The block definitely has a New York center of gravity in the American conception. The Manhattan street grid is very regular with “short blocks” and “long blocks” and vast swaths of the rest of the city use a very similar approach.
There’s also certainly an element of it that comes from all the other gridded cities especially Chicago and the older cities of the East and Midwest.
But New York is one of the most written and talked about and filmed places on the planet and I suspect that’s the biggest cause of it being considered standard American English.
I don't think it entered parlance through that usage. It was actually a common feature of the landscape beginning in the 1780s [2] even if we don't count Philadelphia in the 1680s [3] which later became the national capital city.
The Commissioners' Plan which griddified Manhattan was not until 1811 -- but tens of thousands of square miles were already being rapidly surveyed into townships, sections, and ranges, which lend themselves to further square subdividing, after an act of congress back in 1785.[1]
As a fun side note, 19th Century Philadelphia invented the process of adding street numbers to its existing grid using 100-to-a-block addressing, and was also the first American city to add the hundred-block to street signs.
There’s also certainly an element of it that comes from all the other gridded cities especially Chicago and the older cities of the East and Midwest.
But New York is one of the most written and talked about and filmed places on the planet and I suspect that’s the biggest cause of it being considered standard American English.