Within the exhibition, dramatic photomurals floating overhead transport visitors to a ​“dream city” of imagination and possibilities, of dazzling urban visions, built and unbuilt—and of the transformative ideas that have reshaped New York, its surrounding region, and, in time, cities all around the world.

At eye-level, a series of large display panels combine engaging text, a rich array of images, and archival video sequences to trace the epic story of New York and its environs: the first urban area in the world to reconceive itself as a regional metropolis, an idea so familiar today it is almost commonplace, but a radical, innovative and daring new way of thinking in the 1920s.

In the exhibition, RPA’s four landmark Regional Plans—from 1929, 1968, 1996, and 2017— serve as the center point around which the story of the metropolis revolves. These are remarkable cultural products of their own time, as well as bold, imaginative, and influential responses to formidable challenges which, in many cases, remain as urgent today as ever. Intertwined with that broad narrative will be many of the most crucial events, trends, figures, and themes of the city and its region over the past century—from the rise of the car and highway in the 1920s to postwar ​“white flight” to the city’s rebirth after 9/11, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Jane Jacobs to Michael Bloomberg, from the GM Futurama to the High Line to Superstorm Sandy. Not least of these is the ​“secret history” of the complex, decades-long relationship of the Regional Plan and the legendary New York power broker Robert Moses, who drew many of his grandest, region-shaping ideas from the Plan’s proposals—though he never publicly acknowledged the debt.

Bringing the century-long story up to the present moment—as the city and region attempt to recover from an unprecedented three-year crisis and look to shape their future yet again—the exhibition concludes with an interactive QR display that asks viewers to imagine their own future of New York and its region and contribute ideas to a broader conversation which, with the extraordinary events of the recent past, has grown more urgent and open-ended than ever.

Filled with ideas and stories, brought to life by an astonishing assemblage of seldom-seen images from RPA’s vast archive, and set within one of America’s grandest urban landmarks, The Constant Future: A Century of the Regional Plan offers viewers a sweeping overview of America’s greatest metropolis, and explores as perhaps never before the very notion of planning itself: the inspired imagining—and detailed envisioning—of a city, a region, and a world still to come.

A Special Moment

Not that many years ago, a visionary group of civic and business leaders came together to consider new ways to deal with the daunting problems facing their city and the surrounding countryside. This place, which had once been a collection of frontier outposts…was fast becoming the economic, political, cultural, and communications capital of the world. At the same time it was being transformed into a new kind of place, a metropolitan region.
— Robert D. Yaro & Tony Hiss, 1996

Begun almost exactly a century ago, in May 1922, the ​“Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs” arose at a special moment in the city’s history. As New York emerged victorious from the First World War—poised to surpass London as the largest and wealthiest city in the world—a cadre of Progressive-era reformers sought to wrench its antiquated governmental structures into the 20th century. A new zoning law—the first of its kind in the world—would now regulate the city’s growth, while the ​“Port of New York Authority,” the first bi-state agency in America, would improve linkages around the harbor. A third group looked to create something even more encompassing: a plan not only for the entire city of New York but the vast three-state, 22-county region surrounding it.

By the 1920s New York had reinvented the modern city, harnessing steel-frame construction—and the elevator—to raise the first skyscraper skyline in history (1). In the first Regional Plan, this proud new landscape was evoked in views of Fifth Avenue’s hotels and apartments (2) and the towering skyscrapers of the financial district, rising around Bowling Green (3).

Even as parts of the 1920s city rocketed into the future, much of Manhattan and Brooklyn remained a series of gritty industrial districts ringing New York harbor, still the busiest port in the world. Here could be found endless ranks of aging factories, warehouses, and tenements—along with streets clotted with the chaotic bustle of trucks, lorries and pushcarts. In the 1920s, nearly a million people were still crowded into the confines of a single district: the Lower East Side, where this view of Mulberry Street had been taken in the early 1900s (4).

Surveying the Future

The 1929 Plan…was part blueprint and part vision for a City of New York, population 20 million, circa 1965. Replete with architectural renderings…the [ten]-volume proposal was built on a foundation of hard facts and steely assessments of genuine, streetside conditions. The game plan was to tackle the city’s inevitable growth and increasing congestion….while making it livable.
— Greg Goldin & Sam Lubell, 2016

Launched by a committee of enlightened business and civic leaders and funded by the Russell Sage Foundation—who a decade before had financed the pioneering Forest Hills Gardens development in Queens—the Regional Plan took seven years to complete and ultimately cost a staggering total of $1,300,000. As ​“a modest undertaking grew to stupendous proportions,” in Robert A.M. Stern’s words, the first reports of the group’s ten-volume Regional Survey were released in 1927, followed in 1929 and 1931 by the two volumes of the actual Plan, together over a thousand pages long. Generated by a group of private individuals, the Regional Plan had no official status. Its impact and influence—like that of its three successor Plans—would rely solely on the power and persuasiveness of its vision.

An extraordinary cross-section of New Yorkers came together to create the Plan. The driving force was Charles Dyer Norton (1), a former banker and White House adviser who had launched the 1909 Chicago Plan and spent nine years promoting an even larger initiative for New York. Social welfare interests were represented by Lillian Wald (2), revered founder of the Henry Street Settlement and a fierce advocate for women’s rights and racial desegregation. Implementation of the Plan fell to George McAneny (3), a Jersey City-born journalist and lawyer who as Manhattan Borough President had already guided a vast expansion of the city’s subway system and adoption of the nation’s first zoning law.

