This article covers numbered east-west streets in Manhattan, New York City. Major streets have their own linked articles; minor streets are discussed here. The streets do not run exactly east-west, because their grid is aligned with the Hudson River rather than with the cardinal directions. Rather their "west" is approximately 29 degrees north of west.
The numbered streets carry crosstown traffic. In general, even-numbered streets are one-way eastbound and odd-numbered streets are one-way west. Several exceptions reverse this. Most wider streets carry two-way traffic, as do a few of the narrow ones.
Streets change from west to east (for instance, East 10th Street to West 10th Street) at Broadway below 8th Street, and at Fifth Avenue from 8th Street and above.
Although the numbered streets begin just north of East Houston Street in the East Village, they generally do not extend west into Greenwich Village, which already had streets when the grid plan was laid out by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811. Streets that do continue farther west change directions before reaching the Hudson River. The grid covers the length of the island from 14th Street up. (13th Street is almost the southernmost numbered street to cover the entire width of Manhattan without changing directions, but diverts briefly northward as it meets 8th Avenue.)
The highest street number in Manhattan is 228th Street, but the numbering continues in the Bronx up to 263rd Street.
Famous quotes containing the word street:
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)