We stumbled upon the New York State Archives image library last night, and dug up these old photos of Manhattan, all from the year 1916. That year New York City was the largest Metropolitan area in America, with a population of 5 million and growing, it was experiencing a building boom. At the time, it was home to the world's tallest skyscraper: the Woolworth Building (built in 1913). That year, New York passed the first zoning law in the county, "and because New Yorkers did not want to cap the height of skyscrapers, they decided that they would regulate the shape of skyscrapers. The idea was that that light and air would reach the sidewalk... the height that you could build up to depended upon the width of the street on which your building was located."
That year Popular Science published an article proposing "a project to reclaim fifty square miles of land from New York bay, to add one hundred miles of new waterfront docks, to fill in the East River, and to prepare New York for a population of twenty million." Just 8 years later there would be another plan to drain the East River proposed in an effort to ease up on traffic congestion. Alas, the body of water has escaped a concrete spill this long, so it's probably in the clear.
Click through for photos of a growing 1916 Manhattan.
