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Michael Chabon reinvented the alternate-history genre with The Yiddish Policemen's Union, his novel about a world where Alaska became the Jewish homeland. So where are the great alternate histories of New York? The city's history is full of disasters and bizarre schemes that could have turned out very differently. Here are five timeline turning-points that might have erased New York as we know it forever.
New Orange (1673). Those butter-fingered Dutch lost New York not once, but twice. The first time, the British came and seized the city of New Amsterdam by force in 1664, naming it New York after Charles II's brother the Duke of York. But then the Dutch took it back in the Third Dutch-English War of 1673 and renamed it "New Orange," after the Prince of Orange.
After that, the Dutch were living in a siege mentality and preparing to do whatever it took to keep the Big Orange in their grasp. But their politicians let them down, giving the city back to the Brits without a fight, in exchange for Suriname in South America. But what if the Dutch had hung on to it? It could have stayed Dutch long after 1776, and Americans would be making pilgrimages to the cannibis cafes of New Orange.
The Great Fire of New York (1835). This terrible conflagration started near Pearl St., and quickly spread to Exchange Place, the NYSE and Wall Street. It burned for between 16 and 24 hours, destroying 674 buildings across 17 blocks and 50 acres. Fire fighters had a hard time getting water because the Hudson was frozen solid. Metal from shutters and roofs melted and ran down the streets.
But it could have been much, much worse. The Great Fire of London, just 169 years earlier, burned for four days, not one. The New York Conflagration reached the top of the Tontine Hall, too high for the cold-numbed firefighters' hoses to reach. The last-ditch plan of using a huge "gin puncheon" (cask) to get water onto the roof tiles saved the upper part of the city. How would New York look now if the fire had destroyed mid-town Manhattan? Hint: the actual street where the fire started, Merchant St., doesn't exist any more, since that part of the city was rebuilt with a new layout.
The Blasting of Flood Rock (1885). In the nineteenth century, a section of the East River from 90th street to around 100th street, near the Harlem River was known as "Hell Gate" because it was so difficult for sea-faring vessels to navigate. It had a giant whirlpool (because of currents from Long Island Sound) and huge jagged rocks. A thousand ships ran aground every year. The Harbor Master of New York begged the federal government for help. So the U.S. Army destroyed the biggest rock, Flood Rock, by detonating 285,000 pounds of an explosive mixture called "Rack-A-Rock," plus 5,000 pounds of dynamite. It may have been the largest civil detonation up to that point. Here's a photo which 12-year-old Mary Newton took:
What if the Army had turned down the gig, or been unable to pull it off? Private efforts had already blasted some of the smaller rocks in Hell Gate. But without the destruction of Flood Rock, New York would have been unable to reach its full potential as a port city. Just 40 years after this blast, New York overtook London as the largest city in the world.
LOMEX (1941). Robert Moses, aka "Bob The Builder," had a plan to knock down a huge stretch of Lower Manhattan, including SOHO, and build a massive freeway across the city. It would have connected the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. At one point, in 1946, Moses proposed a six-lane elevated expressway in the vicinity of Canal St. Just imagine the huge overpasses. Plans continued into the 1950s. Here's an artist's conception of what SOHO would have looked like:
A huge grass-roots movement opposed the development, led by Jane Jacobs, author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities. But in the end, it was skyrocketing budget estimates for the project, plus the failure of downtown Manhattan office buildings to generate the expected traffic, that scuttled the project. (As recently as 1998, planners were discussing reviving the project on the Usenet group misc.transport.roads.) If the city and federal bureaucracy hadn't delayed LOMEX for so long, SOHO wouldn't exist today.
Neu York (1946). Finally, here's an "alternate history map" that shows what NYC would look like if the Nazis had won World War II. Melissa Gould painstakingly reshaped "Neu York," giving streets German names (Rhein instead of Canal) and eliminating post-war buildings and anything with a Jewish name. (Via Claire Light.)
Blade Runner concept art by Syd Mead.
Comments
You can easily visit the alternate reality where Robert Moses had his way with a city, built highways willy nilly and turned the whole place to crap. And you don't need a wormhole to get there, just take I-90 west to Buffalo and Niagara Falls.
Did Chabon reinvent alternate history, or just contribute to it?