Though unprecedented in scale and ambition, New York’s Regional Plan drew clear inspiration from the landmark Chicago Plan of 1909, whose visionary proposals included the reshaping of the entire Lake Michigan waterfront (4). ​“The bird’s-eye images of the overall plan,” the urban historian Wade Graham notes, ​“were reproduced worldwide, becoming influential touchstones of a long tradition—one which only gained strength in the twentieth century.”

To ground their vision of the future, the Plan commissioned The Regional Survey, an unprecedented ten-volume study of every aspect of urban life: economy, demographics, land use, government, transportation, recreation, and public services, along with studies of specific industries—printing, clothing, textiles, food, retail, finance, metal, wood, and tobacco. ​“The quantity and variety of the detail [under] consideration were almost terrifying—perhaps not too grim a word to describe the task of formulating a preliminary harmony out of the chaos of the world’s largest city,” one observer wrote, but ​“terrifying or not, the work went forward, methodically and boldly, [to produce] the first wide-focus view of a modern metropolitan region.” (5)

THE QUINTESSENTIAL DOCUMENT

As completed, the Regional Plan was…the quintessential document of the interwar years…that more than lived up to [its] original ambitions. It managed to effect a synthesis between the idealistic aesthetics of the…City Beautiful movement, the pragmatism of an era of unparalleled commercialism, and—to a lesser extent—the social consciousness…of middle-class reformers.
— Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin & Tom Mellins, 1987

THE BIG IDEA

Draw all the lines you like for states and counties, but a city is a growth, responding to the inherent atoms that make it up….. That growth comes [from] the force of…enterprise, desire, movement—the desire for a living, desire for wealth, comfort, society, acting in the hearts and minds of a vast number… That is the great force of modern civilization, and that is the thing government cannot imitate.
— Elihu Root, 1922

The 1929 Regional Plan was an amalgamation of 470 individual proposals—some new, others from earlier studies—but perhaps its most significant proposition was the simple idea that New York and its environs could be regarded as a single entity. Indeed, nothing had ever matched the sweep of the Regional Plan, which took in the five boroughs of New York City, dozens of surrounding towns and suburbs, and a huge swath of the encircling countryside—5,528 square miles, across 22 counties and three states. At the time, the area was home to nine million people—three million of whom commuted daily to Manhattan. It was this reality—that New York and its surroundings already functioned as an organic whole, even if its far-flung communities remained under 437 local governments— that gave rise to the Plan’s powerful notion of a metropolitan region: today commonplace, but in the 1920s a radical concept.

The Plan’s expansive perspective was captured in an aerial watercolor by Jules Guerin (1). Fifteen years earlier, Guerin had produced the famed bird’s-eye renderings of the 1909 Chicago Plan. Now his viewpoint rose still higher into the air to capture an area covering thousands of square miles and stretching all the way to the horizon: metropolitan New York.

In the decades to come, the Plan’s pioneering notion of a ​“metropolitan region” would take hold across the United States and around the world, becoming the common basis for thinking about urban areas. By the mid-20th century, the shape and size of the New York region had itself been redefined by different public agencies—though none were quite as encompassing as the scope of the Regional Plan (2).

The advantages of ​“thinking regionally” seemed obvious when turned to problems like the fragmented patchwork of New York’s rail service, which the Plan proposed transforming into a unified ​“trunk line” network (3). But its proposals would be largely ignored by the fiercely competitive private railways of the day—with troubling consequences for the future.

Dream City

Among the most impassioned of the Regional Plan’s goals was the beautification of the urban landscape. Larger in population now than Paris, Berlin, or Rome— and soon to overtake London—New York, argued the Plan’s authors, needed to match those storied capitals in civic-minded ambition. Drawing on the principles of the ​“City Beautiful” movement, the Plan sought to transform New York into a dream city of spires and domes, fountains and obelisks, promenades and arcades. In the Plan’s lofty and sometimes fantastical visions, the classical grandeur of aristocratic Europe would be transfigured into a new democratic landscape for the people of New York and its region.

In the 1920s, American cities typically met their rivers in a tangle of commercial piers, industrial plants, and grimy railroad sidings, rather than the picturesque embankments of European capitals. The Plan’s proposals for an immense complex along the East River at 34th Street by Francis S. Swales (1)—“reconceiving the city’s watery edges on a scale and scope worthy of ancient Rome,” one writer later said— and the reimagining by Arthur J. Frappier of the Harlem River Valley and adjacent blocks of the South Bronx (2) envisioned arcades, bridges, towers, promenades, and ranks of stately buildings lining the water’s edge.

As New York’s exploding number of cars and its ever-taller and busier office buildings worsened traffic congestion, the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett was sure fundamental change was needed. “[Detroit is not going to stop] building automobiles,” he argued, ​“and we will not stop building skyscrapers.” His solution was to double-deck the city’s avenues, with pedestrians in arcaded pathways above and vehicles passing unimpeded below (3). ​“Shopping would be a joy,” he promised. ​“The overwrought nerves of the present New Yorker would be restored to normalcy and the city would become a model for the world.”

A proposal in the Plan by the architect Eric Gugler and the sculptor Paul Manship—a forty-story-tall stone obelisk at the center of a redesigned Battery Park—sought to bring a civic focus to the riotous, unabashedly commercial ensemble of lower Manhattan (4). The soaring monument would also neatly culminate the view down Broadway, a favored technique of the City Beautiful movement.

