Completely random and irrelevant thought, stirred by a good sleep.
I was pondering the tendency of towns to develop in only one direction. Sometimes the direction is forced by geography like a lake or mountain. When it’s not forced, the reasons are harder to figure out.
Ponca and Manhattan both developed in one direction. In both cases the chosen vector was only partly geographical, and both happened to divide at the same street.
Here are maps of both around 1970, when the boom of the ’50s was starting to fade out. I’ve marked the chosen development vectors with a big clumsy green arrow.
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Ponca developed northeastward. Southeast was blocked by the river. Straight south was blocked by Continental. All other directions were physically open. Straight west would have seemed like the best. Nothing but wide open farmland, and the prevailing wind from Continental carried the smell of oil mostly northeast. The west side of town was much less smelly than the east side.
Only one development tried to branch westward from the original townsite. The Flormable addition was built in the late ’40s, and just sat there, with no further growth. Northeast was directly under the smell cloud, and it was also somewhat hilly and creeky, so not as easy to plant houses. Nevertheless, ALL development went northeast. The dividing line is 14th street. West of 14th is old, east of 14th is new.
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Manhattan developed northwestward. South and east were blocked by the Kaw and Wildcat. Straight north was blocked by K-State, which owned everything north of its campus. Westward was upward, away from the floodplain, so it was clearly the best place to build. Southwest should have been easier, with the highway to Fort Riley as a natural corridor, even equipped with an interurban line in the early days. But nobody went southwest. Everybody went straight west or northwest. The dividing line is 14th street, which is the western boundary of the floodplain.
Both cities divided at 14th, for very different reasons.
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What was the field that pulled the vector? In Ponca it’s obvious. The Marland Mansion is east of 14th and Highland. The new high-status development started on land that had been part of the estate. In Manhattan the Wareham Estate was at Sunset and Poyntz, and the Kimble Castle was across the street. The first high-status houses were directly north of Wareham on Fairchild and Fairview, and the slingshot continued northward. (Wareham and Kimble weren’t nearly as powerful as EW Marland, but they were the top end of the relatively narrow income range.)
Later graphics sidenote: those green arrows look like something else, but I won’t bother to fix them.
Polistra's Mill 