There have been some epically bad plans for New York City over the years, like drying up the rivers, building an underground city, and encasing Midtown in a bubble. There also was Robert Moses’ infamous design for a ten-lane expressway that would have cut through the West Village and leveled parts of Little Italy and Soho. Luckily, we still have our rivers, we still live aboveground, and Soho was spared so that today we can celebrate at one of four Marc Jacobs stores. Whether it was responding to the threat of nuclear destruction or traffic congestion, visionary urban planners and architects gave us some terrifically bad solutions that we now get to gasp and ogle over.
Dome Over Midtown
Some say New Yorkers live in a bubble. In 1960 engineer and architect Buckminster Fuller proposed to make that figure of speech a reality by building a dome over midtown Manhattan. The two-mile-wide dome would have been climate controlled to defray cooling and heating costs while also somehow providing bomb protection. Safety and higher quality of life were the main selling points of life in the bubble. The selling points for life in the bio-dome-adjacent neighborhoods (NoBiDo and SoBiDo) are less obvious.