David W. Dunlap has an incredibly fun slideshow on the New York Times site, which recalls urban planning from NYC’s past that was wildly bold and wholly unrealistic. An excerpt:
“Sobersided planners and wide-eyed visionaries thought this astonishing pace of transformation would never abate. A dreamer named W. Parker Chase proposed in 1932 that the 50 million people living in New York City 50 years on would ride vacuum-tube escalators and take air taxis to their 250-story office towers. The Regional Plan Association envisioned a 1,200-foot-long bathhouse complex at Great Kills Park on Staten Island. Robert Moses, who usually had the power to get things done, tried to persuade the United Nations to build a Brasília-like center at Flushing Meadow Park in Queens. (Midtown Manhattan, he warned in 1946, would by then ‘not be a proper, dignified and practical location’ for the United Nations.)
Dr. John A. Harriss, a distinguished expert on traffic control, went as far as to propose damming and draining the East River, before replacing it with a five-mile-long network of vehicular and train tunnels topped by boulevards and promenades. Pure folly? Not to the advocates of Westway, a highway that would have tunneled through landfill in the Hudson River until the plan was scuttled in 1985.”