By 1971 the development of Battery Park City had slowed, and a new master plan was designed to attract investors. The revised plan by Alexander Cooper Associates explicitly cited the 1811 Manhattan grid as the model for the redesign, as it “has proven to be remarkably adaptable to modern building and transportation technology.”
The 1979 plan for Battery Park City continued the grid of lower Manhattan across West Street, in hopes that the street extensions would reduce the sense of isolation in the new neighborhood. Regular blocks replace the megastructure, whose circulation system of stacked decks was deemed too complicated and expensive to implement. Instead, the new plan was organized around traditional streets, which emphasize ground-level circulation and allow land parcels with street frontage to remain the basic unit of development. The 1979 master plan urges that “Battery Park City should take a less idiosyncratic, more recognizable, and more understandable form”; the form the planners chose was the 1811 grid. CY