It's Popular Mechanics Meets Science Fiction! The thing that's amazing about the NY Metro area is how much was actually done from 1900 to 1960 to bring it all together. All the bridges were built in that span except for the Brooklyn Bridge, which was completed in 1883. My dad remembers taking the ferry that was just upstream from where the bridge sits now when he was 5 years old in 1930. The GWB was already being built then and it was the biggest thing he had ever seen in his young life. Fringe did a really cool thing in their alternate universe with the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building being a zeppelin docking station. Not sure if that's real or not but it's another look at the alternate possibilities for NYC. The one thing they really need to do now is to setup the ring subway around Manhattan Island. It should service all the existing mass transit lines into Manhattan and it should have massive underground garages capable of holding a half million vehicles a day at a rate cheap enough to make people park and take mass transit in. People should be able to park at a dozen different huge garages, big enough that they cannot run out of capacity on a day. Overkill to guarantee that people can park. Then they should be able to get on the ring subway and connect from there to wherever they need to go. The reason you do a ring is that you don't want people who need to go to southern Manhattan to have to drive south on the Jersey road system to get there if they are coming from North Jersey. you want them to be able to park north of the GW Bridge, get on the subway and be at the Holland Tunnel station in 15 minutes from there.
The dome one would have gone over really well.... BTW I love old pictures of cities from like the early 1900's to the 1940's. I think this one is pretty cool. Not really sure when it is from but my guess by looking at the aircraft is the 1950s. Not sure when this was from but Lower Manhattan looks quite different today
