The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.


Prophecies

From the turn of the twentieth century, the confines of Manhattan island spawned speculation on how New York would expand upward in towers, and outward in multiple monumental bridges.

  
Left: Raymond Hood, Aerial View of Manhattan, 1929. Right: "New York City as it Will be in 1999," The New York World, December 30, 1900, supplement foldout. Illustrator: Louis Biedermann.
The newspaper cartoon of 1900 illustrated above and the aerial view of a 1929 proposal by the architect Raymond Hood in the photomontage at the right underscore the differences between the early twentieth-century notion that the future city would grow fantastically taller and more dense and ideas of the 'twenties that skyscraper development could be zoned and channeled into new centers.

Hood's proposal "Manhattan 1950" imagined more than a score of new bridges that carried luxury apartments for wealthy residents and dozens of skyscraper clusters rising at intersections and spaced at half-mile intervals.