Manhattan has a phenomenon of this kind due to its extensive urban canyons and its rectilinear street grid that is rotated 29° clockwise from true east–west.

I named that Manhattanhenge, sort of harkening back to my early days thinking about the alignment of the sun and structures that we might build.In accordance with the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, the street grid for most of Manhattan is rotated 29° clockwise from true east-west.

[8] A more impressive visual spectacle, and the one commonly referred to as Manhattanhenge, occurs a couple of days after the first such date of the year, and a couple of days before the second date, when a pedestrian looking down the center line of the street westward toward New Jersey can see the full solar disk slightly above the horizon and in between the profiles of the buildings.

[10] The dates on which sunrise aligns with the streets on the Manhattan grid are evenly spaced around the winter solstice and correspond approximately to December 5 and January 8.

If the streets on the grid were rigorously north-south and east–west, then both sunrise and sunset would be aligned on the days of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes (which occur around March 20 and September 23 respectively).

[24] When the architects designing the city centre of Milton Keynes, in the United Kingdom, discovered that its main street almost framed the rising sun on Midsummer Day and the setting sun on Midwinter Day, they consulted Greenwich Observatory to obtain the exact angle required at their latitude, and persuaded their engineers to shift the grid of roads a few degrees.

[30] Variously over the years there has been a white or yellow line painted on the sidewalk to mark the place where the light shines through the crack on the Solstice.