A Manhattan without skyscrapers sounds difficult, if not impossible, to imagine today. But such a place really did exist, at least up until the turn of the twentieth century. While the title of the very first skyscraper ever built may go to the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, New York City caught up so aggressively thereafter — in its characteristic style — that it soon became practically synonymous with tall steel-framed towers. The shape of modern Manhattan would surely have been unimaginable to the first non-native arrivals in the early seventeenth century, the approach of whose ships you can see re-created in the animated timelapse above.
The video is a production of CITY 3D TIMELAPSE, a YouTube channel previously featured here on Open Culture for its similarly accelerated visualization of the evolution of Paris. While that video had 23 centuries to compress into a three-minute runtime, this new one on New York takes a leisurely-by-comparison eight minutes to render “just” 450 years or so of history (at least after about twenty seconds spent in the native era’s millennium and a half).
But it also shows us the urban evolutionary process three times: the first zooms out to the whole of Manhattan, the second focuses on Lower Manhattan, and the third on Midtown Manhattan — a suitable division, as any New Yorker knows, for those mutually incomprehensible civilizations.
Even if we’ve never set foot there, we may well know that even old New York was once New Amsterdam. That Dutch colonial era, as depicted in the timelapse, is when the city begins. There follows densification and expansion under English rule, the maritime infrastructural build-out of early America, the ambitious grid-laying under the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, the relentless nineteenth-century industrialization that imbued the city with the might its reputation still retains, the rise of the skyscrapers that shaped (and continue to shape) its skyline, and finally the “globalization era” in which we find ourselves today. That “we,” of course, includes not just New Yorkers, but urbanites everywhere, for the evolution of New York produced not just a city, but in many respects, the city: the model by which so many metropolises have been inspired to get a bit of the action for themselves.
Related Content:
A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)
Watch a Timelapse Video Showing the Creation of New York City’s Skyline: 1500 to Present
Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911
Watch Manhatta, the First American Avant-Garde Film (1921)
Watch the Evolution of Paris Unfold in a Timelapse Video, from 300 BCE to 2025
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
