry bushes and plants, 500 tulips. then and there standing, growing being to the value of $5,000. [laughter] so this played out over several years, this lawsuit, and randel was found guilty of trespass, and the court awarded -- mills was asking for $5,000, he got

$109.63. [laughter] which covered his legal expenses. but randel did gain, and so did the commissioners, from that lawsuit. because it led to a new act of the legislature giving them pirg mission to go on -- permission to go on land during daylight, they could not go on at night, and not to be hauled into court all the time which i think randel was quite happy about. although randel did really like the courts, and i'll get to that in a minute. [laughter] so that was the first stage, producing the commissioner's plan. the next stage, governor morris suggested that the common council hire randel to take the blueprint and actually affix it to the island. that meant going out and putting marble monuments at intersections and in places where he could not put in marble monuments, he would put in an iron vault. he ended up putting in over

1,500 marble monuments and 98 iron vaults. this is one that survived that is in central park. len morse soften, the surveyor i mentioned earlier, has also found one up above 155th street on 10th avenue which is sort of the main axis of the survey along the island. and he and reuben rose redwood who have also, who discovered this together with some other surveyors are careful to say it's not 100%, but there's a good chance because it's so perfectly aligned, and so many of the vaults they found in central park are not, even if they look similar. so, um, randel got the commission to put in the monuments, to put in the vaults, and he also got permission to create instruments. um, he made an argument that he could not do this quickly and

effectively unless he got some money from the common council to build his own surveying instruments. and these are taken from an illustration on a map that randel did that's now in the library of congress. there's another copy at the new york historical society. in 1821 that i'll talk about in a minute. but, oh -- i'm fine on time, right? it's a little -- i have a little less time than i thought i did. so he, he had, as i said, this very, very bumpy ground, and he needed to work very quickly. he was very interested in working quickly and being paid well and working quickly. so he came up with these instruments. i spent a lot of time trying to understand them on my own. i finally, i talked with someone at the smithsonian institution, i finally found one of the cup's leading ex-- one of the country's leading experts in colonial instruments. he very graciously, his name is

jeff locke, he very graciously photoshopped the images from the 1821 map and sat down with me in front of his computer for three days taking these apart, sort of looking at the screws, at everything, conferring with a friend of his who worked at nasa who's an engineer. and some of them are very straightforward. this was a rod that he used to measure, this is a 10-foot rod which you can see can be moved up and down if you're on bumpy ground. he invented several of these. there's another version of it, figure 2. figure 3 seems to be sort of what's called an escapeman counter so he'd click once and by the end of the year sort of as museum guards do sort of tallying so that he could verify what he had in his notebooks with what was on the counter. this was a very elaborate version of a measuring rod.

this is 50 feet long. and it is built for incredible support so that it could stay steady each though it was very heavy and very long. has a foldable version which is figure 5 which you can see, we think, folds in so it would be easier to carry. randel also did tests on these instruments to make sure, to understand how they expanded in certain temperatures, in certain weather conditions. this, again, put him very much in the realm of a gee debtic surveyor. and the 1821 map, which i'll show you in a minute, he apparently issued a pamphlet that described all of these instruments in great detail which we can't find. there seemed to be portions of it that were transcribed. there was for a moment or a weak the possibility that it was in a library in london, and it wasn't on the shelf where it was supposed to be. but part of what i'm hoping with

this book is that randel, who really hasn't been very well known, you know, maybe more material will show up. i'm hoping letters show up, i'm hoping that, you know, there were apparently a huge collection of letters that were around in the early 20th century. those seem to have disappeared or were sold. anyway, maybe the pamphlet will emerge, and we'll find more details. this was a -- [inaudible] which he used for measuring angles, and he put two telescopes in. you can see one on the base, one sort of for vertical, one for horizontal angles, and this is the one that my source, jeff locke, liked the most. he said it looked like it came from venus. [laughter] and it's a water, what we think is a water level which would be used to get very, very, very precise elevations, um, if you were planning a canal. likely. and randel did a lot of canal work later, and it was interesting to see something

with this that could afford this kind of precision on the island. so he did that. he made his instruments. he didn't yet as much money -- get as much money as he wanted from the common council. he complained bitterly about having to absorb the cost of the instruments himself. but then he did use the fact of their existence to make a strong bit for a contract inialny saying he'd already invented the instruments, nobody could use them except he and his brother. he got the division, and then the gig was withdrawn, and then he went to court. and so that was one of randel's first sort of initiated lawsuits to write what he felt and was a wrong. he had a long history of then doing that for the rest of his life. oops. okay. so as he was laying the monuments and the vaults up the island, he decided to publish his map, his version of the

