This map, drawn in 1868, records an impulse to extend north of the commissioners’ original boundary line at 15th Street.
City surveyor Otto Sackersdorff copied the Randel Farm Maps and published them in 1868 in a collection known as the Sackersdorff Blue Book. Although the commissioners stopped the grid at 155th Street, Randel projected it up the entire island, and the Sackersdorff maps show that extension as well. This Sackersdorff map of the area between the proposed 157th and 177th Streets fails to show topography, a dangerous omission when dealing with the undulating grid-defying terrain of northern Manhattan. Studying these maps one would never realize, for example, that steep drop-offs dominate the Hudson and Harlem River shorelines, and that a large bump in the landscape, Marble Hill, crowns the tip of the island. MM