Well this is quite the proposalhttps://t.co/HMvZekXzzo pic.twitter.com/T1Ps2Od1YF
— Samantha Maldonado (@sssmaldo) January 14, 2022
ADDED: Click on the first image to see the full extent of the proposed add-on to the island of Manhattan. Why would you build vast new land vulnerable to the rising sea levels you've got to believe are coming? From the article:Berlin is planning a car-free area larger than Manhattan. The citizen-driven plan would create the largest car-free area in a city anywhere in the world.
— Brent Toderian (@BrentToderian) January 15, 2022
Leadership can come from many places when it comes to transforming cities. Via @FastCompany https://t.co/3xfDHrNv5q pic.twitter.com/1gNwMlaA3v
Creating land in the harbor would... help New York City fortify itself against climate change. The new community would push vulnerable places like Wall and Broad Streets further inland, and the peninsula can be designed with specific protections around its coastline to buffer itself and the rest of the city from flooding. In particular, wetlands ecologies around the shorelines would absorb surges. Building the land at a higher elevation would further improve its protective ability, and the new peninsula could recreate historic ecologies and erect environmental and ecological research centers dedicated to improving the quality of New York’s natural world.
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68 comments:
Germania.
The avenues are for marching.
California high speed rail writ large.
The extending into the ocean idea isn't that novel. This is common around Tokyo and Osaka, although they usually go with islands rather than an extension of the mainland.
I've always wondered how those who had waterside properties with a wide open view felt when an island was put in just off the coast.
Sea level rise has always been inevitable, and will continue as long as its far worse alternative, sea level fall, doesn't begin, which would signal a new ice age. Sea level stability is not a thing during the Quaternary. If it does happen for a time, think of it as you would when a spinning top is steadily spinning vertically, it's not going to last forever.
So yeah, fortifying New York City by building polders makes sense. NYC goes back to its Dutch roots.
This sounds like pure peak-of-cycle fantasizing -- it's a another giant skyscraper proposal, but horizontal instead of vertical. I doubt it will happen.
This part:
"wetlands ecologies around the shorelines would absorb surges. Building the land at a higher elevation would further improve its protective ability, and the new peninsula could recreate historic ecologies and erect environmental and ecological research centers dedicated to improving the quality of New York’s natural world."
Starts with physically realistic thoughts but then shows its pedigree. Moving on from a physical dike, the idea morphs seamlessly into the delusion that "erect[ing] ... research centers" continues the same protective function. As though another little bureaucratic opportunity is an automatically positive natural-world addition; indeed a requirement.
Not even going to start on the "climate change" conception that underlies the idea.
It contradicts almost everything NYT believes. Flooded by rising seas due to climate change. Are they building it with solar powered shovels?
…and when a birth rate so low Ann thinks we need to subsidize, where are you gonna find 250k people willing to move to your floatie swamp homeless park?
The extent of the subway extensions make me think this is submitted by the MTA. Still, the Dutch influence in Nieuw Amsterdam is lasting enough to require building a new polder on the tip of Manhattan Island.
The rumble you hear may be Robert Moses crawling out of his grave to make it happen.
So at a time when people are fleeing the big cities and business districts are emptying out, their big plan is to spend billions on creating landfills?
Why not just covert the empty office space to apartments?
Clearly, they want to put a few hundred thousand units of low cost housing between Manhattanites and the sea. This wouldn't be the first time Manhattan was extended:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CeMh7fmDJqk/WgrqYbz3weI/AAAAAAABLkM/0dEVfkh9ccsAf3mOp-BRAuZsujFPoTwwACLcBGAs/s1600/nyc_manhattan_sl_animation.gif
I'm predicting the Berlin plan will be just as successful as Germany's green energy plan.
If you make it too big people from New Jersey will be able to just walk over.
…I admit- an old joke. I suspect there isn’t anyone left in Manhattan that would be mortified by that…
Who the heck wants to go to crime ridden NYC, nevermind LIVE there???
