Why America Looks the Way It Does
To Europeans, the early United States was a curiosity: rich in resources yet poor in history. They were used to a storied landscape, where it was impossible to go for a stroll without tripping over the lithic remnants of some distant era. America, by contrast, seemed blank. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville scoffed at the “day-old ruins” of deserted log cabins—the closest thing to historical depth that this pathetically young country could manage.
He should have spent more time in Ohio. Settlers there were finding thousands of ancient Native mounds and earthworks, some bafflingly large. Refusing to believe that the ancestors of Native Americans could have built such monumental structures, writers floated bizarre theories as to who had. Perhaps it was a lost tribe of Israel, or an extinct race of giants. (Why not both?)
If oversized Jews were indeed behind it, they must have been especially fond of Pickaway County. It boasted mounds aplenty and the earthen remains of two forts, one circular and another square, constructed with startling geometric precision. In 1810, surveyors latched on to the circle and founded a city, named Circleville, in concentric arcs around it. This was “probably the only city in North America developed in a radio-concentric plan,” the historian John W. Reps wrote in 1955. (There’ve been others since.) It was also, he observed, probably the only settler city built around an Indigenous form.
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Circular or not, the surveying couldn’t come soon enough. Whites were swarming into Ohio. They bought Circleville plots at a barbecue—featuring an immense, sled-drawn wheel of cheese—and raced to erect the first house. By night, several slapdash dwellings stood ready for occupancy.
It did not take long for the charms of Circleville’s bowed lots to wear off. They were hard to divvy up, and their irregular contours wasted valuable land. Rectangles would have worked better, Ohio’s government conceded. And so the Circleville Squaring Company was formed to replace Circleville’s curves with corners.
Circlevillians turned on their city like a squadron of deranged geometers. They razed the earthworks, flattened the land, rationalized property lines, and laid down straight streets. An aghast English writer warned that there would soon be “no vestige left of that peculiarity which gave the place its name, and which constituted the most perfect and therefore most interesting work of antiquity of its class in the country.” He was right; the prehistoric ruins were obliterated. Today, visitors can puzzle over a flat road called Mound Street in a square city called Circleville.
So it went in the United States. A lively new book by the historian Joshua Specht, “Property Values” (Princeton), considers land ownership from the country’s founding to now. It’s been two hundred and fifty years of tumult. Nineteenth-century settlers saw themselves as pioneers, breaking new ground, but, Specht notes, so did twentieth-century suburbanites. Understandably so. His book describes campaign after campaign to remake the land.
It’s often said that the original sin of the United States was slavery. Specht winces at this, not because he downplays slavery but because he regards Native dispossession as equally fundamental. The act itself was consequential, but so was the mind-set it encouraged: a tendency to treat territory as empty space. U.S. leaders stood before the map like mathematicians before a chalkboard. Circles, squares—the slate could be wiped clean as needed.
To get gravel for Circleville’s roads, workers dug into a nearby hillock. It was a burial site, they discovered, full of skeletons. They carried on. Circleville’s straightened streets were to be paved with Native bones.
It would be hard to overstate how ignorant the Founders of the United States were about their own country. The main map they’d used to negotiate the postwar peace with Britain was woefully inaccurate. It showed the Mississippi River—set as the outer border—curving adventurously west onto the Great Plains. The historian Daniel Boorstin noted that some politicians misunderstood the treaty because they’d confused the Mississippi and the Missouri. A forgivable mistake, given that they did not know where either river actually ran.
They didn’t know because those rivers wound through foreign lands. The quiet fact about the new United States was that half the territory it claimed (and far more of the continent beyond its borders) remained under Indigenous control. The largest inaccuracy of the era’s maps was to show that land as belonging to the United States.
That half-claimed Western territory might someday furnish desirable farms for settlers. Yet, even presuming that the government could beat back Native powers, intelligently dividing that unseen area into plots would require understanding its geography, soil, and waterways. Perhaps there was an easier approach, Thomas Jefferson suggested. What about drawing a gigantic grid and just partitioning the area into squares?
The grid was a familiar form, occasionally used in colonial cities, such as Philadelphia. But previous grids had been tightly bounded—patches of orthogonal civilization within an arcing and twisting terrain. What Jefferson envisaged, in contrast, was an unyielding north-south grid of continental proportions. He imagined new states as roughly rectangular, tiled end to end with square plots.
