There have been more dead end building proposals in New York City over the years than anyone really cares to count. Some of them seem insane; some of them seem insanely awesome, like what if there was a Midtown Expressway?

They may not have been practical or even necessarily good for the City, but scoping out what could have been can open the door to reconnecting with an appreciation for the City's structures and infrastructure that we may take for granted.

So imagine if Dr. T. Kennard Thomson's 1916 plan in Popular Science to expand the island of Manhattan and fill in the East River came to fruition. 

That's right, Thomson, who was a well-respected engineer who consulted on more than 20 skyscrapers built in 1916, wanted to completely change the face of NYC.

The idea was to massively increase the City's surface area, basically, by adding 50 square miles to the in the form of new land on the Jersey side of the Hudson, a Manhattan extension almost all the way to Staten Island, a new island in NY Harbor and even more.

The other completely bonkers idea wrapped into the project was filling in the East River, creating a new Harlem River, sending it through Flushing Bay which would snake into a new East River that goes out to Jamaica Bay. 

Yeah, no big deal.

via Curbed NY

By Thomson's reckoning, the price tag on the overhaul of NYC would necessitate an "annual expenditure" of $50-$100 million, in 1916 money. Today, that would be over a billion dollars each year. 

To us, that seems low. Considering the MTA's budget is a whopping $10 billion short right now, and all they have to handle are trains and tunnels. They're not filling in rivers and building new islands.

Maybe it's cynical, but between corruption, interstate bickering with New Jersey, "delays," "conflicts," and whatever other excuses we're fed, it seems Thomson's dream would have cost somewhere closer to a trillion than a billion and taken 50 years to complete with eighteen strikes.

That all being said, it was part of his vision that the increased business facilitated by the infrastructure expansions would bring tons of funds into NYC's coffers and quickly pay for the city-wide redevelopment. 

via Curbed NY

Plus, there would be living space for "twenty-five millions." 

We're hovering around 9 million at the moment, and this was proposed just under a hundred years ago. Imagine how many more people would be living in NYC now if this had happened? 

Would this have made our city better? Who can even answer that? So much has happened in the last century that it's hard to divine what sorts of "coulda-shoulda-woulda" are even appropriate. One thing's for sure. 

This idea was just about as grandiose as they come. 

Check out All of These Amazing Highways That Were Never Actually Built in NYC. 

[Feature Image Courtesy Popular Science]