We should start referring to "climate variability" which is what is really happening.
This offers and opportunity to sell naming rights to the new streets and avenues. Verizon Avenue, Citibank Street, etc.
i REALIZE, that even spending so much as One Night in NYC* is enough to make a person a Truly Moronic Idiot; but Even Native New Yorkers should be realizing that people are moving OUT of their city (ALL CITIES) not INTO them
maybe rent out the spaces you have that have been vacant for YEARS first!
NYC urban decay followup - 6 months later
The IPCC says 1-foot by 2100. Not a big deal. SLR is the least important impact from climate change. Rich countries in temperate zones won't suffer. It's the tropical poor shitholes who will cook to the point of mas mass migration north. We'll need a bigger wall.
Quaestor
I believe the avenues are for grapeshot.
I'm rooting for the new Ice Age.
Well, I agree with tim in vermont that climate variability is what is happening. It is driven by the driver of life on earth, that Variable G0 sun we revolve around. It is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, the main driver of our climate variability. It has been going on for millions of years at least, and will continue for millions more with any luck.
The Chinese landowners in Nebraska will fund this.
Who's going to pay for this? City? State? Feds?
The better question regarding paying is How?
Buy land, they're not making it anymore. ~Mark Twain
The Left is constantly working on this Urban Demographic thing they believe the world is clamoring for, but it's not. The constant urging of urban density living, removing cars, creating villages of latte drinking, cafe jumping, book discussing, black-framed glasses wearing young intellectuals, artists, and musicians is a bizarre pipe-dream.
Go for it, Berlin. But when it comes to Manhattan, please note that they are hemorrhaging population at this time. They don't need room for additional people. They need to figure out how to keep the ones they have, while helping to make their lives better, not worse (just read about the woman pushed off of the subway platform into a train. It's not that uncommon anymore in NY).
No, I don't think this playful land buffer is anything but an exercise from people with too much time on their hands. When it comes to rising sea levels, they should first consult with Barack Obama and Leonardo DiCaprio and others like them, who yell about the rising seas and dying planet while they build oceanside mansions around the world. Please.
It's like my relatives in the New York area who worried when we moved to Florida. "Aren't you afraid of rising ocean levels?" they asked us from the coast of New Jersey.
People tell you where and how they want to live by where and how they choose to live. Suburbs. Exurbs. Southeast. SouthCentral. Smaller midwestern towns. These are the places people are moving to. Manhattan? This is a place people are moving from. This can change. And obviously Manhattan has a lot to offer. Or did. They need to first work on making it appealing again before filling in the ocean to make land for more and newer coffee shops.
NYC to protect itself from global warming rising tide by creating a New Orleans surrounding Manhattan. The poor and minorities will be hardest hit, but the fat cats on Wall Street will be protected.
After the flooding from the last hurricane, I thought NYC should build some sort of seawall around southern Manhattan with added functionality. The Dutch have been doing this for centuries. If the value of creating new land could pay for the project it would be a no brainer.
Good luck getting the permits for that. The EPA is rather sensitive about building in coastal areas. The desired designation for a construction project is a Determination of Non-Significance. That project won't receive that determination. It'll be buried in lawsuits until the heat death of the universe.
Then there's the significant reduction in the channels of the Hudson and East Rivers. That's just going to magnify any tidal effects and constrain any ship traffic.
The NYT is dreaming.
I can’t speak for now, but I lived in West Berlin from 1985-89, and the city had a superb mass transit system of subways, streetcars and buses then. I didn’t really need a car to get around.
serious questions
How much is this NYC thing supposed to cost?
How much WILL IT COST?
Who's supposed to be paying for it?
Who WILL be paying for it?
They have tried such things as before. Think Warsaw, et al.
Drowning NYC residents is indeed a solution. Maybe we can build similar add-ons to LA and San Francisco. Recruit them with "no cars! 24/7 recycling!" And then let global warming unleash its wrath.
Why would you build vast new land vulnerable to the rising sea levels you've got to believe are coming?