Beware straight borders on a map—they usually mean that the person drawing them knows nothing of the place in question. That was true of Jefferson, but there was an upside to his ignorance, the historian Amir Alexander argues in “Liberty’s Grid” (2024). The grid Jefferson proposed was neutral, agnostic, making no place more important than any other. This was connected to Jefferson’s political views, Alexander argues. In a country where all men were created equal, as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence put it, all plots would be, too.
Congress summoned surveyors from all thirteen states to start laying down Jefferson’s grid. On September 30, 1785, surveyors from eight states got to work in what is now Ohio, just across Pennsylvania’s western border, in lands controlled by Lenapes, Miamis, Odawas, and Shawnees. After axemen cleared paths through the oaks, elms, and basswoods, the surveyors stretched a standardized measure called a Gunter’s chain—a hundred links to a chain, eighty chains to a mile—and marked the distances with tally pegs. It was a lot of fuss to make a few perforations in the earth’s surface. But those dotted lines were meant to run from the “Place of Beginning,” as the lead surveyor called it, to the distant horizon.
Jefferson’s idea was strange in many ways, but the strangest thing about it is that it took hold. By the early twentieth century, thirty-five more states had joined the original thirteen. All had at least one straight side, and several were essentially rectangles. Meanwhile, the public-land survey that began in Ohio had extended to the Pacific, covering two-thirds of the contiguous United States. As whites marched onto new lands, the grid unrolled before them like a red carpet.
Squares suited the fast-moving settlers. Certainly, they were simpler than plots defined by landmarks. Consider how one Massachusetts landowner delineated his property in that traditional system: it was “more or less bounded” by a path that started with a stake on E. Daniels’s land and then moved east “about 97 1/2 rods” to a corner of a fence, north “about 54 rods” to the corner of I. Fowler’s land, twenty-four rods toward the chestnut tree growing in the wall of Daniels’s property, and back to the stake. Compared with that morass of rustic wayfinding, where you practically had to marry Fowler’s daughter to get comprehensible directions, coördinates were bliss.
Squares made life easy for officials, too. Although the nineteenth-century state collected few taxes, it funded things with what Specht calls the “national nest egg”: its extensive landholdings. An investigation by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone for High Country News showed how this worked in higher education. To start fifty-two land-grant universities, the government used more than ten million acres it had wrested from nearly two hundred and fifty Native polities. It gave the institutions federal holdings in the West, which they could rent out or, more likely, sell. M.I.T., Cornell, Texas A. & M., Penn State, and U.C. Berkeley were among the schools launched with these grants.
The national nest egg also bankrolled the military, as soldiers could be paid partly in property. This started a vicious cycle: wars against Indians yielded land, and land funded wars. Abraham Lincoln received two parcels of federal acreage for serving less than three months in the Black Hawk War of 1832. From Illinois, where he lived, he opted for grid squares in Iowa, which he owned without ever visiting.
Eventually, the government started giving land away. The first Homestead Act, signed by Lincoln in 1862, distributed squares for free, as long as recipients went and farmed them. In a country known for its bootstrap individualism, this was a monumental handout; officials ultimately doled out an area the size of Pakistan. The vast checkerboard that airline passengers see when they fly over the West shows state socialism in action.
For settlers, gridded land came to seem natural. American football was initially played on a field of squares, hence the occasional references today to football fields as “gridirons.” Musicians use the precise markings on those fields to choreograph geometrically complex routines as part of a distinctive art form: the marching-band drill.
More consequential was the squaring of cities, like Circleville. Older settlements, such as Boston, kept their short streets and jaunty angles. But nineteenth-century ones resembled Mondrian paintings. Manhattan, straddling the two patterns, began as a typical jumble of pathways until an early-nineteenth-century planning commission imposed a grid, turning nearly everything above Fourteenth Street into a regular matrix of numbered streets intersecting numbered avenues.
The numbers are telling. In Britain and elsewhere, streets are typically named for landmarks: Station, Church, Mill, Green, and School are among the most common. In the United States, the top names are numerical—Main/First, Second, Third, and Fourth—as if its towns were coördinate planes. The numbers sometimes go disconcertingly high: to 400th Street outside Miami, 477th Avenue outside Seattle, and 571st Avenue outside Phoenix. The enumeration system starting in Roosevelt, Utah, runs ambitiously and intermittently through dozens of desert miles to reach the right-angle intersection of 6,000th South and 47,000th West.
