An Incredibly Bad Idea

I could have sworn that I wrote about this before, but I’m not finding it in the blog archive. Maybe I’m just remembering the bad aftertaste this whole idea gives me. Hey, why not destroy New York’s harbor – the reason that a city was built here in the first place – to create land for development and a railroad connection?

This idea was floated in the 1910s and again in the 1930s, and again in the 2020s, and probably a few more times. In our current circumstances, with harbor traffic down, it’s somewhat less insane; in 1930, this was cutting the throat of the industrial portion of the city’s economy to benefit real estate speculators. The rail connection, which would allow direct freight transfer between southern New England and the rest of the country, would have been nice, but could have been achieved by simply building a tunnel at the Narrows or to the north, as the Port Authority was originally chartered to do.

There are just a few unanswered question: the state boundary running through a piece of new land connected to Manhattan, the landfill subsuming Liberty and Ellis Islands, the issue of tidal flow through the newly extended and curved East River, the huge amounts of land (old land, in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey) required for the ramps down to the nine new vehicular tunnels, the creation of a linear airport in the middle of this new urban area, how the freight railroad was going to get from somewhere north and east to the Battery, through the crowded heart of the city…