The "Citizens and Strangers Guide" of 1814 said "The whole island has been surveyed and framed into extensive avenues and commodious streets, forming an important legacy to posterity, from which the most solid advantages may be anticipated," while another commentator from that year wrote "The arrangement of the original or lower part of the city ... is essentially defective. Beauty order and convenience seem to have been little valued by our ancestors." This comment is especially interesting, considering that so many of the critics of the plan would cite its lack of beauty as a reason for their displeasure with it. One critic recently pointed out that the wide avenues attract retail and commercial use, among other benefits. In 1836, an official in the city government wrote that the Plan "...laid out the highways on the island upon so magnificent a scale, and with so bold a hand, and with such prophetic views, in respect to the future growth and extension of the city, that it will form an everlasting monument to the stability and wisdom of the measure."