We have revisited plenty of terrible plans that have been proposed for our fine city in the past—like the time they were going to fill the Hudson, and drain the East River, to name a few—but how about this one that would have had a bizarro NYC built under the real NYC?
The plan was proposed by Oscar Newman in 1969, and has been called a "terrifically bad idea"... and even that seems like somewhat of an understatement.
Newman's idea was based on clearing out "massive underground caverns [under Manhattan] with nuclear explosions." If everyone survived that, the next step was to place an underground sphere containing a miniature version of the city above. But why stop there? Newman wrote:
"Manhattan could have a half-dozen such atomic cities strung under the city proper... the real problem in an underground city would be the lack of views and fresh air, but its easy access to the surface and the fact that, even as things are, our air should be filtered and what most of us see from our window's is somebody else's wall. [sic?]"
The top half of the sphere would somewhat solve the view problem, containing a "cinerama" for image projection (in the case of the rendering this is used for a Coca-Cola ad).
John F. Ptak once calculated that the structure would have had "a volume of 1.2 cubic miles... with its top beginning some 1,200′ under Times Square. The hole needed to be excavated to reach a 1.2 mile diameter of this sphere some 3,500 feet under the surface would be, um, big—like needing to divert the Hudson and the East rivers, and extending the digging into Jersey, which would be a, well, a task."