A NEW KIND OF MOVEMENT

The Plan optimistically posited that a vital and ever-expanding central city could be maintained within a larger, urbanized region: yet…its advocacy of ​“belt” highways that would bypass Manhattan sowed the seeds of the metropolitan city’s demise.
— Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin & Tom Mellins, 1987

Perhaps no single proposal of the Plan carried more momentous significance than its vision of a new network of express roadways stretching across the region. For planners, the new road system was key to unlocking their larger goal: to decentralize the industry and population of Manhattan to the city’s other boroughs and to Long Island, Westchester, New Jersey, and Connecticut—creating more healthful and pleasant places for people to live, and more efficient and productive places for them to work. Brought to reality by Robert Moses and later adopted all around the country and overseas, the Plan’s pioneering highway diagram represented the first rough sketch of every modern city in the world.

By the time the Plan was being prepared, the Southern State Parkway had already been started under the direction of Long Island state parks president Robert Moses—the initial leg of the world’s first network of limited-access highways. Grasping sooner than anyone else the revolutionary implications of this new kind of movement, the Plan’s creators proposed a network of similar roads across the entire New York region (1). Dispensing with the older ​“hub-and-spoke” pattern that brought traffic into the heart of the city, the Plan proposed instead an ​“open-grid” that would disperse people across the landscape, providing the armature for a low-density, autocentric way of life.

The lynchpin of the Plan’s proposed highway system was its ​“metropolitan loop”: an express roadway that for the first time would not lead into a city’s center but circle its periphery, linking outlying communities to each other and allowing long-distance travelers to bypass the city entirely (2). To complete the ​“loop,” two huge crossings were needed: one over the Hudson River, to be built by the Port of New York Authority and called the George Washington Bridge (3, as originally designed by Cass Gilbert with stone-faced towers), and one across the Narrows, begun by the city in the 1920s as a underwater tunnel (4) but completed in 1964 by Robert Moses and the Port Authority as the world’s longest suspension span, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge

A VISION FOR THE EDGE

No plan will command recognition unless it includes all the areas from which all New Yorkers earn their livelihood and make their homes. From City Hall a circle must be swung which will include the Atlantic Highlands and Princeton; the lovely Jersey hills; the incomparable Hudson as far as Newburgh; the Westchester lakes; to Bridgeport and beyond, and all of Long Island.
— Charles Dyer Norton, 1915

For all its eye-catching proposals for the center of the city, the true innovation of the Regional Plan lay in its attention to the vast tracts outside the five boroughs: the hundreds of cities, towns, villages, and rural areas of northern and central New Jersey, coastal Connecticut, Long Island, the Hudson Valley, and upstate New York. Though the terms ​“ecology” and ​“the environment” were decades away from common use, the Plan evinced a prescient interest in interconnected issues of climate, water supply, sewage and refuse disposal, oil pollution, power generation, farming and food distribution, the preservation of natural landscapes, and the regulating of suburban development.

The Plan’s vision of the suburbs had little in common with the cookie-cutter tract-houses of the postwar years, but drew instead on projects like Radburn, a model suburb in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, designed by the architects and planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright. With a walkable town center and houses oriented to communal greens, pedestrian paths and bike lanes instead of private backyards and vehicular streets, Radburn would prove influential all around the world but remained, one man later said, ​“an isolated, fascinating experiment in its own region.” (1,2).

It was obvious to the Plan’s authors that the recreational needs of the growing region could never be met solely by local parks and playgrounds. Instead, the Plan called for expansive regional parks and beaches, inspired in part by the pioneering Palisades Interstate Park of 1900 (4, showing Bear Mountain across the Hudson). Another inspiration was the necklace of giant state parks being developed on Long Island by Robert Moses, capped by the newly opened Jones Beach: a spectacular 6.5-mile-long complex of bathhouses, swimming pools, boardwalks, lagoons, outdoor theaters, and golf courses, set along a wide, sparkling beach that was itself largely manmade (3).

LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK

For the mass of people living in the older neighborhoods in the city, the Plan offered little relief—nor, with its concentration on…the center and the fringe, could it have been expected to do so. The Plan…was imbued with the valuesof the emerging middle class in their quest for more spacious living and greater mobility.
— David A. Johnson, 1996

Forward-looking in many ways, the Regional Plan was decidedly conservative in others. Shying away from any radical redirection of New York’s capitalist culture, the Plan chose instead to ​“ride the forces of change,” in the historian David A. Johnson’s words, ​“channeling them where possible into more efficient and amenable patterns.” Accepting the reality of the modern industrial metropolis and its relentless need for growth, the Plan rejected the quasi-utopian vision of self-sufficient village-like settlements promoted by the critic Lewis Mumford—who in turn dismissed the pragmatic Plan as ​“a badly conceived pudding.” The Plan’s vigorous proposals to shift industry out of Manhattan and encourage new roadways for middle-class families were not matched by a willingness to confront New York’s most obvious human tragedy: the appalling conditions of its tenement districts, home to more than a million Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants, as well as a growing population of Black newcomers from the South.

In the 1920s, Manhattan remained the largest manufacturing center in the world, with 420,000 factory workers crowded into the lower half of the island alone (1). But the concentration that had made sense in an era of railways and horse-drawn lorries was plainly becoming obsolete at a time when gas-powered trucks could travel anywhere. Factory complexes could now be located more rationally along the waterfronts of Queens, the Bronx, and New Jersey, in sprawling new industrial districts such as those proposed by the Plan for the Hackensack Meadows (2).

