text: New York Retro Futurism
  New York's retro futurism is particularly interesting becuase the city itself is an anachronistic view of modernism – an antique skyscraper city. Each one of these proposals is not just a past vision of the future, but a past vision of the future which is now in the past itself.
  The 15 items here, range from the purely conceptual work of Italian 60s architects, Superstudio, who designed a continuous monument around the earth, crashing through lower Manhattan to Lindenthal's serious proposal for an absolutely gargantuan bridge across the Hudson, with towers bigger than some of the tallest skyscrapers and where the keystone, still exists today.
  Along with Buckminster Fuller's well known idea for a geodesic dome over mid-town Manhattan, is his lesser known one for an array of huge, cooling tower like housing projects in Harlem, each holding 40,000 people. There are a couple of representative engineering projects showing plans to dam the Hudson or drain the East River and an array of transportation concepts, including Raymond Loewy's idea for a helicopter pad covering Bryant park, 10 storys above ground.
  Weirdest of all is the proposal for a spherical nuke proof 2nd city, below ground.
  New York City as It Will Be in 1999, from 1900
  Cartoon of elevated railway system from Liberty's mouth
  Nuke Proof 2nd City Below Manhattan
  Mooklyn 1916 Engineering Proposal To Merge Manhattan And Brooklyn
  Buckminster Fuller, power plant Harlem condos
  Each residential block would have been 100 floors and house 45,000 people.
  Mies van der Rohe Proposal for Battery Park, 1957-1959
  We tend to associate Battery Park with Battery Park City, which is on the opposite side of the tip of Manhattan from this scheme. Its a great shame that these were never built, because what was is possibly the worst of all the modernist developments in NY.
  Plan to drain the East River
  Paul Rudolph's gigantic cross-Manhattan proposal for Robert Moses
  Airport-Docks for New York, 1931
  Just Imagine – NY in 1980 imagined from the Great Depression
  Buckminster Fuller, Geodesic Dome over Midtown Manhattan
  Raymond Loewy, 10 storey helicopter landing pad over Bryant Park, 1941
  1960s Superstudio Continuous Monument crashing through downtown Manhattan
  Superstudio were a seminal Italian conceptual architecture group. In this proposal the planet would be covered in a continuous structure based on a ruthlessly consistent grid.
  1881, New York in a few years from now
  Gustav Lindenthal's design for a colossal bridge accross the Hudson
  Unlike many of the other designs here, this was not just conceptual, the corner stone for it still exists and Lindenthal designed the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges,which makes the statistics about it all the more incredible.<p /><p />&quot;The bridge was to be 6,000 feet long (nearly twice the length of the George Washington Bridge), 200 feet wide, and 200 feet above the river. It was designed to carry 12 railroads, 24 lanes of traffic, and 2 pedestrian promenades.&quot; The towers would have been taller than the Woolworth building.<p /><p />