commissioner's plan because he had done those three manuscript versions and submitted them to the common council, to the commissioners, and then a city surveyor named william bridges had come in and had offered his services to the common council to make his copy of the map and to engrave it which meant that he could sell it which was a way of william bridges earning a profit. and apparently randel, although there's no record of him being really angry about this, was quite angry about it. so he made the corrections that he, you talked about a little bit, but as he was laying out the monuments and vaults, he made corrections. he started to issue, um, his map for 1814, his version of it which was going to be engraved. and then he publicized this map. he was ready to sell it. and he ended up in this really delicious battle with william

bridges in the newspaper about how his map was much better, it was much more correct. bridges challenged him, randel started pointing out in this long, long list all the r records on bridges' map and how he had not copied his map even correctly, and this went pack and forth. in the end, randel withdrew the 1814 map and didn't end up having it end graved because of the war of a 1812. apparently, he was worried about security and providing a really upgraded and clear map to the city. the language in the feud between bridges and randel is just, it's just beautiful. um, it didn't end well for bridges. he defended himself, and then he died a few months later. and i think the feud just fell away. there's bridges' map which was based on the commissioner's plan but is, apparently, riddled with

errors according to randel. randel tried again to issue his own map, his own engraved map. he got peter maverick to work on the engraving, and he had grand plans for this map. he, it's completely unusual. you can see that there are the surveying instruments up on the top. usually people did not put their inventions or their surveying instruments on their maps. it's got this map of new york city that's folding over a map of the northeastern states. you have a map of philadelphia that's folding down on top of new york city. he put in all of this incredible census data and information about new york city, a little bit about the instruments which was not very long but somewhat helpful. and he had grand plans for this map. and, again, it didn't sell. the common council, the council members felt that it was too small and was really not useful for them, that they couldn't really get the resolution of the

island that they wanted, and they all -- they bought a few copies, and hen they asked another -- then they asked another, they turned to another map maker. and randel, i think, was enormously disappointed about this. the mentions of this map come up again and again in his field books, and when his brother -- his family had a lot of financial trouble, and randel was always the person who seemed to bail them out. he really took care of his family. he was incredibly loyal and very good sibling and child to his parents. and when his brother william was in financial trouble, he tried to get william -- he said all i can do at the moment, i have no work to give you, he would often hire william to help him, please, just try to sell the map. [laughter] but it didn't work. and he was very disappointed by that as well. um, and also during this time after he finished mapping the island in sort of inscribing the grid, he started the farm maps

which he had a contract to do with the common council that they'd forgotten about. he had made the contract, i think, with them in 1810 or 1811, and then about 1818 he reminds them that they owe him this huge map that he was going to do, and there's sort of a peish note in the minutes -- peevish note in the minutes of the common council from one subcommittee to the others telling them not to sign contracts without checking with everybody, essentially. [laughter] but they honor the contract, and randel does these 92 maps which are absolutely extraordinary as michael was saying. they show the island from the beginning of the grid at north street all the way up. and they are colorful and gorgeous and huge. they, i think the estimates are that they would be 50 feet long and 11 feet wide be you put them all together, that's how big the map would be. and that web site that sarah mentioned is extraordinary because you can go to it, you can find out where you live

right now if you live in manhattan, and you can zoom in, and you can see whose land was there, what houses were there. marsh was there, rocks were there. they're just extraordinary. and he worked on them starting, i want today show you the base of the grid plan where it began. i think i may have turned that around. the first three. yes, there's hudson river. there you can see greenwich lane, and the grid begins above that. and then i just, i gave you a sample just to go up the island. but you can see the marshes, the creeks, the waterways, the topography. and you can't see it, i don't think, very well probably at the distance you're at or at this resolution. but at each intersection on one of the corners he marks where there's a monument or a vault, and he marks the elevation at that moment or at that particular spot. and anyway, they just go on up the island.

they're absolutely exquisite. i want to show you the one where he shows -- yes, there's 10th avenue running through the water. you get a sense of what an active imagination in places the grid was. that's one of my most favorite. and then we go on up the island, and you get to the end of the island. and they're just, they're just extraordinary. if you haven't spent time with them on that web site, i would really encourage you to. and as michael was saying, you can see all of the property lines. and that was, in large part, a lot of the reason people were so worried about randel's appearance. reuben rose redwood, the geographer who did the topographical reconstruction, also sat down with these maps, and he marked every single structure on them, and he figured that -- and then he saw where they were in terms of the pending streets and avenues, and