In the 1920s, over a million people still filled the overcrowded tenements that had been the shame of New York since the 1870s, whose dank and gloomy backyards were evoked in the Plan by the drawings of Louis Weirter (3). Though the Plan presented numerous designs for improved housing, such as George B. Ford’s complex of modern apartments (4), a fear of stirring controversy in the real-estate community kept its authors from suggesting any kind of subsidies to build them. The Plan’s ​“failure to come to terms with the underlying dilemma of housing,” David A. Johnson later wrote, ​“was its most serious defect.”

CITY OF THE FUTURE

Rich in sunshine is the city of 1960: fresh air, fine green parkways, modern and efficient city planning, breathtaking architecture. Elevated sidewalks give a new measure of safety and convenience to pedestrians. All express city thoroughfares…. have been so located as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible.
— General Motors’ Futurama, 1939

The Plan’s gleaming visions of the ​“city of the future” provided Americans with a mesmerizing template of the world to come—and revealed its sponsors’ own dreams and ambitions. With soaring towers rising from what had been a tenement slum, the Plan presented a Manhattan whose grimy past had made way for a gleaming new world of ​“clean” industries such as finance, advertising, retail, and communications—a place whose factories and blue-collar workers had been relocated largely to the periphery. Over the next century, that vision would indeed come to pass, though the degree to which the Plan itself was responsible—or merely predicted trends that would have happened anyway—remains impossible to say.

The Regional Plan’s sleek renderings became the iconic image of the ​“city of the future” for generations afterward. Their influence could be felt in every corner of popular culture, from Hollywood films such as Just Imagine, a 1930 science-fiction musical set in the imagined New York of 1980 (2), to General Motors’ Futurama at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, designed by Norman Bel Geddes—both of whose futuristic cities were plainly shaped by the Regional Plan.

Bringing together many of the Plan’s most advanced concepts—from multi-level boulevards to widely spaced skyscrapers, a 1931 rendering by Arthur J. Frappier presents the proposed redevelopment of Christie and Forsyth Streets on the Lower East Side, whose land had already been cleared. In 1934, the area would be transformed by NYC Park Commissioner Robert Moses into Sara Delano Roosevelt Park (1).

THE PLAN AND THE POWERBROKER

[Robert Moses] hated to admit this, and he improved on the plan as he carried it out, but we used to say that he had a copy of the Regional Plan tacked up on the backof his attic door or somewhere, and he’d take a look at it and say, ​“Well, I think I’ll do that next year.”
— C. McKim Norton, 1981

To the amazement of many—not least the Regional Plan Association (RPA), the non-profit organization founded in Spring 1929 to promulgate the Plan—a remarkable number of the document’s most ambitious ideas began to materialize in just a handful of years. The public-works czar Robert Moses, whose Long Island projects had served as early inspiration for the planners, now began constructing many of the Plan’s most formative proposals, garnering RPA’s enthusiastic support—until the day in 1939 they opposed one of his projects, and were stunned by the arrogance, dishonesty, and outright cruelty of a man they had once admired.

With tens of millions of New Deal dollars at his disposal, Robert Moses by 1940 had become the most powerful public builder in New York’s history—and used that power, in no small part, to turn the Regional Plan into reality (1). The Plan ​“came about in large measure through the efforts of a single man, Robert Moses,” observe Robert A.M. Stern and his colleagues, ​“who never acknowledged his debt. [His] policies …set in motion the process of de-urbanization that in postwar years would unalterably change the composition of the city.”

The most ambitious of the Regional Plan’s proposals carried out by Moses—and one whose stream of toll revenue became the bedrock of his power—was the vast transportation complex presented as the ​“Tri-Borough Bridge” in the 1929 Plan, completed by Moses in 1936, and now known as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (2). Flying over the waterways that had isolated New York’s land masses since the Ice Age, Triborough’s immense spans linked the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens—knitting together the metropolitan region as never before.

By 1940, thanks largely to the unstoppable determination of Robert Moses, nearly 40 percent of the 1929 Plan’s 2,548 miles of proposed highway had been completed—along with the Triborough Bridge, Henry Hudson Bridge, Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, Marine Parkway Bridge, Riverside Park, and Jacob Riis and Orchard beaches (3). RPA’s exhilaration over the head-spinning progress was tempered by a concern that its goal of a balanced transportation system—mixing rail, public transit, and roads—was being neglected in Moses’ single-minded focus on the automobile.

RPA’s friendly relationship with Robert Moses was suddenly upended in 1939 when the group contested his proposed Brooklyn-Battery Bridge (4), suggesting in its place a less obtrusive tunnel (as was later built). At a City Hall hearing, Moses dismissed the RPA’s alternatives, lied blatantly about their cost, and viciously attacked the group’s venerable president George McAneny—now a frail, 81-year old man—as ​“an extinct volcano…an exhumed mummy.” That day, Robert A. Caro later wrote, the RPA ​“saw him at last for what we was—and they realized that he was not the embodiment of everything they believed in but its antithesis.”