Because the problem will be fixed by Climate Change Legislation and a massive reduction in carbon dioxide emissions through conversion to solar and wind generated electricity for our electric vehicles. Can't wait to see the plug-in bulldozers that will build it.
Part 2 - Berlin. Street removal only works when the vast majority of residents live and work within the car-free area. It likely wont's happen or won't be successful. You can't get rid of the streets because you still have to truck in everything and fires have to be put out. It greatly increases the cost of living within that area as no costs are ever deleted.
The IPCC says 1-foot by 2100. Not a big deal. SLR is the least important impact from climate change. Rich countries in temperate zones won't suffer. It's the tropical poor shitholes who will cook to the point of mas mass migration north. We'll need a bigger wall.
Temperatures in the tropics will not rise to unbearable levels. There's this little known phenomena called thunderstorms. When the temperature reaches 86-def F, thunderstorms form. Thunderstorms convect the heat from the lower atmosphere to the stratosphere. The rain cools the surface.
The other assumption that Howard's making is that current trends will continue. Climate is cyclical. It's main drivers are the radiation and magnetic fields from the Sun. An inactive Sun will allow more cosmic rays to enter the atmosphere, causing more clouds, thereby reducing the heat input. The Sun is going into a quite phase for the next two or three decades. Get your long johns out Howard, you'll going to need them.
FYI climate variability vis a vis glaciation is primarily driven by ocean circulation. It started with the closure of Tethys Sea, then Australia separation from Antarctica which caused the permanent southern ice sheets. Next, the closing of Panama caused the Northern ice sheets to form. The Milankovitch cycles is a theory that is being reevaluated. It turns out that the cycling collapse of the Northern ice sheets is due to a combo of too much mass and too much dust resulting in albedo driven melting and catastrophic failure.
In some sectors car derangement syndrome (CDS) is almost as virulent as TDS. And I’m a city planner..
Quaestor said...
Germania.
The avenues are for marching.
I thought the story was about Berlin, not Paris.
New conspiracy theory: there are billions and billions of plastic straws on garbage barges around the world. The owners are desperate to empty them. Solution: Manhattan gets bigger, barges are freed up to solve the supply chain problem.
Has anyone checked if Bloomberg went long in straws?
Urban Dreams indeed! From the ziggerats of Ur onwards, the city has always been a place apart; consciously denying the natural world while inevitably dependent upon its produce. The New Yorker cover showing virtually nothing west of the Hudson results naturally from the urban mindset. It's deliciously ironic then that holding imagined threats from nature at bay is used as justification for a massive but ultimately mundane urban development.
This current post blends seamlessly with yesterday's "The Denial of Death" post.
This has been done before. Boston’s Back Bay was created by landfill projects during most of the nineteenth century. Beacon Hill used to be a lot taller
It’s a public works big dig wet dream.
Remember when we said it was only gonna cost $2 trillion? Well we were waaaay off! Oops.
Christopher B said...
Quaestor said...
Germania.
The avenues are for marching.
I thought the story was about Berlin, not Paris.
Man, I guess no one paid any attention in Western Civ II. The boulevards of Paris were made wide for sweeping with grapeshot.
Because the problem will be fixed by Climate Change Legislation and a massive reduction in carbon dioxide emissions through conversion to solar and wind generated electricity for our electric vehicles. Can't wait to see the plug-in bulldozers that will build it.
Pipe dreams. Solar panel pollute the ground the sit on. Farm land is no longer usable as farm land. Wind mills require the cutting down of forests to site them. The vast resources required to build these boondoggles will gut other parts of the planet, like Congo, because the energy density of power sources is very small. These projects are mirages, just like Don Quixote's wind mill. Just ask the Texans how they liked the weather during February 2021.
In some sectors car derangement syndrome (CDS) is almost as virulent as TDS. And I’m a city planner..
Such as Seattle, where they spend $11M/mile for bike lanes. Meanwhile, the Magnolia bridge is ready to tumble down, but they have no plan on how to replace it.
