Noted architecture critic Lewis Mumford, a vehement protester against the plan, complained about the "blank imbecility" of this "civic folly" with its "long monotonous streets that terminated nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses." He wrote in "The City in History" (1961): "Such plans fitted nothing but a quick parcelling of the land, a quick conversion of farmsteads into real estate, and a quick sale." Thirty years earlier, in "The Plan of the City", published in "The New Republic" in 1932, he called the grid plan "a straight-jacket from which York City has not escaped, from which perhaps it can never escape."