FUTURE NEW YORK.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5505, 25 November 1929, Page 4

FUTURE NEW YORK.

PLANNING FOR 1965. A CITY OF 20,000,000. New Yorkers may now envisage their city as it will be 36 years hence. The regional plan committee of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York has issued a report, which cost £200,000 to prepare, regarded as the most exhaustive study of regional planning ever made, resulting in the most comprehensive programme ever proposed. The committee sees New York in 1965 with a population of 20,000,000 people, comfortably housed, with amazingly intricate system of rapid transit and plenty of parks, playgrounds, and breathing space. The New York of to-day, with its congested traffic areas, its skyscrapers, its underground tunnels, and bridges, and the mad hustle of daily life, is vastly different from the city of 36 years ago. What life in New York will be like after 36 more years can, of course, only be conjectured. But if the general principles of the regional plan are followed it is possible that the New York of 1965 will have regained some of the leisure, comfort, and spaciousness now lost for the sake of progress. The report shows how New York and the rest of an area embracing 5528 square miles can be gradually improved through scientific development until it is not only a desirable place in which to work and live, but also a place in which the present inhabitants and the prospective 20,000,000 of 1965 may work and live happily with all the room and air and sunshine that nature demands.

The survey, which began in 1922, differed from other city planning in that the effort was made not primarily for the sake of beauty, although the whole plan tehds towards that end. The social factor predominated throughout. The committee maintains that its aim has been to preserve civilisation, and that no element entering into this consideration has been overlooked. The committee expects the present population of New York City and its environs, which is 10,000,000, to double itself by 1965, and the report asserts that there is no want of land to enable 20,000,000 people to live in spacious surroundings within a* radius of 25 miles of Manhattan. Every family could have a house of its own on a lot 40 feet by 100 feet, with ample sunlight; and even then only one-fourth of the land in the region would be occupied for residential purposes. A few impressions formed by one individual of the life of the New Yorker of 1965 are as follows : “The New Yorker of 1965 will have plenty of room, if he wants it. He will not spend so much of his time sitting in stationary motor-cars in congested traffic, unless he really wishes to. He will not have to brave the perils of the open streets so often. He will be able to get round the 5000 square miles of the region far more easily than now. But he will not have so much occasion to do so. His job, his recreation, his stores, his children’s schools will be much more conveniently situated in respect to where he lives than they are now.

“The city of the future, by 1965 or sooner, will not only have large fields for types of aeroplanes similar to those now in use, but provision will also be made for types not needing so much room. The number of planes in use might even become comparable with the number of motor-cars now in use. We may, perhaps, see large flatroofed sky garages, on which planes of the helicogyre type can be landed and stored to wait their owners’ pleasure. Flats may have their own storage facilities.

“Easy transit in 1965 will really be easy, not the present desperate struggle against crowds. The suburban resident may choose to live far out. If he does he will find it possible to reach Manhattan by belt lines, similar to the trunk belt lines of the main railways, which will carry him, without need of changing cars, from a point near his home to within walking distance of his office. “In 1965 the Island of Manhattan will still be the hub of the mighty city of New York, or rather of the group of cities, lying in three States, which will really make up New York, but it will be relatively less important than it is to-day.” The regional plan committee has not yet made public its architectural proposals, but the preliminary discussions have brought out several divergent points of view. One view favours a city shooting far higher into the air than the New York of the present day. Double-decked and triple-decked streets, gardened terraces, lofty footpaths, perhaps built of glass so as to permit light to penetrate to the lower levels, and towers shooting a thousand feet and more into the clouds, like miniature mountain peaks, are features of this idea. In such buildings the residents might, if they choose, live, out their entire lives without setting foot on the ground. Probably, however, a process of rebuilding will have gone on all over Manhattan, the old tenements will have disappeared, garden apartments will have taken then 1 places, parked motor-cars will have disappeared from the streets into sub-surface garages, or skyscraper storage buildings, the smoke evil will have been done away with, and the community will have progressed far towards the ideal of a spotless city. But perhaps none of these possibilities controverts the principal thesis of the regional committee, which is that, no matter what surprises are in store for us, a city which has been planned as far as practicable in advance will be more beautiful and more comfortable to live in than one which is left to grow at random.