Never built New York: the city that might have been – in pictures

[Disassembled 249]

Never built New York: the city that might have been – in pictures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From an elevated 19th-century pneumatic railway to a skyscraper cathedral and a Native American alternative to the Statue of Liberty, Never Built New York chronicles ambitious plans for the city which never saw the light of day

 

 

 

 

 

Pneumatic Elevated Railway – 1880 – Rufus Henry Gilbert

Henry Gilbert’s design was a hybrid of Alfred Beach’s air-powered underground and Charles T Harvey’s cable-powered elevated railway. Passengers would be moved through a double row of ‘atmospheric tubes’ suspended from wrought-iron Gothic arches, held on slender Corinthian columns. The Wall Street Panic of 1873 killed Gilbert’s untested scheme but a conventional steam-powered elevated railway was eventually built – the Sixth Avenue El opened in 1878. It closed in 1938 and was razed the following year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hyperboloid – 1954 – IM Pei

As railways struggled nationwide in the 1950s, redevelopment proposals were sought for Grand Central Station. New York Central Railroad chairman Robert Young argued that not utilising the air rights above the building was like sitting on farm land worth $100m and never farming it. Young and William Zeckendorf brought in architect IM Pei to design the Hyperboloid, a 108-storey hourglass office tower which would have been the world’s tallest, with a transit hub at its base. Young’s suicide in 1957 halted any hope for the building.

 

 

Too see the rest of these nostalgic visions of a past that could have been go to:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/jan/12/new-york-never-built-skyscraper-cathedral-pneumatic-railway-in-pictures#img-1