Comment on It hurts.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 5 days ago
There has to be some interesting history here.
A few other examples have been posted, but this is easily the wildest. It’s not even the same aspect ratio of grid, or at a normal angle. (And they’ve still managed to tie it in reasonably well)
I think that area was built when nothing else was there, without the developer thinking too hard about its orientation.
As time went on, new development started nearby, oriented to a different geographic element, like a shoreline, or a river, etc. eventually that development met the old development, and they were lined up differently, and the municipality stuck with the new grid system orientation and just built around the old one.
Yeah, someone deciding to clear out an area and develop it in a completely different way is possible, I guess, but seems a lot less likely. Maybe there’s a bit of both - something large like horse stables or a hospital was there, then it was replaced with a new self-contained development, and then they built out into the margin between the two later on yet.
In any case, somebody had a big urban planning idea of some kind, but it hasn’t really worked out as envisioned. The angle could be because one grid is aligned true north, and the other magnetic north.
Could also have been a remnant of say a grove or something and was simply developed later on. There’s a couple of these type of things near me caused by my great grandfather being weird, where the streets are all fucked in their width because they’re built on the old trails and roads. Sometimes the roads are only wide enough for a single car other times you could fit four next to each other with room to spare, also all the blocks are weirdly sized because they were built at slightly different times so are all oriented towards different cardinal directions.
merc@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
To me what’s wild about it is that it’s completely filled with houses, and the houses seem to all respect the orientation of the nearest street.
You’d think that they’d say “Ok, well in this section we have these two roads coming at a narrow angle, let’s just make this a park”, or something to make the places where the two grids join a little less ugly.