THE SUBDIVISION AND THE MEAT AXE

By 1960…[suburban] homeownership on a mass scale became a foundation on which the American economy could grow and flourish. [T]he process of transforming wood, steel and oil into cars, washing machines and lawnmowers created the commodities that…made the American economy the strongest in the world. But the bounty that came with expansion of homeownership was not evenly distributed; the bloom of the suburbs came at the expense of urban development.
— Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, 2019

Not even the most farsighted proponents of the 1929 Plan could have predicted the scale and speed of suburban growth after World War II. By the late 1960s, Long Island was home to three million people; Westchester, nearly a million; suburban New Jersey, two million; and suburban Connecticut, 800,000. Factories and port facilities were also decentralizing, and in part to expedite the outward movement of industry, Robert Moses was building a new set of roads, not landscaped parkways at the edge of the region but massive expressways that sliced through the densest parts of the city. To build them, Moses would throw 250,000 people out of their houses—more than the population of Albany, Nashville, or Tacoma. ​“When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis,” he declared, ​“you have to hack your way with a meat axe.”

Propelled by the far-flung network of highways and river crossings presented in the Regional Plan and constructed by Robert Moses and the Port Authority, by cheap mortgages and federal loan guarantees, by streamlined low-cost tract-house construction and land subdivision pioneered in Long Island’s Levittown (1)—and by the rise of the single-family postwar ideal—New York’s suburbs exploded in size in the 1950s and ​’60s.

Perhaps the only of Moses’ postwar highway projects to provide any real amenity for city dwellers was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—first proposed by RPA in 1936—whose triple-decked stretch at the edge of Brooklyn Heights, opened in 1954, created a broad pedestrian promenade with spectacular views of lower Manhattan (2).

First proposed for the 1929 Plan’s ​“metropolitan loop,” the Cross-Bronx Expressway proved one of Robert Moses’ most ambitious—and destructive—postwar projects: a six-lane trench ​“blasted directly through a dozen solid, settled, densely populated neighborhoods,” the critic Marshall Berman later wrote, requiring ​“something like 60,000…people, mostly Jews, but with many Italians, Irish, and Blacks thrown in, [to] be thrown out of their homes…Moses was coming through, and no temporal or spiritual power could block his way”.

TIME AND SPACE

In the years after World War II, the Regional Plan Association continued to issue a stream of reports—including its influential 1947 study, Airports of Tomorrow—but lacked the resources to produce a full-fledged successor to the original Regional Plan—which, one person declared, ​“had done its work.” Indeed, as the Plan’s twentieth anniversary arrived in 1959, some argued RPA should go out of business, especially since the last big unfinished piece of the 1929 Plan—the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge—was now underway. But the immense challenges of the postwar era—“white flight,” deindustrialization of the urban core, and rampant suburban sprawl—drove RPA to recognize that a Second Regional Plan was needed, in part to address the Pandora’s Box the first plan had opened.

Since the early 19th century, when New York introduced regular packet service across the Atlantic and drove the Erie Canal into the heartland, much of the city’s greatness lay in its ability to compress time and space. In 1947, as an astonishingly time-saving kind of transport came to the fore, RPA urged leaders to extend New York’s commercial dominance into the future by dramatically expanding its airports (1, 2). The report proposed that Newark, La Guardia, and the new international airport at Idlewild Field (3, shown in 1947, now known as JFK) be placed under a single regional agency—and that year, control of all three was transferred to the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, where it remains to this day.

By the early 1960s, with nearly 2,200 square miles of the region now urbanized—nearly five times the urbanized area in 1925—the region’s explosive growth was threatening the area’s last large open spaces (4). RPA’s landmark 1960 study, The Race for Open Space, boldly proposed the acquisition of land for ten new regional parks, including Fire Island National Seashore in New York (5). Within a few years came RPA’s greatest open-space triumph: Gateway National Recreation Area, a 26,600-acre preserve around New York Harbor, from Sandy Hook to the wetlands of Jamaica Bay.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A REGION

[T]he New Yorker had climbed here and seen that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he has supposed, but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1931

The Regional Plan and its successors relied upon—and advanced—an array of new techniques for visualizing the urban landscape. Indeed, it was only thanks to the advent in the late 1920s of aerial photography—and a new generation of skyscraper observation decks—that the sprawling three-state region could be grasped at once in its entirety.

MEGALOPOLIS AND MIDTOWN

NEW CHALLENGES, NEW PLANS

In recent [decades], we [at the Regional Plan] have recognized all the more that social issues of race, poverty, unemployment, and migration…affect the shape of the metropolis as much as highways and zoning.
— William Shore, 1995

Released in the tumultuous years of the late 1960s, the Second Regional Plan balanced confidence in the ​“continuing growth and prosperity” of the region with a frank appreciation of the problems facing its older cities, where middle-class families were fleeing to the suburbs, crime rates were soaring, and blue-collar jobs were disappearing—making it all the harder for them to absorb waves of Black and Puerto Rican newcomers, themselves struggling with racist barriers in employment, housing, lending, schools, and elsewhere. Addressing issues of entrenched poverty, poor public services, a dwindling tax base, and deep-seated discrimination would require a new, more engaged approach to planning, far removed from the lofty dictates of the 1929 Plan.

Since the 1940s, when it conducted a pioneering survey of the lives and hopes of Black New Yorkers, RPA had recognized that the ​“top-down” planning model of the original Plan—largely representing the interests of the city’s elite—would need to adapt. To prepare its Second Plan and subsequent studies, RPA held more inclusive community outreach (1), including a 57-member Committee on Minority Affairs, designed to engage Black and Puerto Rican residents directly in the planning process.

The Plan’s volume called Public Services in Older Cities offered a level of human empathy utterly different from the detached tone of the 1929 document (2). Its study of New York’s welfare system included the experience of an actual recipient: Mrs. Hannah Brockington, a Harlem mother of four, meeting with a caseworker after waiting three hours (4). A look at innovative school programs ​“aimed at filling in stimulation and preparation for academic education” included a documentary-like photo essay on the children’s daily activities (3).

