Predictions About the City of the Future

1808 - 1908 - 2008, 2108. The New York Times looks at two centuries of predictions and invites ten New Yorkers to imagine New York City a century from today, in 2108.

1 minute read

January 1, 2008, 9:00 AM PST

By Chris Steins @planetizen


Among the predictions, this one by Robin Nagle, Anthropologist-in-residence, New York City Department of Sanitation: "Assuming there's still a tourist trade to New York a hundred years from now, people will visit Fresh Kills landfill the way tourists go to the cemeteries in France. It will stand for us as a grand monument, like the Great Wall of China."

This prediction from Kate Kaplan, a seventh grader, School of the Future, a New York City public school near Gramercy Park:

"Central Park will be preserved in a bubble to protect it from the adverse effects of global warming. Everything will be shiny and nice and big. The subway cars and stations will have TVs in them. The Empire State Building will no longer be New York's largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks. Madame Tussaud's wax figures will have robotic capabilities."

Some of the predictions from 1908 about 2008:

"We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves";... "We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need."

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