Zeppelins were ushering in a new era in air transportation at just about the same time that land reclamation seemed the modern thing to do at sea. 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).

America wasn't immune to the fad. In 1911, Dr T. Kennard Thomson proposed to expand New York into its adjacent waters for a grand total of 50 square miles. Thomson was neither a lightweight nor a crackpot. As a consulting engineer and urban planner for the City of New York, he had been involved in the construction of numerous bridges and over 20 of New York's early skyscrapers, specialising in their foundations, designing pneumatic caissons. It was the versatility of these caissons that would lead Dr Thomson to envisage a much wider application for them. In August of 1916, he wrote an article in Popular Science, advocating 'A Really Greater New York'.

 

 

"At first glance," he writes to suspend his audience's disbelief, "a project to reclaim fifty square miles of land from New York bay, to add one hundred miles of new waterfront docks, to fill in the East River, and to prepare New York for a population of twenty million, seems somewhat stupendous, does it not?"

But the future has a way of surpassing our best guesses, just like Thomson's New York would seem unrecognisable visitors of a mere century earlier: "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."

The continuous expansion of the city was generating enormous strains: "New York's overflow has made of Brooklyn a great city. New subways are constantly being built, yet are inadequate when they are completed. Twenty-five years ago New Yorkers felt sure that their water-front would be sufficient for their purposes for many years. Today engineers are searching for some method to cut the knot of New York's harbor congestion problems."

Hence Dr Thomson's radical, but ultimately indispensible plan: "I propose to add, by a series of engineering projects, fifty square miles to Greater New York's area and port foothold. At the same time this will mean an addition of one hundred miles of new water-front. New York's City Hall would become the center of a really greater New York, having a radius of twenty-five miles, and within that circle there would be ample room for a population of twenty-five millions, the entire project to be carried out within a few years. Many have said 'It can't be done.' The majority of engineers, however, have acknowledged the possibility, and I have received hundreds of letters of encouragement."

By Dr Thomson's estimates, enlarging New York according to his plans would cost more than digging the Panama Canal - but the returns would quickly repay the debt incurred and make New York the richest city in the world. He then goes on to describe how he would reclaim all that land. The plan's larger outlines: move the East River east, and build coffer dams from the Battery at Manhattan's southern tip to within a mile of Staten Island, on the other side of the Upper Bay, and the area in between them filled up with sand. This would enlarge Manhattan to an island several times its present size.

Proximity and easy access to the new Battery would increase the total land value of Staten Island from $50 million to $500 million. "This would help pay the expenses of the project," Dr Thomson suggests.

The project would also add large areas of land to Staten Island itself, to Sandy Hook on the Jersey shore just south of there and create a new island somewhere in between. The East River, separating Manhattan from Queens and Brooklyn, would be filled and replaced by a new canal east of there, slicing through Long Island from Flushing to Jamaica Bays. This canal should, among other things, facilitate protection of New York by the US Navy. All reclaimed land areas would be connected via underground 'rapid transit' tubes.