CENTERING AND DECENTERING

In the Second Regional Plan could be felt many of the contradictory impulses and tensions of the original 1929 document—which, if anything, had become more glaring over time. On the one hand, the Plan sought to boost the region’s center—Manhattan—now under threat as never before. At the same time, the Plan sought to decentralize the region, through smaller ​“downtowns” across the five boroughs, Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A proposal to pedestrianize Times Square in the heart of New York, and another to transform the city’s edge at Jamaica, Queens, into a vibrant urban hub, seemed to embody these contradictory instincts—though both appeared equally unlikely to come to fruition. Both took decades. Both happened.

Set among the grand envisionings of 1969’s Urban Design: Manhattan was a relatively modest proposal to pedestrianize Times Square, creating an oasis in the heart of the busy crossroads (1). On Memorial Day, 2009, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan ordered Broadway closed to traffic and hundreds of patio chairs put out in exactly the location the Plan had sketched, over forty years earlier (2).

To demonstrate its belief that thriving subcenters were essential to the region, the Second Plan devoted an entire volume to Jamaica, Queens, a shopping district and transit hub that had fallen on hard times. Developed with the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, the Plan called for a soaring ​“Jamaica Center” with offices, housing, hotels, theaters, and educational facilities (3, 4)—the start of an initiative whose slogan, ​“Change at Jamaica!” borrowed the cry of Long Island Rail Road conductors. The 1970s fiscal crisis halted progress, but efforts resumed in the 1990s (5), setting off a building boom that has only accelerated in recent years.

THE REGION AND THE WATER

Activities that encourage people to see, use and enjoy the river should be emphasized. Wherever possible, public access to the riverfront should be created.
— The Second Regional Plan, 1967

Perhaps the most prophetic of the Second Plan’s volumes was The Lower Hudson, which explored the challenges and opportunities of the great waterway at a moment of momentous transition. Much as the 1929 Plan had prophesied, the working heart of the Port of New York—the miles of finger piers edging Manhattan and Brooklyn—was giving way to sprawling new facilities in New Jersey, where a revolution in container shipping was underway. The result was the painful loss of New York’s maritime identity—along with tens of thousands of jobs—but, as the Second Plan pointed out, it also opened up hundreds of acres for housing, recreation, and water-landings—much of which was ultimately built.

Due to the expansive upland space required for container shipping, the great fringe of crowded piers that had ringed Manhattan for 150 years—and driven the city’s prosperity along the way—would soon be gone, never to return (1). But in that loss, the Second Plan argued, lay a silver lining: to return the water’s edge—long isolated by commerce—back to the people. Miles of deteriorated waterfront (2) could be turned into new parks, promenades, and housing—exactly as later occurred along the New York and New Jersey riverfronts.

In the 1960s, Manhattan’s Hudson piers were still home to the greatest gathering of passenger vessels in history: the legendary transatlantic ocean liners (3, including, bottom to top, the Queen Mary, the France, and the United States), each a thousand feet long or more, that for decades had carried millions in style and comfort between America and Europe. Though RPA’s proposed ​“consolidated passenger liner terminal” was built in the 1970s, the great liners themselves had by then vanished, replaced by cruise ships sailing to the Caribbean.

Attempting to integrate the inward-facing layout of the new World Trade Center into a larger vision for downtown, The Lower Hudson called for the creation of a wide plaza connecting the towers and the river, to be built on the 23 acres of landfill that later became Battery Park City (4). On the East River, meanwhile, would rise a futuristic companion project called Manhattan Landing—though that effort never proceeded beyond the planning stages (5).

EYES ON THE STREET

Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull.
— Jane Jacobs, 1961

Beneath the social and political tumult of the 1960s, a revolution in urban thinking was under way that would transform RPA’s approach to the region. On the one hand, the human and environmental costs of Robert Moses’ highways were increasingly clear—as was its inability to solve traffic congestion, which only seemed to grow worse as more roadways were built. On the other hand, a new appreciation of existing city streets and blocks—memorably advanced by the urbanist Jane Jacobs—suggested the future lay in a balance between vehicles and pedestrians, highways and sidewalks, new construction and older neighborhoods.

A journalist and mother of three who made her home in Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs (1) upended thinking about cities with her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which rejected the modernist ​“superblock” and ​“tower-in-the-park” and celebrated instead the workings of the ordinary city street. Though Jacobs generally disdained regional planners, by the late 1960s her ideas had begun to be reflected in the Regional Plan, which called for smaller interventions within the existing ​“grain” of the city’s blocks, rather than their wholesale destruction for towers and superblocks (2).

Despite the city’s obvious problems, the 1960s were a time when residents stood up proudly for urban values (3, an Upper West Side playground). ​“There are some of us who don’t want to leave the city,” the director of RPA’s Committee on Minority Affairs Junius Williams declared in 1973. ​“There are some of us who feel the warmth and the vitality of the greatest human resource that we have…People basically don’t want to live in dull, sterile environments. They want to live where they feel comfortable, where they have grown up, where they can feel alive.”

In the early 1960s, the battle over Robert Moses’ Lower Manhattan Expressway—a ten-lane elevated highway connecting the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges (4)—became a symbol of changing attitudes about the city’s future. First proposed by Moses in 1941—and supported in earlier decades by RPA—the plan was defeated in the 1960s by a coordinated campaign led by Jane Jacobs and an unlikely coalition of New Yorkers—Chinatown residents, Little Italy merchants, Greenwich Village activists, SoHo artists—who would be displaced by the roadway.

