Interesting article on how New York City claimed its land from the sea and, with Hurricane Sandy’s arrival, sudden realization that may be payback time is fast approaching! ( Posted by F. Sheikh)
“And worse, the new FEMA maps reveal that almost 400,000 New Yorkers are living on the hundred-year floodplain. More people in New York than in any other U.S. city, including New Orleans, are living with the prospect of high water encroaching on their lives.”
New York has a long history of thumbing its nose at the sea. The Dutch colonists took some of the initial steps to wade out into the water—building a pier, for example—but it was the British who followed them who transformed underwater land into a commodity. This move formed the basis for the physical expansion of the island of Manhattan. Back in the 1600s, the lower part of the island ended at what is now Pearl Street, a couple of blocks inland from where it ends today. But grants to underwater land, made by the Crown and then the state of New York, expanded the city’s underwater real estate. By 2010 such expansion had added 2,286 acres—the equivalent of more than 1,700 football fields of land—to the island.
The process of encroaching on the sea, which began at the tip of Manhattan, was then replicated in other places around New York Harbor, including Brooklyn and Queens and, across the Hudson River, in Jersey City and Hoboken. Indeed, before massive landfilling operations in the 1800s, Hoboken was an island community, and Jersey City little more than a spit of land connected to the mainland at low tide by a soggy marsh.
As New York rose to become the nation’s largest city—a position it has retained for some 200 years—it continued to grow at the expense of its surrounding waters. The rise of the city’s red-hot real estate market in the latter part of the 1800s, meanwhile, helped to underwrite the idea of New York City as a limitless proposition. What historians Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace have dubbed the “City of Capital” was premised on a particular relationship between land and sea, one founded on a growth imperative designed to produce more of New York’s scarcest commodity: land. The result was increased building on the floodplain and beyond on land wrested from the ocean itself.
By the twentieth century, those on the margins of the city experienced the brunt of the city’s quest to grow. Even as late as 1900, New York City was a swampy environment dominated by wetlands. Over the course of the century, however, in part under the leadership of that master builder Robert Moses, New York’s once magnificent stock of wetlands came under attack. Roads, parks, and landfills all started to bear down on the marshy grounds. At the Flushing Meadows in Queens, the 2,400 acres of marshland in existence in 1900 were completely wiped out by 1966. In New York Harbor as a whole, more than 17,000 acres of wetland estimated to exist in the mid-1800s vanished during the golden age of American capitalism (1953–73) to make way for roads, landfills, and the expansion of Kennedy Airport.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/can-new-york-city-survive-the-sea