My understanding is that Hell Gate is primarily the strip of water that connects the East River to The Long Island Sound, running between Randall's Island and Astoria and under the Triborough and Amtrak bridges.
It's still called that by the way. Even though the major obstacles are long gone, the waters flow into it from both the East River and the sound, creating a dangerous body of water for smaller boats. Plenty of speedboats head out that way to catch air off of the resulting waves.
That LOMEX image is really interesting in that it looks a lot like the Brooklyn-side of the Brooklyn Bridge, where the Brooklyn court complex and downtown Brooklyn is bisected by the need for easy access to the bridge.
Thank God for Robert Moses (FDR, Triborough), but Thank God he was stopped as well (Bronx, Bay Ridge).
An awful lot of famous songs would not have rhymed at all if we lived in New Orange.
@moff: Yes, where would the world be without the genius of Madonna?
"I don't like cities but I like New York.
Other places make me feel like a dork."
@zeppelined: Ha ha... and ouch...
Hey I liked the 33.. it made getting into the medical district easy...
But yes that city has a bunch of weird highways...
@92BuickLeSabre: Exactly. While it is easy to vilify Moses, this City wouldn't be operational today without him. Urban planners of the tree-hugger variety are too quick to point out his demolotion of neighborhoods (they have a point with the Major Deegan) while not acknowledging a single accomplishment.
There were also those crazy plans by Columbia University to take over upper Manhattan and transform it into a series of glass boxes surrounded by housing projects. Thank God that didn't happen! . . . Wait . . .[neighbors.columbia.edu]
@moff: New Orange New Orange..
You just rhyme it with itself...
Blue door hinge?
@DocGratis: But it sounds more like something you'd sing on Consumerist.
@risingstar: No kidding. There should be a sixth timeline point for everything being planned right now, including: the new battery park, the new southstreet seaport, the westside rail yards, Ratner's development, development around the highline, 2nd Ave subway, and on and on. There are a ton of massive re-imaginings going on in NYC right now, all of them arguably at least as impactful as LOMEX.
I just wish they would build the underground commercial trucking tunnels that were thrown around in idea form for decades.
@GraniteInMyVeins: Robert Moses was one of my least favorite NY figures....until work started requiring me to get from uptown to downtown quickly and often.
No "Fifth Element" New York?
I only mention it because the take out looked so convenient.
-well, you know...up until the mail came and the phone rang.
is this a new site?
i'm pretty sure the "hell gate" etymology here is off- I think it's originally from the Dutch for "bright gate". yours fits too though!
what if the AIDS hadn't decimated the gay population?
What about Fernando Wood's "Tri-Insula" secession idea?
@TimGunn: As I currently live in the West Village, you can rest assured the gay population is doing quite nicely (just take a walk on Christopher Street some time). The zoning restrictions in my area of New York are a godsend, as I work for a large corporate law firm, and getting out of our massive skyscraper at night, and arriving down to the quiet of the village is much needed. I'm not gay, but everyone in the neighborhood is really friendly. I can't imagine a massive highway rolling through the area - that would really kill the spirit (ugh).
That would be really interesting if the Dutch still owned it, Manhattan would be independent of the US, like Bermuda off the coast of Virginia. And Hell Gate would still be there and it could never have expanded. Very interesting.
Don't forget the Irish doing their best to burn down New York in the Civil War Draft Riots. Cannon on the corner of Bleeker and MacDougal.. Blood running in the gutters..
There is an Elizabeth Bear book, "New Amsterdam," Alt/hist with zeppelins, vampires and forensic sorcerers.
@wishnevsky: That makes me think of walking through the "Five Points" area in Manhattan.
It's now a playground in Chinatown surrounded by state and Federal court houses, and you really can't help but think: "Really, this was arguably the most violent spot in the country for fifty years?"
@wishnevsky: I almost included the riots, but couldn't imagine how they'd have turned out differently.
Nieuwe Oranje Nieuwe Oranje, grote stad van dromen
En alles in New Orange is niet altijd wat het schijnt
U zou kunnen krijgen fooled als u uit uit stad komt
Maar ik ben neer door wet en ik ken rond mijn manier
Teveel, teveel mensen, teveel (aha-Ha)
Teveel, teveel mensen, teveel, Raaah!
