In the early 1900s, Dr. T. Kenard Thomson proposed increasing
NYC's property value by creating a land bridge between Manhattan
and Brooklyn, building an island off the Jersey shore, and
constructing a "New Manhattan" directly below the old one. In
1916, Thomson, an engineer and urban planner employed by the
City of New York, wrote a piece in Popular Science advocating a
radical expansion of New York's land by reclaiming it from the
sea. The plan would cost as much as the Panama Canal and
included such flourishes as diverting the East River through
Long Island (thus uniting Manhattan and Brooklyn), creating new
land off the coast of New Jersey, and connecting Staten Island
to Manhattan with underground subway tunnels. Said Thomson: I
propose to add, by a series of engineering projects, fifty
square miles to Greater New York's area and port foothold. At
the same time this will mean an addition of one hundred miles of
new water-front. New York's City Hall would become the center of
a really greater New York, hav