"In 1916, Dr. T. Kenard Thomson, an engineer and urban planner employed by the City of New York, wrote a piece in Popular Science advocating a radical expansion of New York's land by reclaiming it from the sea. The plan would cost as much as the Panama Canal and included such flourishes as diverting the East River through Long Island (thus uniting Manhattan and Brooklyn), creating new land off the coast of New Jersey, and connecting Staten Island to Manhattan with underground subway tunnels. Thomson estimated that construction would cost in the neighborhood of $50-100 million (1916 dollars, natch) per year (over an unspecified amount of time)."

Read it at io9