The grid treats the Earth as if it’s flat, which, famously, it is not. Squaring off the land required property lines and related roads to perform a sort of topographical parkour, running straight over hills and across rivers. In San Francisco, the grids simply ignored the steeply sloping terrain, resulting in streets so precipitous that they make parking an extreme sport.
All this unswerving rigidity served one end: transferring property. In that, the grid succeeded marvellously. During the late nineteenth century, in what is now Oklahoma but had been Indian Territory, the government distributed some formerly Native-owned land to whoever could reach it first in a race. At the firing of a federal official’s gun, settlers scrambled to claim their squares.
Native Americans, in losing their land, lost the anchors of their worlds. Settlers, in gaining it, gained something less. Jefferson had imagined planting the countryside with farmers, but how deeply would roots grow in a property defined, as Lincoln’s was, as “N. W. ¼ of the S. W. ¼ Sec. 20 T. 84 R. 15 West in Tama Co. Iowa”? Men like Lincoln, in selecting square plots on maps, weren’t joining communities so much as amassing commodities.
Sensitive souls rebelled. Lewis Mumford, the great architectural critic, bemoaned the parcelling of land into “abstract units for buying and selling, without respect for historic uses, for topographic conditions, or for social needs.” It was pretty much a rite of passage for authors to deride Manhattan’s orthogonal streetscape: its “perpetual dead flat” (Walt Whitman), “primal topographic curse” (Henry James), or “deadly uniformity of mean ugliness” (Edith Wharton).
Nineteenth-century Romantics sought to reclaim a verdant refuge within Manhattan. This could supply “an antithesis to its bustling, paved, rectangular, walled-in streets,” the planner Frederick Law Olmsted believed. Under Olmsted’s direction, the city evicted roughly sixteen hundred New Yorkers (mostly Black or immigrant), exploded almost twenty-one thousand barrels of gunpowder, and moved more than a hundred million cubic feet of earth and stone to create Central Park. It was an Arcadia of meandering paths. Unlike the rest of Manhattan, you could get lost there.
Central Park was just the start. Olmsted also designed cemeteries, campuses, and garden-city suburbs. He even had a hand in establishing a nature preserve in the Yosemite Valley, which expanded to become today’s Yosemite National Park. It was all, Amir Alexander argues, part of a larger revolt against rectangles.
In this new light, Circleville looked different. In 1880, a local history of Pickaway County expressed regret over the obliteration of its earthworks. That relic-strewn ground, the author fumed, could have made the most “unique and attractive” park in all of Ohio.
One of the grid’s most astute late-nineteenth-century critics, the geologist John Wesley Powell, decried its environmental recklessness. Square plots might work in the East, but they’d cause ruin in the semi-arid West, he felt. Their straight lines ran roughshod across natural drainage basins, leaving some tracts unirrigated. Borders should follow water flows, not compass directions, Powell believed.
A fine idea. Yet Powell was “using bear language in a bull market,” his biographer, Wallace Stegner, wrote. The government went on gridding land, and hopeful farmers surged onto the plains, snapping up plots whose ecologies they barely understood. They enjoyed bumper crops in rainy years. But when drought struck Oklahoma and surrounding states, as drought regularly did, the topsoil dried out and blew away. Plowing up the native grasses that held that soil in place probably didn’t help.
Specht writes eloquently of the Depression-era Dust Bowl caused by an especially dire drought. The liberated dirt smothered crops and choked towns, burying farmers’ dreams in fine powder. It blew east, in great dark storms, to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. Dust rained on the White House and the Statue of Liberty.
The symbolism, for anyone who cared to notice, was rich. Whites had seized enormous swaths of unfamiliar territory. To turn it hastily into property, they’d partitioned it into squares, reducing complex geography to simple geometry. They had come for the land in droves. Now the land was coming for them.
The nineteen-thirties were a tipping point, Specht argues. If strivers in the previous decade had sought newly available farmland, their children more often sought suburban houses. The American Dream, in this sense, moved from production to consumption, from homesteaders growing crops to homeowners buying appliances. With this social shift came a spatial one, from the grid to the curve.
