Re: OT: Spatial thinking (WAS: Re: Letf / Right, was Re: Count and mass nouns)

Roger Mills scripsit:

> South, in Sioux Falls SD or Holland MI.  Even so, as I recall, you're more
> likely in NYC to be told "go uptown/downtown" etc.  Actually NYC/Manhattan
> above 14th St. is remarkably easy, except for the house-numbering-- IIRC my
> old phone book had a page explaining how to figure what number corresponded
> to what cross-street, at least close-enough.....(it tends to vary for each
> N/S avenue).
Right, because houses on avenues are numbered starting at 1 wherever the
avenue actually begins, which may or may not be at the zero line of the
grid.  In addition, the numbering is consecutive, with an average of
20 numbers per block; there is no forced skip to the next multiple of 100
at a street corner.

The East Side is actually rational all the way down to 1st St.; the West
Side isn't, because it incorporates an earlier grid laid out when
Greenwich Village actually was a village named Greenwich.

> Moo! Or NYC south of 14th St.  IIRC, somewhere in the Village, West 4th St.
> crosses West 12th St...........
Right again; also 10th and 11th.  What happened there is that the main
grid is aligned with the long axis of the island, which is roughly
northwest-southeast, whereas the Greenwich Village grid is laid out
by cardinal directions.  When the two grids were merged, some streets
in the Village were identified with streets in the main grid; it just
so happens that one of the north-south streets was relabeled West 4th,
whereas a set of east-west streets were relabeled West 10th-12th.

--
But that, he realized, was a foolish            John Cowan
thought; as no one knew better than he          jcowan@reutershealth.com
that the Wall had no other side.                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Wall of Darkness"