@92BuickLeSabre: And Canal Street was named for the open-sewer that was jokingly called the Canal. The smell has not improved.
This is a great post! Thanks Charlie!
During the 1600s the Dutch were in the middle of their Golden Age and had a lot of trouble attracting settlers to New Amsterdam. Hence, you had the English (like John Bowne whose home still stands in Flushing) coming down from New England, Jews from Europe and other non Dutch folks settling here.
Even if the Dutch were able to hold onto the area I'm not sure they would have been able to populate it in the manner that the English were able to but it still would most likely have been a melting pot much like we see today.
Personally, I'd love to see what would have happened if Brooklyn - not Manhattan - had seen the great skyscraper boom of the late 19th century. What if all of Long Island, from the East River to the Sound, became a giant skyscraper-populated megalopolis?
Hey there,
Thanks for picking up NEU-YORK! Ironic that you came across it via Claire Light. For the record, from the scores of blogs who've written about this project over the past several years, she remains singular, not only for her out-of-bounds and mean-spirited "review" -- nasty in an oddly personal, below-the-belt and unprofessional manner that I've never encountered anywhere, before or since -- but because the "points" made in her post, the accusations of the many things I've done "wrong," are completely and uniformly misguided.
For example, she claims that naming streets after trees is an American convention, something that the Nazis did not do. While this aspect of street-naming may indeed have been realized similarly in the United States, it certainly happened in Germany, as evidenced from the 1939 map of Berlin -- printed under Nazi rule -- that was the source of my project. Anyway, I can only laugh; she devoted a good deal of pixels to a project that got her "panties in a bunch" (her words); her post reads as a sadly competitive directive -- how she would have done the piece, had it, in fact, been hers to do.
Not a soapbox moment here -- just a heads-up and caveat to any in your readership who may peruse that original post. Thank you most kindly for the mention and keep up the good work!
MeGo
@omg-ponies: Especially in the subway; that stink has lingered.
As for the Long Island megalopolis. Keep tithing to the Jehovah's Witnesses and pray for Citigroup to stay afloat and you just may get your wish some day.
@GraniteInMyVeins: I don't think so. All planners recognize the value of Jones Beach, the Triborough Bridge, the Merritt Parkway, and all the open space, pools and parks. It's just where he began tearing down neighborhoods to build freeways in dense areas that he ran into trouble when he got super power-hungry. Soho and the Major Deegan were just the two most aggressive and crossed a line.
No one - and I mean no one - hates every project he did.
@Moff: excellent observation.
So...
If this post is about new york...
Why is the lead image Syd Mead's concept drawings for Bladerunner...
Which is of course Los Angeles.
@dOk: Well, L.A. is like an alternate NYC. It's like the evil mirror universe version of New York.
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.
Robert Moses did some good stuff, but he's rotting in the nastier part of hell for what he did to Buffalo. He was a charter member of the Pave the Earth group.
I'm proud of what New Amsterdam has brought us, even up to its current nick, New York. Everyone still goes Dutch here. Am I Dutch? Well, I'm living here. The street names have been of great interest to me since first landing here in the summer of '06. A confluence of energies transpire on the corners of the streets of Wall and Water, in Battery Park, up and down Broadway of course, on Canal Street, and Lexington, almost everywhere you look! Five points now pinpoints the great halls of Justice? Limited experience withstanding, I can't think of a better mosaic! Readers, what's the survey on alternate futures of New York? The deliberation is endless, and that note about going Dutch, well, that's one of the best virtues upon which such deliberations are founded. Up, up, and awayyyy!
Actually L.A. is the good twin.
The Blasting of Flood Rock actually provides an important piece information to the alternate history story that I am presently working on. Thanks!!
OK, I'm from the uK, and wikipedia can only tell me so much, what seems to be the problem with buffalo?
Why isn't Elvis Costello being credited with an alternate present vision in his song "New Amsterdam?"
I am confused here... is Michael Chabon the inventor, or just an addition to reinvented histories?
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Hmm interesting stuff. I live in NY and this was very insightful. But I only have 1 issue. Did Chabon re-invent the alternate history genre or made an impact on it with his addition?
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