SIDEWALK GLIMPSES

Pedestrians should be loved. Pedestrians comprise the greater part of humanity—and, moreover, its better part….When our beloved planet assumed a fairly habitable look, motorists appeared on the scene. Streets …were usurped by motorists. Roadways were widened… sidewalks narrowed…and pedestrians began to cower in fear. In a large city, pedestrians lead a life of martyrdom.
— Illya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov, 1931—quoted in RPA’s Urban Space for Pedestrians, 1975

As RPA’s orientation swung away decisively in the late 1960s from the automobile and highway, the group became a forceful advocate for mass transit and the pedestrian. Its proposals paved the way for the first federal aid for public transportation and for a unified Metropolitan Transportation Authority—allowing the tolls from Robert Moses’ bridges and tunnels to cross-subsidize bus and subway fares. It also carried out pioneering studies in the early 1970s of subway and pedestrian crowding—volumes whose pragmatic illustrations, half a century later, comprise a poignant portrait of a vanished, mid-century Manhattan.

DROP DEAD

There is no other city that better epitomizes the economic decline, transformation, and resurgence of America’s cities in the 20th century than New York City.
— Ester Fuchs, 2012

By the mid-1970s, long-term planning for the region’s future seemed an exercise in futility as New York City’s mounting social and economic troubles came a catastrophic climax with its near-bankruptcy in 1975 and its emergence as a national symbol of urban decline. But behind the scenes, powerful forces were in play—including the growing globalization of the world’s economy and the arrival of new populations from overseas—that would transform the region in ways no one could have predicted.

Nothing symbolized the decline of New York in the mid-1970s more glaringly than the sight of the South Bronx burning—the result of arson instigated by unscrupulous landlords seeking insurance payouts. On October 12, 1977, sixty million viewers of the World Series in Yankee Stadium also witnessed—on live national television—the flames of a blaze at 158th Street and Melrose Avenue (2).

Decades of economic problems in New York City and years of questionable fiscal practices by its leaders exploded in late 1975, when Wall Street banks refused to refinance the city’s loans, bringing it to the edge of bankruptcy. A request for federal loan guarantees was humiliatingly rejected by President Gerald Ford (1)—though he later reversed himself, allowing the city to begin a long and difficult journey to financial stability.

On October 5, 1977, President Jimmy Carter—visiting New York to address the UN—made a surprise visit to the South Bronx in the company of Mayor Abraham Beame, to witness firsthand the worst peacetime devastation even seen in a postwar American city. The following year, the president presented the first National Urban Policy, which drew on RPA recommendations and called for increased assistance for urban areas.

Though less obvious than the fiery spectacle of the South Bronx or the dark headlines of fiscal default, the seeds of renewal in New York were already being planted in the 1970s, as the impact of a little-noticed federal law—the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration act—began to be felt. The first waves of a global influx of newcomers began pouring into the region, bringing an energy and vigor that would impact every aspect of urban life.

THE LONG VIEW

By the mid-1990s, the city had spent a quarter-century not planning. The idea that New York should actually think about big new things was lost for a generation of stagnation. The Third Regional Plan was incalculably important in challenging everyone to think about what an ambitious New York would actually do. And without the Plan, the Bloomberg administration would have needed a lot more time to come up with those big ideas. So the Plan served its purpose perfectly: preparing good ideas, laying the groundwork for them, and having them ready when their political moment arrives.
— Rohit Aggarwala, 2022

A BETTER WAY

We used to grow fast and spread out slowly. Now our growth is much slower—but we spread out quickly, consuming vast areas of open land and shattering traditional patterns of community. We have sacrificed our landscapes for high-cost sprawl and endless miles of traffic congestion.
— The Third Regional Plan, 1996

As had its predecessors in 1929 and the 1960s, the Third Plan put special attention to the region’s periphery, whose challenges had grown ever more urgent as untrammeled growth continued. Noting that in the previous thirty years the developed area of the New York metropolitan region had expanded by nearly two-thirds—an additional one million acres—while the population increased by only 13%, the Plan called for a host of measures to limit further sprawl: compact development in exurban areas, retrofitting suburban centers into walkable communities, and the preservation of some of the region’s last large-scale open spaces: the New Jersey Highlands, Long Island’s Central Pine Barrens, and waterfront areas all around the New York-New Jersey harbor.

Drawing on the burgeoning planning approach known as the ​“New Urbanism,” the Third Plan argued that much of the region’s landscape could be preserved—even as development continued—if strategies of compact growth were pursued. The green open space around an existing highway cloverleaf (1) would be mostly displaced by conventional patterns of development (2), but could be largely retained if a denser, more coordinated approach was followed (3).

The Third Plan recommended transforming suburban centers—such as Yonkers in Westchester, Long Island’s Hicksville, and New Jersey’s Princeton Junction—into walkable, transit-accessible places. The Princeton study (4) pioneered an early digital ​“kit-of-parts” technique that allowed citizens to interactively explore options for their communities. As a result, ​“two-story buildings instantly became three stories, because they felt more urban,” said Michael Kwartler of the Environmental Simulation Center, which ran the project. ​“Little by little, through this process, the design became more like a traditional townscape.”

