GROWTH OF NEW YORK

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 7 August 1922, Page 2

GROWTH OF NEW YORK

MAMMOTH CITY OF THE FUTURE.

(By J. W. Macon.)

New York City has started to plan for a> population as large ae Great Britain’s. One hundred years hence New York will contain 37,000,000 people, and the municipality will be the most chaotic in the world’s history unless plans are immediately begun to guide the inevitable civic expansion. The Russell Sage Foundation is coming to the rescue of next century’s New York, and has promised to finance a comprehensive survey so that the western metropolis will have its growth under favorable conditions.

Eminent engineers, lawyers, and authorities on municipal government are volunteering their services in the salvage work. The task is stupendous. New York City at present has outgrown itself. When the original gridiron street plan of New York was adopted in 1810 the city's population was 90,000. The metropolitan area has now spread across two rivers until it embraces a population of 9,000,000. All of these people do not live under New York’s municipal government, but all depend on New York for a livelihood. The greater New York movement cannot be headed off. Leading authorities declare that one hundred years hence New York City’s boundary will have a radius ol fifty miles from Fourteenth street at Union Square. It is this circle which will make New York the greatest cosmopolitan city in the world’s history, and will give it the population of an empire.

The city’s expansion is inevitable. It cannot be stopped. But, if’it is wiselyguided, Mr Hoover estimates the cost of living can be reduced 10 to 15 per cent. Besides the financial saving, the gain in health and comfort will be incalculable.

At present, a mile of streets along New York’s congested East Side houses two million squalid people, while onlysix miles away, across the Hudson River, there are 32 miles of wilderness, waiting to be added to the city. This wilderness is in the State of New Jersey, and in another direction New York City’s natural growth will carry the municipality into the State of Connecticut. But Congressional action and action by the individual States are confidently expected to overcome these difficulties of administration.

New York originally was planned without aay thought of ite possrbiifties of growth. The city was located on Manhattan Island, a long, narrow stretch of land which has compelled the inhabitants to expand into the air by means of skyscrapers, and beneath the surface with sub-cellar below: sub-cellar. The traffic congestion in New York is appalling. Imagine mile after mile of confusion such as exists in London only at the Bank and you will have a fair idea of what life in New York is like. Two to eight persons are killed dlaily in New York by motor-care. The mad and illogical growth of the city promises to end in uncontrollable chaos unless the problem of expansion is solved along proper lines.

If the RuseeM Sage Foundation has its way, New York eventually wiH become a garden city. Bridges crossing the Hudson River and the East .River wiM unite the surrounding territories lik? a mammoth Venice. New roads will be built in the suburbs, diverting traffic from Manhattan Island. New business centres will be established at the present outskirts, relieving the pressure on New York’s underground transit lines;. Great parks will be built and residences will have open spaces for gardens between them. The gateway to the new world will become a fitting entrance to next century’s republic.