The streets of lower Manhattan had, for the most part, developed "organically" as the colony of New Amsterdam - which became New York when the British took it over from the Dutch without firing a shot in 1664 - grew.
The third instance of a privately developed grid in New York City came in 1788, when the long-established Bayard family, relatives of Peter Stuyvesant, hired surveyor Casimir Goerck to lay out streets in the portion of their estate west of Broadway, so the land could be sold in lots.