Again, the state blazed the trail. Whereas previously it had subsidized the mass acquisition of land, now it started subsidizing the mass purchase of houses. It did so by providing zero-down-payment loans, guaranteeing mortgages, building roads, and insuring loans to developers. The home-buying boom was “guided by government but implemented through the market,” Specht writes. This made it seem like the result of individual choices. But policies shaped those choices, and those policies strongly incentivized new, detached houses on cities’ edges. By 1960, Specht notes, “there were more Americans in suburban single-family homes than people in cities or in the countryside.”
In essence, officials helped city dwellers flee the grid. Cars made suburbs physically accessible, and subsidies made them financially so. Builders, prodded to work beyond city limits, adopted Olmsted’s vision for what those suburbs should look like. Essentially, they should look like Central Park. “Gracefully-curved lines, generous spaces, and the absence of sharp corners,” Olmsted wrote, would cultivate “contemplativeness and happy tranquillity.”
Developers sold slices of nature, but there was nothing natural about the suburbs. They were as sudden and artificial as the grids had been. The most famous postwar suburb, Levittown, on Long Island, was an explosion of 17,447 houses built in a four-year spree on failed farmland. (The farmers had daringly pursued an all-potatoes style of industrial farming only to see their tuberous cash crop ruined by an invading pest.) The builders, the Levitt family, boasted that by using assembly-line techniques they could produce a house every sixteen minutes. They’d intended to at least personalize the streets by choosing nomenclatural themes for subdivisions, but they couldn’t think of enough. Throwing in the towel, they just gave some areas street names starting with the same letter: the “D” section, the “E” section, and so on.
Throughout the nineteen-fifties, developers like the Levitts levelled an area about the size of Rhode Island every year, according to the historian Adam Rome’s “The Bulldozer in the Countryside” (2001). Hillocks, which interfered with mass construction, had to go. So did trees—the Levitts ripped them out to ease the work of building crews (and then planted saplings after the homes were built). It was Oklahoma all over again. Some suburbs battled soil erosion, which ruined rivers and contaminated drinking water. Others suffered dramatic landslides.
Mud and silt weren’t the only substances flowing downhill. In escaping the grid, suburbanites also escaped municipal sewer systems. Often, this meant septic tanks. These had worked adequately for isolated farmers, but too many could overwhelm the absorptive capacity of the ground—especially if sprinklers were watering the lawns—causing effluent to rise to the surface or enter waterways. In Levittown, the cost-cutting builders at first hadn’t even bothered with tanks and had installed cesspools instead—three decades later, the suburb’s sewer system was still under construction. (It could have been worse: in one Miami development, the toilets just flushed straight into front yards.) Rome describes public-health experts, having essentially vanquished raw sewage in cities, cursing the skies as it oozed through the suburbs.
Had anyone thought this through? Perhaps not, Michael Glass suggests in “Cracked Foundations” (University of Pennsylvania), a bracing new history of Levittown and its environs. Although curving suburbs were spatially antithetical to gridded cities, they shared one principle: speed. Most were instant communities, born of the same monomania for property sales as the grid. Glass chronicles the chaos as home buyers thronged into tracts without schools, sewers, trash removal, or viable tax bases.
The reward was homeownership. But the way to capitalize on homeownership wasn’t by sinking roots; it was by buying, building equity, and selling. This made the suburbs transient places, Glass argues. The average nineteen-fifties Levittowner left after five years.
As is well known, many suburbs were racially exclusive. The government favored loans to racially homogeneous suburban developments, and racial covenants maintained that homogeneity. In 1948, the Supreme Court found such covenants judicially unenforceable, but Specht explains how communities upheld them nonetheless. When the first Black couple moved into another Levittown, in Pennsylvania, in 1957, their neighbors burned crosses, threw stones, and gathered menacingly at their property line. The man who sold the couple that house was fired from his job.
This racial discrimination gave whites privileged access to government-backed assets—suburban houses. But, as Glass points out, condemnation of the suburbs’ racial exclusion can make it sound as if they were paradises whose only flaw was that their gates were unfairly locked. That is worth questioning. Did open spaces, cul-de-sacs, and “Oops, all curves” street designs make for better living?
It’s hard to say. The problem with the grid was its empty abstraction, an insensitivity to purpose that made the city a “grinding and piling up of blind forces,” in Frank Lloyd Wright’s words. Suburban developers swung hard in the opposite direction, designing large areas around specified activities. But in doing so they took the elements that had been interwoven in cities and separated them into housing tracts, office parks, industrial zones, and shopping areas. Critics compared this to eating an omelette by consuming its ingredients one by one—eggs, cheese, vegetables, oil, then salt.