he figured that about 40% of the structures were going to be obliterated by the grid or moved by the grid, and you get a sense of what kind of transformation the landowners were anticipating. randel's farm maps also as paul cohen and robert augustine point out in manhattan in maps provided a lot of the information for the water map which is one of the gems of new york city's map collection and was one of the resources, again, that eric sanderson referred to, shows where all the water courses were on the island and still are for the most part. that is, essentially, the end of randel's time in new york city. his first stage of it. he finished those maps in a huge, crash deadline. matilda, his wife, helped him with them. >> she painted some of them, she pricked out some of them, and there's in his notebooks just this frenzy to get them in on

time. he gets a little bit of an extension, he finally gets them in. and then the sort of next phase of randel's career which was pretty long, covers several decades, is a story of -- and maybe i'll go through this kind of quickly, and if anyone has questions about it, please, ask me afterwards. he became involved with a lot of the canal work. he worked on the delaware, surveying it. he worked on the erie canal. he got into a terrific feud with benjamin wright who was one of the engineers of the erie canal, and he published a pamphlet which he reissued himself in 1836, he originally published it in 1821 criticizing wright's plan for the erie, the eastern third of the canal. it seems, from what i can see in the notebooks, that actually simeon dewitt and some of the other canal commissioners paid randel to issue that pamphlet. so it was also a political, seems to have been a political move as well. but if you read it, you get the

sense that you get with everything randel does, that he's just passionate about precision. if people just followed the map, if they just did their figures correctly, if they just measured correctly, they would see truth, and truth was that the plan that benjamin wright had was not the best one. his was. [laughter] and it's, it's -- he seems very difficult for that reason because he's so exacting, but there's also something really, really lovely about reading his real, deep-seeded, true belief that if people got things right and really measured and thought carefully, they would see a higher truth. and that higher truth for him was very much connected to the progress of the united states and the development of the united states and of these routes of transportation and planning. so he becomes -- he gets in this refuge fight with benjamin wright, and then he heads down to work on another really -- not

big, but important canal, the chesapeake and delaware, and benjamin wright is the engineer and chief there. [laughter] randel works a little bit with benjamin wright, he gets fired. and he goes to court. and he is defended by this very interesting character, matthew kerry, who i don't know some of you may have heard of him. he was an early publisher, a journalist. he had fled from ireland. he had been apprentice with or at least in contact with benjamin franklin. he set up a printing press. he, um, he issued maps, some of the early atlases of the u.s. and distributed them all up and down the east coast. he's a very, very interesting and influential person, and he was outraged by randel's treatment. and so he took up randel's cause, and he issued all these pamphlets about randel's mistreatment. he encouraged randel to go to court, which he did. it went on forever.

it went on, i think, for about 12 years, the court case. during that time his first wife, matilda, died. he remarried. and finally the case was settled. i mean, the canal company did all of these shenanigans. they objected to every, i mean, every bit of evidence, every subpoena, every bit of testimony. finally, it was settled in randel's favor, and he won what was at that time the largest lawsuit in the short history of the united states. it was for a quarter of a million dollars in, um, 1834 terms, so about $6 million today. he used that to buy land to repay an enormous number of debts. he'd been hiring looks like dozens of people to help him with this lawsuit. and he eventually lost it. it seems he lost it mostly through feuds over land and some bad investments in terms of some of his inventions. he went on the to work on one of the country's earliest

railroads. he was the chief edge mere for the new cast -- engineer for the new castle and french town. we can get you across the peninsula faster. in the train you can go on the canal. he was going to work on a railroad going down through delaware. he worked on this incredible railroad upstate, the ithaca. that's an engineering problem that you see depicted there. this hill and how to get the trains up the hill. there were horses at the top that walked around in big circles, and i describe this in the book, but they were often lifted up off the ground when the trains were going fast, and they couldn't stop them. there were a lot of problems on this railroad, but it was, again, they were all testing things out. randel was among the first who were experimenting with forms and techniques.

and after this period in which he was very involved with railroads and canals, he did come back to new york city, and that's what i'm going to talk a little bit about now. he came back, um, to promote his idea of an elevated railroad. he wanted -- and i think this also speaks to what kind of person randel was. he didn't just sort of see the man as a city, he saw movement in the city. he thought about how people were going to get around, how the island was going to develop. and he was one of many people who came up with a plan for an elevated railroad. and there's some wonderful descriptions in newspapers. he gets into a feud with some other designers referring to them as sort of stealing all of his ideas. but, in fact, really it looked as though they had taken a lot of his ideas. he had great support from a bunch of scientific organizations but, ultimately, his model -- can which he