This has been done before. Boston’s Back Bay was created by landfill projects during most of the nineteenth century. Beacon Hill used to be a lot taller
The same thing happened in Seattle, the city of seven hills. Denny Hill was a little too tall and the Interbay area was a little too bayee. So, Denny will was literally was washed away and used to fill the Interbay area. That's the industrial and stadium area south of downtown Seattle.
In the futuristic docudrama "Fifth Element" French director Luc Besson shows a spaceship taking off from New York, with the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island sitting hundreds of feet above sea level, which is an example that there are alternate future histories in which sea levels decline.
Choose your future, zone your Manhattan accordingly. I go with the future of flying cars and Bruce Willis taxi drivers and Lelu with her multipass. Your choice may not be as much fun.
Germans. Is there nothing they can't do?
When they came for the cars, I did nothing, because I wasn't a car ...
As an aside, Turtle Bay in New York is named that for a reason. It used to be a small bay on a creek. Development dried up the creek, and in the 1800s the bay was filled in to create more land for houses. Katherine Hepburn lived there, as does Stuart Wood's fictional detective/lawyer/bon vivant Stone Barrington. Landfills are first and foremost "land."
I wonder what those with river views now will think of this expansion, and what compensation they will demand for loss of real estate value from this shoreline move.
San Francisco built on landfill. It didn't turn out so well. Granted, New York City isn't near a major fault line, but the city couldn't even keep a highway from collapsing or replace it for decades after it collapsed.
Even if you leave out the "rising sea levels" thing, if you paid many millions for waterfront property, you might not like it when it stopped being on the waterfront.
Althouse said...
"Click on the first image to see the full extent of the proposed add-on to the island of Manhattan."
That image reminds me of the animated map of Manhattan at the start of 'Escape From New York.'
In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country.
A fifty-foot containment wall is erected along the New Jersey shoreline, across the Harlem River, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. It completely surrounds Manhattan Island.
All bridges and waterways are mined. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison, only prisoners and the worlds they have made. The rules are simple: once you go in, you don't come out.
Jamie Lee Curtis is the narrator.
Note that the idea is to expand Manhattan, the good part of NYC.
I would take all that dirt and layer it over Newark NJ to get a fresh start there and to create a haven from the rising sea level.
I like this proposal. The only problem I can see is liquefaction during earthquakes. Loose fill and rubble can turn into something like a liquid (or quick sand) during very strong earthquakes. So super tall buildings are probably a nonstarter.
Remember, 2022 is the year of Soylent Green. Progressives see that movie as aspirational.
The Jefferson Memorial was built on landfill.
It's now sinking into the Potomac.
I like this proposal. The only problem I can see is liquefaction during earthquakes.
I'd assume that they could have pilings going down to the bedrock. If it's the same granite that under most of Manhattan, then building skyscrapers shouldn't be a problem.
San Francisco's infamous Millennium Tower was built on landfill. The giant tower has sunk 18 inches and tilted 22.5 inches to the west.
In NY at least, any new housing would be immediately filled with illegals, probably at government mandate.
Illegals are dependent upon you, but at the same time more important than you.
'The avenues are for marching.'
Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees?
So German troops can always march in the shade.
That's how Battery Park City (which you can see on the map) came to be.
Quaestor had it right the first time. Germania was to consist of broad tree-shaded avenues, lined with the trophies of war and suitable for mass parades. No thought was given to fields of fire--why would anyone want to rebel?
The Parisian boulevard story is much exaggerated, IIRC. (Boulevard, BTW, is out of 'bulwark' and in Paris originally followed the trace of the demolished medieval walls.)
Finally, skyscrapers in NYC exist only where the bedrock allows.
For all the talk about the decline of NYC, the city has actually been growing in population. I don't know what to make of that. I'm just reporting that there's been some pushback against the New York is doomed narrative.
