NYC almost had an airport in the middle of New York Harbor
Imagine flying home to New York City and landing on a floating airport right in New York Harbor, or catching the Metro-North not underneath the Beaux Arts Grand Central Terminal, but an hourglass-shaped 108-story modernist tower dubbed the Hyperboloid.
While we’re at it, what if Central Park looked like Versailles, MoMA looked like a zigzagging cantilevered checkerboard and Ellis Island looked like a futurist, bubble-filled planet out of “Star Wars”?
‘I really wanted people to think of what could be and how easy it could be to change the course of the future.’
These are just some of some of the 150 pie-in-the-sky real-life proposals presented in “Never Built New York,” which runs through Feb. 18 at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows. The exhibit — inspired by the 2016 book of the same name, by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell — includes drawings, installations and virtual-reality simulations that invite viewers to envision an alternative cityscape.
“I really wanted people to think of what could be and how easy it could be to change the course of the future,” says Lubell, who co-curated the exhibition with Goldin. “The exhibit is looking at the past but makes you look at the future. It makes you ask, ‘What if?’”
“Never Built” begins its journey in a long, tapering gallery that resembles the shape of Manhattan. Here, the curators present a glut of projects — hanging on the walls and scattered throughout the space, salon style — arranged geographically.
Visitors first encounter Frank Lloyd Wright’s proposal for a sci-fi Ellis Island dashed off on a cocktail napkin. They then progress through the manicured gardens of a Versailles-inspired Central Park; a sculpture of Isamu Noguchi’s idea for a modernist playground in Riverside Park; and Norman Bel Geddes’ 1949 plans for a stadium with a retractable roof to replace the Dodgers’ Ebbets Field. The effect is like taking a walking tour through a cacophonous, dizzying bizarro version of the Big Apple.
Some of these proposed buildings and bridges have been placed on the museum’s famed Panorama of New York City, in the next room, which consists of lit-up, plastic shells that hover, ghostlike above an enormous to-scale model of the five boroughs. The exhibit ends in the museum’s central skylit gallery, with a bouncy-castle version of Eliot Noyes’ Westinghouse Pavilion, originally intended for the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows.
“These projects do have the capacity to seduce you,” says Goldin of the wonders on display. “Some would have been beneficial, but some would have been frankly terrifying.” (Such as a series of 50-story skyscrapers on a bridge spanning the East River, or a $3 billion airport built over 40 blocks in Midtown Manhattan.)
But architect Christian Wassmann, who designed the exhibition, says he hopes the exhibit inspires people to dream big when it comes to their environs. “I hope I can inspire one or two kids who see this to become architects or city planners. But I think it can also inspire people to participate in the city more. It’s your city: Contribute to it.”
“Never Built New York” at the Queens Museum, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park; QueensMuseum.org