In the late 1930s, Robert Moses advocated that the city build a bridge connecting Manhattan’s Battery Park with Hamilton Avenue in Brooklyn. Regional Plan Association vehemently opposed his plan, which would according to its early regional planners ​“would result in an unjustifiable defacement of Battery Park.” (Moses’s proposal also came a few short years after RPA released its first plan for the New York region which called for all future river crossings in Lower Manhattan to be made by tunnels instead of bridges.)

For its advocacy campaign, RPA created renderings of what the proposed bridge would look like and how it would obstruct the Manhattan skyline. In the era before photoshop,the 1939 rendering shown above was created by hand painting the bridge over a photo of Lower Manhattan.

RPA was eventually successful in its campaign and the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel was completed in 1950.