At 08:11 AM 11/25/03 -0000, Jean Nathan wrote: >. . . - how far is a block? . . . could vary from say 100 yards to a mile or >more
Precisely! I was exceedingly frustrated when I bought a map of New York City in preparation for a walk from Grand Central Terminal to Union Station, and found that there was no scale on it anywhere -- the map-maker assumed that everyone knows how big a NYC block is! (I never did find out.) Indianapolis blocks are eight to the mile. Given an Indianapolis street address, you know precisely how far you are from Monument Circle. My Warsaw map is a bit weird -- the scale tells you how long .6 mile is, rather than any reasonable fraction. I found a block of blocks that pretty well fit it, and counted nine, by which I make it fifteen blocks to the mile -- and in addition, each block is divided into four parts by two alleys, so a dog-walk could be very short indeed. I couldn't find an un-interrupted mile of standard blocks -- the town is only three miles across, and contains two lakes. Out in the country -- in those parts of the U.S. where the surveyors arrived before the road builders did -- a standard block is one mile on each side. We refer to those blocks as "sections". Odd-sized blocks are not sections. A "section" is, by definition, one square mile, measured to the centers of the roads. The first settlers got a section each, and there are still a few houses with half-mile lanes, built on the sites of the "section houses". (We're back to needing a whole section to make a living as a farmer again, but now they rent it in little patches all over the county.) -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather) west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where the first snow didn't stick, but the ground has started to freeze. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
