Quote Originally Posted by Irving View Post
Oh yeah, and the reason that Downtown Denver is crooked, literally, I'm not talking about the politics this time, is because the trappers started setting up buildings where the Platte River and Cherry Creek met. You build one building, then build all the rest of the buildings square with that first building. After they started getting past Broadway, they decided that Denver was going to be a "real" town and starting building everything on a north/south grid like every other town.
Interesting... I heard a while back that orientation was purposeful, something about getting sun on the streets in winter to help the snow melt/clearing.

It does look on the map like someone cut out a chunk of the grid, rotated it a few degrees and stuck it back in.

Chicago is on a perfect grid too.... "ground zero" is State and Madison, and every 800 numbers in any N/E/S/W direction are a mile. The diagonal streets of course don't follow the distance figure. I can still name all the even mile streets, it's handy to always know where you are, how far something else is just by the address, etc.