While traffic engineers viewed the grid’s many intersections as a problem to overcome, Jane Jacobs sought to create more of them. In her classic book of 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs advised that shorter blocks are better blocks. With shorter blocks come more intersections, and the corner, the pedestrian corollary of the intersection, creates a valuable point of human interaction. The corner, in her view, is where neighbors bump into each other or stop to chat, ultimately leading to social cohesion. The shorter blocks diagrammed here indeed produce more corners per unit of square measure, but they also create more paths. These diagrams get to the heart of the way we move across our grid. To Jacobs, the long 800-foot blocks of Manhattan’s West Side deterred street life, sidewalk interactions, and the interpersonal city she was fighting to preserve. JR