Casimir Goerck

Casimir Theodor Goerck (born c.1755 – died November 19 or December 11, 1798) was one of a handful of officially recognized "city surveyors" for New York City from 1788 until his death from yellow fever in 1798. Goerck was related to the Roosevelt family by marriage, having married Elizabeth Roosevelt, by whom he had two children, a daughter, Henrietta, and a son, Theodore.

Goerck was of Polish or German origin, and had come to America to be an artillery officer for the Continental Army in the American Revolution. According to Stokes's The Iconography of Manhattan Island, Goerck first appeared on the New York scene in 1785.

That year, the city's Common Council hired Goerck to survey and lay out lots and streets in the city's "Common Lands", about 1,300 acres (530 ha), or approximately 9% of the Manhattan island, which was what remained of land granted to the colony of New Amsterdam by the Dutch provincial government. The Common Lands were landlocked with no access to the rivers, and of poor quality, either rocky and elevated or swampy and low-lying. The Council hoped that by providing streets to access the new lots, they could sell them and provide the city with a needed stream of income. Despite the difficulty of the task due to the topography and ground cover, as well as the relatively primitive tools available to surveyors at the time, Goerck finished the job in about 6 months, by December 1785. He had created 140 five-acre (2.0 ha) lots – the size he was instructed to create – of varying uniformity, and had laid out a road through the middle of them that would, eventually, become Fifth Avenue in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811. Goerck's lots were oriented with the long axis going east-west, just as the five-acre (2.0 ha) blocks in the Commissioners Plan would be.

In 1788, Goerck was hired by the long-established Bayard family, relatives of Peter Stuyvesant, to survey and lay out streets in the portion of their estate west of Broadway, so the land could be sold in lots. About 100 acres (40 ha) accommodated 7 east-west and 8 north-south streets, all 50 feet (15 m) wide, making up 35 whole or partial rectilinear blocks of 200 feet (61 m) width from east to west, and between 350 and 500 feet (110 and 150 m) long north to south – although near the edges of the estate the grid broke down in order to connect up with existing streets. The Bayard street grid was one of the first attempts to apply a gridiron plan to Manhattan island, and the streets still exist as the core of SoHo and part of Greenwich Village: Mercer, Greene, and Wooster Streets, LaGuardia Place/West Broadway (originally Laurens Street), and Thompson, Sullivan, MacDougal, and Hancock Streets, although the last has been subsumed by the extension of Sixth Avenue.

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