presented at the new york crystal palace in 1853 and a sample of it is depicted here -- was not accepted. and he lost many, many years advocating for it, and he lost an enormous amount of money because he had a working model made that was hugely long and hugely intricate. -made in philadelphia -- it was made in philadelphia, and the reason i know is because, of course, there's a lawsuit -- [laughter] these metal workers are asking to be paid because they were never, apparently, paid. and that, again, i think, is another -- i think there are many inventions that we don't know about that took place in maryland, um, where he lived. there's some obscure and interesting advertisements in newspapers about, you know, 500 men come to this town at 3:00, and you will find something. or, you know, the description in

somebody's journal about a huge, big plotting table that randel has invented. so i think, hopefully, some other things will come to light. but he did not -- this is not accepted. his men were not paid. he was in a lot of financial trouble, and he then offered to the city that he resurvey the city and do much more up-to-date maps. and at this point he's many his late 60s, early 70s. this is not really easy work for someone of his age, but i think it really reflects a lot of the financial desperation that he was feeling. and for a while it looked as though the common council was going the pay him to do that. the mayor was behind it, he seemed to have petitioned him directly. but then in the end they did not, and randel seems to have died in albany not well off at all. and his legacy, i think, is really these incredible maps and this incredible vision that he

had for this city and this incredible excitement he had about invention and innovation and creativity with regard to transportation and planning. and the other part of his legacy, as i mentioned earlier, is the data that he has left scientists. sanderson being able to do the project, reuben rose redwood being able to do the top photographical reconstruction is all possible because of rapidel. and as i learned when i was doing this book, there are surveyors' journals from all over this country, millions of them from the land surveys that took place as the country, as development moved across the west. and a lot of those, those records and the day in them -- data in them is increasingly being used by restoration ecologieses to figure out what was there and to try to bring things back. so i see randel also very much as part of this legacy to -- he

made possible in some ways by, by changing the city, changing the land. he also gave us a record that allows us to restore it or to preserve it in some ways even if it's an active imagination in many cases or an act of creativity as it is for eric sanderson. and i'm going to read you one last section from the book because the other reason that i really love randel has to do with just because i grew up in new york city. what happens to us when we're in a place for a long time and the layers of time sort of come, come to sort of inhabit us. and we see things around us in a very different way. so i'm going to read you this last passage, and then i would love to take questions. the garden and the machine. randel's survey of the canal was part of the national movement to lay down the country's infrastructure. it was to be, as albert intended, part of the else in network of internal

improvements. canals cut through land bringing with them settlement, commerce and industry. they were among the agents bringing the machine to the garden. today the delaware is a blue meander, a stretch of welcome water traveling across the suburban and industrialized landscape. it has become as howard green of the new jersey historical commission has noted the garden in the machine. many early canals similarly had become significant recreational routes. many old railroad lines had become quiet bike path, trails through the woods, refuges from highways, cars and urban living. the high line which clattered between factories and warehouses in lower manhattan transporting raw materials and produce has become an aerial refuge, a long, thin bridge of architectural and botanical beauty curving above the darting energy of the streets and sidewalks below. it, too, is a garden in the

machine. .. once adopted the elevated railroad committed new york to expand and fill its shell out to ink in the pencil lines of the grid, the elevator permitted new york city to expand and out of the grid in the direction the city commissioners never described natural slopes in the air, buildings brought people to new elevations. man had remains of island of

layers. [applause] >> i went over my time talking too fast. i am sure there is time for a few questions. remember, michael is also here. [inaudible] >> yes. >> my question relates to this. at the new york historical society we have a marble marker

that marks fourth avenue in 26 street. when i lead my tours we way this thing out. and i tell them that this is that a particular corner and i believe i got that information from reading something in the last three or four years. could you tell me if you know what corner of these markers were marking or are they in the center of the street. >> they were definitely on a corner and i can't remember, i think they were usually on the north east corner but it varied. you can see on the map that sometimes they're in different places and it had to do with the conditions at that particular spot. he ideally wanted to put marble markers in because they had much more heft and i didn't mention everybody was always running off with his markers. he wouldn't pay go them, they

would disappear, the marble markings would disappear, sometimes the bulls he had to put in would disappear and constantly having to go back and put things in again so i don't know this for sure but i have a sense that he would try to do them consistently but would have to change depending on conditions but that was likely 26 and fourth avenue and it was at one intersection and that was an interesting issue for the topographical reconstruction because if you just have elevation of all these points you have no idea what is in between them and they had to look at the notebook to figure out when they occurred was in between all those points with very particular elevation. >> great talk, by the way.

