23rd Street is a broad thoroughfare in the New York City borough of Manhattan, one of the major two-way, east-west streets in the borough's grid. As with Manhattan's other "crosstown" streets, it is divided into its east and west sections at Fifth Avenue. The street runs from Avenue C and FDR Drive in the east to Eleventh Avenue in the west.
West 23rd Street from the High Line (2014)
The HL23 building overhanging the High Line park
The famous Flatiron Building sits on the intersection of 23rd Street (front), Broadway (left), and 5th Avenue (right)
The east end of the street, the East River. The New York Skyports Seaplane Base is the last building on the east end of 23rd.
Commissioners' Plan of 1811
The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 was the original design for the streets of Manhattan above Houston Street and below 155th Street, which put in place the rectangular grid plan of streets and lots that has defined Manhattan on its march uptown until the current day. It has been called "the single most important document in New York City's development," and the plan has been described as encompassing the "republican predilection for control and balance ... [and] distrust of nature". It was described by the Commission that created it as combining "beauty, order and convenience."
Simeon De Witt
The only known image of John Randel Jr., the Commission's chief surveyor, by an unknown artist, probably Ezra Ames.
The park-like grounds of the American Museum of Natural History – called "Theodore Roosevelt Park" since 1958, but officially part of Central Park – is the only one of the planned public spaces of the Commissioners' Plan which still exists; it was to be "Manhattan Square".
William M. "Boss" Tweed (1870)
