The architectural critics Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell tour nearly 200 of those unrealized building plans. The catalog represents, in one way, “200 years of failed attempts to confer that order, rationality, efficiency, ‘beauty’” dictated by the grid, the authors write. In another way, it “demonstrates just how hard it is, when a designer conceives of something new or outside the orthodoxy, to realize that innovation.” There are always new buildings going up in New York City, but “genuinely pathbreaking concepts often languish,” they write.

The book opens with 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for park spaces—almost none of which panned out, even as the grid itself did. As the 19th century unfolded, so did visionary transit schemes grown out of the machine-obsessed Victorian era: think tubes, monorails, and multi-tier expressways. From the skyscraper-infatuated 1920s come bridges trussed with imposing commercial towers, and from the wartime 1940s, an airstrip made of conjoined rooftops. The futuristic mid-20th century produces Buckminster Fuller’s plan for a bubble-enclosed baseball stadium to replace the Dodgers’ Ebbets Field, and a community of pancake-stacked towers and domes by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Along the way, Lubell and Goldin show how some of these plans leaned towards the rational uniformity that the grid encouraged, while others broke from it to cast a new image of the city.