Tuesday, January 20, 2026 – IMAGINE NEW YORK WITH NO EAST RIVER

By admin

The “Entirely Feasible”

1911 Plan to Extend

Manhattan Four Miles into

New York Harbor

Tuesday, January 20, 2026


Ephemeral New York


ISSUE #1610

Manhattan started extending its land mass back in the colonial era, using construction debris, sunken ships, ashes, ballast, and other waste to reclaim land and enlarge the island.

Pearl Street used to be the southern boundary; Greenwich Street was at the edge of the Hudson River. Manhattan continued to grow in the 19th century, but by the early 1900s—with almost all of Manhattan urbanized—civil engineers were considering new ways to create more real estate.

Enter a highly esteemed and successful engineer of bridges and skyscrapers named T. Kennard Thomson.

His proposal, popularized in a nationally syndicated newspaper article in June 1911, was to extend Manhattan four miles into New York Harbor, adding 4,100 acres to New York City’s most populated borough.

“The method of reclamation to be followed is extremely simple,” he told a reporter. “I would merely erect concrete seawalls from the Battery toward Staten Island for the desired length, and then fill them in.”

Thomson made his case by focusing on the taxes that could be collected on the additional land. But he was especially concerned with the journey ships took from the harbor to the docks in Manhattan.

Extending the island into the harbor while preserving a narrower ship canal above Staten Island would make it easier for ships to complete their voyage, he believed. The more ships that dock in Manhattan, the more enriched city coffers become.

Part of his proposal involved building a “six-track subway all around Manhattan Island, including the new extension. The subway would be built underneath the present dock line of the city.”

Visionary or pipe dreamer, Thomson was grounded enough to know that he needed city officials to get on board with his plan. The article states that his proposal was “under consideration, and other engineers who have looked into the matter regard it as entirely feasible.”

You can imagine what City Hall must have thought of this massive, likely quite expensive plan. But Thomson wasn’t finished coming up with new ideas for enlarging Manhattan.

In 1916, he published a proposal in Popular Science not only to build into New York Harbor but to fill in the entire East River (third image), which would reclaim 50 square miles and create “a really greater New York.”

You know the end of this story. Like so many other fantastical ideas that never came to pass, Thomson’s second proposal never came to fruition.

[Top image: The Atlanta Journal; Second image: Geographicus.com; third image: Popular Science; Fourth image: New York Tribune]

CREDITS

Ephemeral New York

 Bad Ideas for New York City, Ideas for NYC that never came to pass, Landfill in New York City, Plan to add 4 miles to Manhattan, Plan to extend Manhattan into Harbor, Plan to fill in East River 1916, T. Kennard Thomson engineer, Unbuilt New York City
Posted in Lower Manhattan, Politics, Staten Island, Uncategorized 

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A SNOWY AFTERNOON

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