clique two parter. the reality of randal's career reminds me of surveying, inventing, engineering canals, railroads. the know if they ever ran into each other? >> i don't know. the only one i could find, the princess to him on one of his pennsylvania surveys who wrote this incredible letter about randal was charles eliot junior who worked on a lot early suspense bridges and railroads and ended up in a lot of trouble with the companies that he worked for sometimes for being very independently minded but he wrote these beautiful letters to his family and he would apologize, he apologized to one of them for not having written more that john randall wouldn't let him ride on sundays. very religious and very acutely

conscious of honoring the sabbath and you concede that, i don't know who else he bumped into. it was a very small circle of people and i imagine there are lots of people whose names we would recognize who he did bump into. >> did randal publicly or privately express his own ideas for what manhattan should look like or disagree with the commissioners? >> not that i know of. i did find really interesting letters in the collections from the surveyor general in albany, in the archives in which he is laying out some of the cities in central new york state, that i should you maps of. i moved the square because it was not in a good place, better if there was better elevation, it would be much better for people to get to, easier access to more level ground and he does seem to have this sensitivity to

that' and landscape and how that should shape the design of those cities. from what i can see wasn't always listened to but clearly felt he could express that opinion to do it and clearly had it. and if there's an interesting exchange. one of the guys who didn't like the grid was this guy, clement clarke who we all read about or heard about and he hired randal or consulted with randal. it is not a part of his statement that is often read but he hired randal to give judgment on what the city was doing in terms of leveling the streets and he was very opposed to it, worried that there was going to be flooding, that they were changing how lovely everything looked and random agree with him and said they shouldn't be levels.

very interesting part of that. he does seem to have some sensitivity to that but maybe if more letters come out. >> you mentioned his second wife, she died in poverty in albany. the unit where they buried her? >> buried in orange, new jersey and my husband and i went out to the church and cemetery where a lot of his relatives are buried and we found he was apparently buried with his first wife because her family was very, his first wife's cousin was from that harry and her family, all around that area, that is where he chose to be buried, not in albany if this newspaper account is right and we searched through poison ivy, looking at head stones that were faint and we didn't find anything but we also

did discover very sadly at a huge section of the cemetery had been black topped for -- they needed a parking space. so i don't know if maybe he is there or if he is one of the head stones that has eroded. some of them were in bad shape. his second wife was a very interesting -- matilda was clearly helping him a lot with his work. there is one reference in the no vote to her being actually two to her being on a survey says she may have assisted him. that is my reading of them. if it is correct. might not be. i wanted her to visit him. seems like it is fair. and she worked with him on the map and was very involved with his family and friends coming in

to town and taking care of them. the second wife seemed to manage his business affairs. he was writing letters to her, she paid the workmen, would tell her what to do, and at one point a claim business he was trying to get clay from wilmington to philadelphia for the ceramic trade, he had all sorts of schemes and she was supposed to pay the workmen with that. he comes up a lot in one of the court case testimony's because of the receipts and the money trail. she also was involved with a lot of the land related losses later and she and her son of, john randall jr. product case against south sandal at one point which seems i spoke with a legal scholar who thinks that might have been a way of getting the

best creditors off. >> at least he had children, no family. >> stand find any record of matilda or how many children but there were definitely kids from the second marriage ban all of the newspaper notices that i could find about them were obituaries. two of them died very young and the one who sued randal with his mother was a doctor. he helped fight the yellow fever epidemic downtown, and he died shortly after that. two more questions. >> back to is the slide. >> sure. >> if i could ask you to slip to the slide of the elevated

railroad, it appears gray is one level up and underground, what i assume are intended to the foundation structures to support the elevated railroad but they also could be if the spaces left vacant subways. was there any hint of that or thought of that? transporting two different ones? >> not in any of the documents that randall wrote about the elevated railroad plan. he had great plans for that, garbage, gas and water pipes under their. and it was very interesting. there was a physician who seems to be one of the early members of new york city public community to call for this and he seems to have based on this description actually randal may

have worked on the blueprints that went along with his proposal and i can't find them but can't, if it is in this one or one of the other ones that is not here where he describes refuge that people can throw garbage away and the gas and the water can run and the the streets. he also is involved in trying to bring public water supply to baltimore, clearly interested in absolutely everything to do with infrastructure. one last question. >> spectacular presentation. we are all aghast at this. [applause] >> i often understood the early engineers, oliver evans, what people were doing on the go because so much, made a very

strong case of doing surveying, some of this is not the quantity of covering large farms of land, and you've convinced us he went further and elevated surveying itself in new york to a higher level. can you comment on that. any chance this had any implication? >> i can't answer the latter part. i don't know. i don't know if randall had an impact on the surveying generally because he seemed mostly concerned about getting it right himself. he didn't seem to be training people. most of his crew if you read the