Big City of Dreams

"Conventional wisdom holds that the era of big plans is over. 'We've lost a little bit of our spirit to go ahead and our can-do attitude,' Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in 2005. He was speaking, of course, the day after one of his ideas - a $2.2 billion football stadium, with room for as many as 70,000 spectators, on the West Side of Manhattan - was halted by politics."

These images show how big thinking has existed through the years -- and offers a clear argument about why it is unlikely to die.