Origins
Earlier street layouts for Manhattan had been drawn up prior to the Commissioners' Plan. In 1797, for example, the city asked Joseph Mangin and Casimir Goerck to survey Manhattan's streets; the two eventually produced a map which included a web of future streets, most of which appeared to correspond with future developers' speculative plans for street grids on their properties north of the city. Nevertheless, the scheme was pointedly rejected by the City Council.
In 1807, however, the City Council showed a new willingness to consider planning for the city's future, and asked the state for help in laying out future streets. The council said its goal was "laying out Streets... in such a manner as to unite regularity and order with the public convenience and benefit and in particular to promote the health of the City...." In March 1807, the council appointed a three-member commission made up of Gouverneur Morris, the lawyer John Rutherfurd, and the surveyor Simeon De Witt, to establish a comprehensive street plan for Manhattan.
A month later, the state legislature gave the commissioners "exclusive power to lay out streets, roads, and public squares, of such width, extent, and direction, as to them shall seem most conducive to public good, and to shut up, or direct to be shut up, any streets or parts thereof which have been heretofore laid out... not accepted by the Common Council." The jurisdiction of the commission was all of Manhattan north of Houston Street, and into the Hudson and East Rivers 600 feet beyond the low water mark.
Morris was named the president of the commission. The commissioners were paid $4 a day for their work, and were empowered to enter onto private property, and were greeted with widespread hostility from property owners. The commissioners' chief engineer and surveyor, John Randel, Jr., said afterwards that he "was arrested by the Sheriff, on numerous suits instituted...for trespass and damage by...workmen, in passing over grounds, cutting off branches of trees. &c., to make surveys under instructions from the Commissioners."
Read more about this topic: Commissioners' Plan Of 1811
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