A Really Greater New York

New York City just introduced congestion pricing in an attempt to eliminate gridlock. There have been many other plans over the years to alter the city to improve traffic flow, also to create housing and solve environmental problems. One of the most ambitious plans was this one, "A Really Greater New York"  detailed in a 1916 issue of Popular Science Monthly.

This plan came from Dr. T. Kennard Thomson, a consulting engineer on skyscraper foundations and expert on pneumatic caissons (watertight structures for building underwater). He expressed a high level of confidence that the new real estate created would pay for the project’s enormous costs.

It involved creating many new lands including extending the tip of Manhattan and a new island off Sandy Hook, New Jersey that would connect by tunnel to Staten Island and then to Manhattan. The plan proposed rerouting the East and Harlem Rivers, while filling in the old East River, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. “New York and Brooklyn would be as much one big city as are the East Side and the West Side.” A new East River would be dug across Queens connecting Jamaica Bay with Flushing Bay. The Harlem River would also be moved and straightened to reduce ship congestion.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard was proposed to be relocated to Newark Bay with a new river cutting across Bayonne, New Jersey to link the yard to the Hudson and East Rivers. This would simplify ship access, reduce congestion and help create a “maritime Pittsburgh”. One of the more thoughtful aspects of the plans is to build subway lines, sewers and electrical conduits before the new lands are filled in so it will “never be necessary to tear up the streets to get at these necessary arteries of city life.” “The tax assessments alone will make a fortune!“

Though this plan was never implemented, the expansion of the tip of Manhattan has been suggested many times since, including in this New York Times article from 2022.