in Architecture, History | August 3rd, 2026 Leave a Comment
A Manhattan without skyscrapers sounds difficult, if not impossible, to imagine today. But such a place really did exist, at least up until the turn of the twentieth century. While the title of the very first skyscraper ever built may go to the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, New York City caught up so aggressively thereafter — in its characteristic style — that it soon became practically synonymous with tall steel-framed towers. The shape of modern Manhattan would surely have been unimaginable to the first non-native arrivals in the early seventeenth century, the approach of whose ships you can see re-created in the animated timelapse above.
The video is a production of CITY 3D TIMELAPSE, a YouTube channel previously featured here on Open Culture for its similarly accelerated visualization of the evolution of Paris. While that video had 23 centuries to compress into a three-minute runtime, this new one on New York takes a leisurely-by-comparison eight minutes to render “just” 450 years or so of history (at least after about twenty seconds spent in the native era’s millennium and a half).
