Texas A&M Geography Assistant Professor Reuben Rose-Redwood will be featured in the original program Super City: New York airing on The History Channel Monday, September 22, at 8 p.m. central time. The program retraces the environmental history of Manhattan since the seventeenth century, exploring the roots of one of the greatest cities in the world, New York, to discover what its future may hold.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Texas A&M Geography Assistant Professor Reuben Rose-Redwood will be featured in the original program Super City: New York airing on The History Channel Monday, September 22, at 8 p.m. central time. The program retraces the environmental history of Manhattan since the seventeenth century, exploring the roots of one of the greatest cities in the world, New York, to discover what its future may hold.
“They filmed me trekking through Central Park on an Indiana Jones-style ‘treasure hunt’ looking for the old survey monuments from the grid plan of 1811,” Rose-Redwood said.
In 2003, Rose-Redwood first appeared in a Discovery Channel documentary on New York City in which he discussed the origins of the city’s grid plan of streets and avenues. The upcoming History Channel show features him retracing the steps of the original survey team in search of any survey markers that still remain.
“When the grid was originally surveyed,” noted Rose-Redwood, “the surveyors placed stone monuments or iron bolts at each of the proposed intersections, and since the idea for Central Park was not part of the original plan, it seemed possible that some of these survey markers might still be there today.”
After looking through the surveyor’s field records and maps with his colleague, professional surveyor Lemuel Morrison, they were able to determine where the surveyors had placed iron bolts in rock outcropings in what is now Central Park. “We had been searching for these survey monuments since 2004, and we’re pretty confident that we may have found one of the iron bolts at the southern end of Central Park, since it’s in precisely the right location according to our GPS calculations,” Rose-Redwood said. “We first found this survey monument over two years ago,” he commented, “but for the show they have us wandering around the park with our survey equipment and a magnetic detector pretending that we haven’t found it yet, and then all of a sudden it appears before our eyes, so it’s really a good mix of historical fact and fiction.”
Rose-Redwood has a longstanding interest in the historical geography of New York City. In addition to television appearances, his work on the Manhattan grid plan has been featured in the New York Times. As a graduate student at Penn State University, Rose-Redwood began studying the history of New York’s grid plan as well as the initial surveys that were conducted by John Randel, Jr., in the early nineteenth century.
“Randel played a key role in laying out the grid,” Rose-Redwood explained. “His maps are one of the most detailed depictions of what the area looked like before the grid transformed the landscape.”
Using information from Randel’s historical maps, Rose-Redwood was able to create a 3D computer model of Manhattan’s pre-grid topography using Geographic Information Systems ( GIS ) techniques, and he is currently working with Texas A&M geography graduate student Li Li on a project to compare this historical model with the current topography of Manhattan.
“Most people assume that with the coming of the grid, Manhattan’s topography was essentially leveled into a flat surface, but if you go to the city today, you’ll notice that there is still considerable topographic variation, especially toward the northern end of the island,” he noted. “What we’re trying to do is calculate the difference between historical and contemporary elevations in order to determine the geography of topographic change that resulted from laying out the grid plan.”
Rose-Redwood’s work on the numbered streets and avenues of Manhattan’s grid plan led him to explore the historical geography of street and house numbering across the United States. This past summer, he hired a team of Texas A&M undergraduates to use GoogleMaps to collect data on the geography of street numbering in U.S. cities and towns. Currently, he is completing a John W. Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, exploring the ongoing transition from rural route and box numbering systems to city-style street addresses in rural areas across the country as part of recent efforts toward developing Enhanced 9-1-1 systems for emergency response and homeland security purposes.
Rose-Redwood has published articles on the politics of street naming, the genealogy of the grid settlement pattern, the history of surveying and mapping, and the use of GIS in historical geography. He completed his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Pennsylvania State University and joined the faculty in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M in 2007.
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