2. Episode One: The Country and The City 1609-1825 September 12,1609 An English explore hired by the Dutch to find a faster route to the Riches of the orient stirred its 85 ton ship to the surging current of the Atlantic into a shelter bay, sailing up stream hoping it lead to China it didn’t it found the Northeast passage. Henry Hudson came upon better. One of biggest best natural harbor in the world. Henry Hudson is the first to sense the potential of a remote lonely harbor.
3. First boat of Colonist 15 years later in Spring 1624 the first boat of Colonist arrived to establish a permanent stay on the harbor, to beat out there arch rivals of the North Continent it was a business proposition from the very start to the very end to another The new colony was owned and operated by a giant corporation called the Dutch West Indian Company. The Atlantic wing trading empire to stretch around the world was the most successful/powerful businesses in the world.
4. Erie Canal Opened in 1825, the Erie Canal was the engineering marvel of the 19th Century. When the planning for what many derided as “Clinton's Folly” began, there was not a single school of engineering in the United States. With the exception of a few places where black powder was used to blast through rock formations, all 363 miles were built by the muscle power of men and horses. The Erie Canal proved to be the key that unlocked an enormous series of social and economic changes in the young nation. The Canal spurred the first great westward movement of American settlers, gave access to the rich land and resources west of the Appalachians and made New York the preeminent commercial city in the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Allegheny Mountains were the Western Frontier. The Northwest Territories that would later become Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio were rich in timber, minerals, and fertile land for farming. It took weeks to reach these precious resources. Travelers were faced with rutted turnpike roads that baked to hardness in the summer sun.
5. Episode Six: City of Tomorrow 1929-1941 1929 the stock market crashed. Total shock to the people it lead the people into a economic gloom. 1930’s the depression occurred. With the economic decline, criticism of Mayor Walker grew, from Cardinal Patrick Joseph Hayes and then from New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who broke with Walker and Tammany. Mayor Walker came under increasing pressure in the midst of FDR's 1932 Presidential campaign, and resigned to relocate to Europe fleeing potential criminal charges.
6. Fiorello La Guardia In 1933, Republican reformer Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor. La Guardia, sometimes considered New York's greatest mayor, was of both Italian and Jewish descent and acted as an exuberant populist with a multi-ethnic sensibility. La Guardia's term also saw the rise of the long careered planner Robert Moses, bridges, parks and parkways coordinator, and great proponent of automobile-centered modernism, whose legacy of massive construction projects is controversial today. The last large expansion of the subway system and municipal ownership of the previously privately owned subway companies gave the system its final shape
7. Robert Moses was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, Rockland County, and Westchester County. He changed shorelines, built bridges, tunnels and roadways, and transformed neighborhoods forever. Moses's projects were considered by many to be necessary for the region's development after being hit hard by the Great Depression. In the late 1930s a municipal controversy raged over whether an additional vehicular link between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan should be a bridge or a tunnel. Bridges can be wider and cheaper but tall ones use more ramp space at landfall than tunnels. A "Brooklyn Battery Bridge" would have destroyed Battery Park and physically encroached on the financial district.
8. A Merge That Puts New York on Top Mike Clough argues that the real issue at stake in America Online's decision to buy Time Warner is not the triumph of the new media over the old. Instead, it's whether New York, the unrivaled capital of the old American national industrial economy, will dominate the new American global information economy. Whether it succeeds in doing so will depend, in large part, on how its West Coast rivals Southern California, the Bay Area and Redmond, Washington –respond to the challenge created by the merger of the world's leading Internet company with the world's leading media entertainment company.
9. Chicago During the last decade of the nineteenth century the fastest-growing city in the United States, probably in the world, was Chicago. The evolution of Chicago bears closer examination, for in many ways twentieth-century American urbanism got its start here. Chicago was formed by the great commercial and industrial expansion of the late nineteenth century. After the construction of the railroads and a business boom during the Civil War, the city took off like a rocket.
10. The building code In 1923 the building code was again rewritten, with the result that the maximum height of towers was almost unrestricted; so was the height of buildings that did not cover the entire block but left at least three-quarters of their site open. The sky was the limit. During the 1920s, North Michigan Avenue became the site of some of the city's tallest and most spectacular buildings: John Mead Howell and Raymond Hood's 450-foot-high Tribune Tower (winner of a famous international competition) and the exuberant 42-story Medinah Club, which was built for the Shriners and is topped by a minaret and pear-shaped dome.
11. City Beautiful Movement The popular movement known as the City Beautiful. According, to the architectural historian William H. Wilson, the term "City Beautiful" emerged in 1900 as a slogan for an urban improvement campaign in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It became a rallying cry that brought together civic reformers, community volunteers, businessmen, and municipal politicians, with crusading architects and landscape architects. This makes the City Beautiful It was the reform movement in North American architecture and urban planning that flourished in the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of using beautification and monumental grandeur in cities. The movement, which was originally most closely associated with Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.