I am usually up before sunrise, but I am not typically on the streets until somewhat later. With sunrise even earlier much of the year than it is mid-winter, I rarely see a site like that which I witnessed heading east on Prince Street Saturday morning at 7:47 AM.
Something few New Yorkers know is the angle at which Manhattan deviates from north-south (or that it deviates much at all). New Yorkers believe Manhattan’s avenues run north-south and crosstown streets run East-West, but there is only a casual relationship between true north and the avenues. It is extremely useful, however, to think of orientation in Manhattan in that way.
With the establishment of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which established an orthogonal grid north of 14th, avenues were run parallel to the long axis of Manhattan, not actually north-south. The deviation from true north is significant: 29 degrees to be exact (read the New York Times article here). This, however, does not prevent seeing sights such as that in the photo. One of the most interesting phenomena in the city is the occurrence of Manhattanhenge, a biannual occurrence where the setting sun aligns with the crosstown streets of Manhattan’s main grid. On these days, the sun fully illuminates every cross street from river to river during the last fifteen minutes of daylight, with the setting sun’s center exactly on the street’s center line. I saw this for the first time on May 28, 2007 (see my photos and article here).
If you are familiar with View of the World from Ninth Avenue, you know how extraordinarily ethnocentric New Yorkers are. How important is magnetic north really? Perhaps what we have is 29 degrees of irrelevance and we should more correctly say that magnetic north deviates from Manhattan’s center line which, as every New Yorker knows, points true north. 🙂