Unsurprisingly, developers creating single-purpose spaces placed controls on them, and not only racial ones. Specht gives the example of Celebration, Florida, the Disney-developed suburb that opened in the nineties. Its residential area is ruled with the stringency of a Victorian governess: commercial activity is forbidden, pets and parking are restricted, and front-facing curtains must be white or—for renegades who dance on the razor’s edge of propriety—off-white. This all sounds exhausting, but most inhabitants love it, Specht notes, especially compared with the chaos of nearby Miami.
A less-noticed constraint comes from suburbia’s street layouts. Although suburban enclaves boast winding lanes, their more determining feature is their lack of intersections, the architectural theorist Albert Pope observes in his highly intelligent book “Ladders” (1996). Urban grids are a tight mesh of streets and junctions, meaning that any two points on them are connected by many viable routes. Suburbs, by contrast, are generally hostile to the idea of strangers barrelling through, so they have fewer streets and fewer crossings. This prevents traffic from flowing evenly, pushing it away from cul-de-sacs and go-nowhere lanes and onto a few large roads. Some communities, famously, have gates at those roads. The gatehouses prompt eye rolls, but the underlying exclusion lies in the fact that such places have so few entrances that they can be gated.
The unintended effect of low-density construction, restrictive zoning, and curving roads is a staggering increase in the distance between destinations. Ultimately, the cul-de-sacs designed to repel traffic increase the number of needed cars. And the more a place accommodates cars—widening main roads into smooth, unobstructed arcs—the more dangerous it becomes to walk or cycle, and the more everyone drives.
This country is now littered with developments that are called parks and gardens where it is miserable to do the one thing people like to do in parks and gardens: walk. The writer Jonathan Franzen has described a bizarre sociological phenomenon resulting from this state of affairs. Whenever Franzen, an avid urban hiker, tries his perambulations in suburban Missouri or Colorado, he sticks out so awkwardly that men in passing cars shout obscenities at him. I’ve experienced the same thing walking the winding streets of Levittown on Long Island.
The suburbs promise space yet deliver emptiness, critics charge. Even the most thoughtfully designed enclaves are suspended in a larger sprawl. For Pope, the result is a revolting phantasmagoria: the orange sodium-vapor lights of “nighttime parking lots, long abandoned agricultural fields overdraped by power lines, immaculate corporate campuses maintained in silence save for the splash of a ‘water feature,’ the brutal concrete and weeds of a freeway apron.” This is the nineteenth-century complaint about the grid—that it was soulless—applied to its opposite.
Specht adds another complaint: the suburbs have pushed politics rightward. Generally, in the United States, people get more conservative as population density falls. Even diehard Democrats seem to have felt the tug. In “Don’t Blame Us” (2015), the historian Lily Geismer profiles Boston’s deep-blue suburbs, full of engineers and college professors. Their inhabitants worked assiduously for integration and against war, yet they also embraced a politics of individual choice that eschewed collective spending on broader social goals. Geismer suggests that the market-forward liberalism that took hold during Bill Clinton’s Presidency can be traced to the suburbanization of the Democratic Party.
It’s tempting to see the curve as having vanquished the grid. In reality, they’re both alive, and they’re almost symbiotically bonded. Suburbs stretch their undulating freeways into the grid, sucking out nutrients (and cutting through neighborhoods). Cities, encased in suburbs, extend their ever-widening “metropolitan areas” for miles.
Specht calls for a truce between city and suburb. The government once dedicated itself energetically to distributing homesteads or homes. If such energy could go toward building up higher-density neighborhoods in lower-cost areas, a hitherto elusive “shared civic life” might be obtained, Specht suggests. It’s a sensible thought. Both the grid and the curve were simplistic, uncompromising ideas. And, when it comes to viable communities, compromise is everything.
But why did simplistic ideas hold such sway for so long? The United States has been a rootless, restless country, lunging between “Make everything squares” and “Screw squares, we’re doing circles.” Such crudely geometric thinking prevailed because the unfamiliar land seemed unmarked by history. On a stolen continent, settlers rushed onto new terrain and let their ideas run rampant. They flattened the mounds and paved the roads, bulldozing yesterday to clear space for tomorrow. ♦