What New York Might Have Been

It's safe to say that the folks who laid out the city of New York back in the day never saw modern New York coming at all. "One hundred years ago, Gouverneur Morris, Simeon De Witt and John Rutherford spent four years laying out New York, and went on record as saying that 'the country north of One Hundred and Twenty-first Street would never be covered with houses for centuries to come.' Now apartment houses extend to Yonkers, to White Plains and to New Rochelle."

Interestingly, one engineering consultant had an idea to radically change the landscape. His plan, illustrated in the picture at left, proposed to fill in large parts of the Bay and East River to add more than 50 square miles of land that could be developed. (Ahem, Client 9, thoughts on filling in the East River?)

This idea wasn't new at all: "Possibly spurred on by the example of the Dutch, who then were in the midst of a multi-decade project to tame the North Sea (1), some early 20th-century visionaries called for reclaiming land on a super-sized scale: drying up the North Sea to reconnect Britain with mainland Europe (2), or even damming the entire Mediterranean for hydro-electricity and arable land (3)."

Wherever he got the idea from, it's funny to think what the New York area might be like if it had gone through. Read the full piece here, one more proposed map for you below.