Perhaps a survey of New Orleans in the Fall of 2005 could illuminate the limitations of wetlands to absorb the surges. Of course, climate change is predicted to bring rising sea levels, which are not "surges", but rather inundate wetlands by never draining.
In any case, if you fortify Manhattan, you do not stop rising waters, you simply raise their level until they overflow other areas in Brooklyn, New Jersey, Statan Island, or even move further up the Hudson and East Rivers till they can overflow the banks.
“In particular, wetlands ecologies around the shorelines would absorb surges.” LOL. Not just wetlands but wetlands e ologies. Much better.
To all those asking about whether current property owners would have a claim for lost light and views: I believe the answer is no, not unless they have some special deed from the state granting a permanent easement of light and views, and I’ve never heard of any such deed ever being written.
These ideas have the effect, if possibly not the intent, of making it very difficult of 70 year olds plus to live in an urban area. if you can't drive or take an Uber or be driven by a relative to a place, and you have difficulty walking -- well, you're plumb out of luck aren't you? (Oh, the fantasists will say -- there will be buses, or moving sidewalks, or Amazon drones, or maybe an app to summon Gwaihir the Windlord?....well, not really.)
Btw, as to Baron Haussmann -- yes, Quaestor, I agree the main purpose of the creation of the boulevards was to permit soldiers billeted on the outskirts of Paris to enter the city quickly and in force to suppress rioting in districts where, because of the narrowness of streets and the
ability of the rioters to erect barricades in part by uprooting the paving stones, troops had difficulty being effective. The barricades would stop the horses and the troops, and the residents would throw stones at them from their attics. The boulevards were more about transit than grapeshot, the rioters did not congregate outside their strongholds with the narrow streets. (Though in 1968, it was 50/50, even on a relatively broad boulevard like the Blvd St Michel. Bertolucci's movie The Dreamers' (2003) last scene shows this, though it is less well-known than his earlier, butt(er)-centric Paris movie Last Tango in
Paris.)
Of course, it didn't totally work. During the 1870-71 Commune (i.e., "communists") it took a siege for the rest-of-France troops to reduce Paris,
while the inhabitants ate the animals in the zoo and killed the Archbishop attempting to arrange a cease-fire. Yet the Parisian rioters were martyrs to the Left for 50 more years. The division of France into two camps who hated each other from 1870 on was a major factor in French weakness which in turn helped allow Germany to think it could conquer France in 1914 (came within an inch); prevented France from enforcing the terms of the Versailles Treaty when Hitler was weak; and allowed Hitler to win so quickly in 1940.
Unfortunately rather similar to where USA seems to be headed now.
Really, Howard!? How about some links for those closings (Tethys and Panama) and that separation of Australia from Antartica? You know, the ones about their climate effects.
It would be impossible to expand Manhattan like that. Not because it's impossible, but because the environmental impact statement alone would supply all the landfill needed. I'm surprised a preemptive lawsuit against even considering the idea hasn't been filed.
There's no technical reason it couldn't be easily done.
You will need 250 million tons of fill, and the perimeter will need to be sheet piled. How about leaving the fill where it is now and letting the new people live there. What is the value added? Or think smarter and let the new people live in underwater bubble cities, with tourist opportunities for viewing the fields of bones sticking out of cement overshoes. Or build 100,000 houseboats.
New Mannahatta is just the sort of real estate deal Donald Trump was born to negotiate. I'm sure NYC would be glad to have his help with the project.
This sort of geo-engineering used to be common and would be exciting to watch, but I don't know how they would get it done today between regulations and cost.
They could root out the hundreds of thousands of illegal Chinese, Mexican, and Central and South American immigrants, but then who would cook and deliver their food? Sort of like Downton Abbey losing its servant class.
They could tell families who have lived in public housing for decades, generation after generation, to move to places the could afford to live and get a damn job, but that's a no-starter.
This has been done before. Boston’s Back Bay was created by landfill projects during most of the nineteenth century.
It's been done before in Manhattan. It's called Battery Park City.
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