CRISIS AND RESILIENCE

New Yorkers love where they live, and believe in the region’s future. They have seen the region face daunting challenges over the past generation and come back even stronger. But….many feel their life is too expensive, housing and jobs are too difficult to find, and the social divisions in our society run too deep.
— Tom Wright & Scott Rechler, 2017

In many ways, the first decades of the 21st century would prove the most startling and contradictory in the region’s history. Even as crises of unimaginable proportion struck New York and its surroundings—from the horrifying destruction of the World Trade Center to the cataclysmic damage of Superstorm Sandy—the city was enjoying a wave of growth greater than any since the 1950s, as population, jobs, and development exploded and New York became a global emblem of the resurgence of cities.

A decade after 9/11, the region-wide devastation of Superstorm Sandy on October 29, 2012 made painfully clear the urgency of climate change. Afterward, RPA helped cities and towns rebuild in ways that would advance coastal adaptation and increase resilience against future events.

After September 11, 2001, as stunned New Yorkers attempted to imagine a future for the 16-acre World Trade Center site (1), RPA filled the void by convening the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, bringing together more than 75 business, community, and environmental groups. The alliance’s ​“Listening to the City” forum at the Javits Center—attended by 4,000 impassioned citizens—proved crucial to directing the rebuilding toward something grander and more inspiring.

Under the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning Chair Amanda Burden and with the support of RPA, New York undertook a range of public-private initiatives that made it a model for 21st century urbanism. An abandoned freight line on the lower West Side (2)—slated for demolition—was transformed instead into the High Line, an elevated public space that drew millions of visitors and inspired similar efforts around the world. RPA also fought to realize the long-held dream of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: to convert the historic James A. Farley post office, across from Penn Station, into a spectacular new gateway to the region for Amtrak’s long-distance trains (3, 2017 concept rendering by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, courtesy Empire State Development Archive)

A NEW REALITY

Everyone has to recognize that climate change reshapes everything. It is profound in the same way that suburbanization was profound. When the first parkways were built in the 1920s, people did not see it was going to lead to the suburbanized region of the 1960s and ​’70s. Climate change is regional in scope, and touches all layers of planning—from the way the land is shaped, to the uses we can have on it, to the way infrastructure has to be designed, to the patterns of people using that infrastructure.
— The Fourth Regional Plan, 2017

One of the most daring concepts in the Fourth Plan was its proposal to transform the New Jersey Meadowlands—which despite decades of industrial activity remained the largest wetland system in the region—into a 21st century national park, one that would provide an unmatched recreational resource and the model for a new kind of ​“climate park” (1). Beginning with 10,000 acres, the park would grow over time as waters rose and adjacent communities receded. Providing a wide range of water-related amenities, the new Meadowlands Park would also help to protect its surroundings from the impact of global warming.

By 2013, Superstorm Sandy had brought forth, in Governor Andrew Cuomo’s words, ​“a new reality.” RPA supported Mayor Bloomberg’s $20 billion Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resilience and participated in a major federal initiative called Rebuild By Design—a partnership of the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States government, led by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan—including a proposal for a belt of elevated open spaces along East River Park by Bjarke Ingels Group (4, in its original 2014 design, now revised and under construction). The Fourth Plan also presented concepts by DLAND Studio (now part of the New York office of Sasaki) and Rafi Segal A+U for buffer areas where land and water might commingle: elevated houses reached by boardwalks on Long Island’s Mastic Beach (2), or a multi-modal transit gateway at the edge of Jamaica Bay (3).

The Region Reborn

In its vision for the region outside the five boroughs— long a focus for RPA—the Fourth Plan recognized that a stunning reversal had taken hold. After decades of lagging behind its surrounding suburbs, New York City had become the engine-house of the region’s growth, exceeding the incredible total of four million jobs and 8.8 million residents. But with a few exceptions—Jersey City, White Plains, Stamford—the region’s smaller cities had not shared in that resurgence, and it was to these well-situated but often struggling communities, from Paterson and Poughkeepsie to Bridgeport and Newburgh, that the Plan put a large part of its energies.

Working closely with community partners, the Fourth Plan developed detailed visions for the region’s smaller cities, from Newburgh, New York on the Hudson (1) to Bridgeport, Connecticut on the Long Island Sound (2). Having struggled in the late 20th century with population decline and job loss, these communities were poised for a rebirth, the Plan argued. Well-served by commuter rail and relatively affordable, they offered the kind of walkable historic neighborhoods that had drawn people and startups to older districts of New York City for decades.

Looking to transform the region’s far-flung periphery into a unified recreational resource, the Plan proposed a trail network linking 70,000 acres of publicly owned space—from the upland forests of the Highlands and Catskills to the ocean beaches of New Jersey and Long Island—with over 1,600 miles of biking, hiking, and walking paths (3). Other remote areas could serve as ​“flood farms,” a innovative concept by PORT + Range: preserved lowlands designed to absorb storm floodwaters conveyed to the site, providing an additional source of income for farmers (4).

ONLY CONNECT

The Fourth Plan’s ideas represent a profound shift from those of the Third, especially in transportation: the shift from restarting incremental growth to transformational growth. Over the last thirty years we’ve used up all of the system’s excess capacity—and we’ve done most of the things where incremental change can make a difference. The Fourth Plan was the moment to realize that the next step in the region’s transportation picture is not evolutionary but revolutionary.
— Rohit Aggarwala, 2022

In many ways, the core of the Fourth Plan—as with those before it—was its vision for the region’s transportation networks, many in desperate need of repair, rebuilding, or outright rethinking. The Plan proposed the dedication of more street space to transit, bikes, and pedestrians, the extension of the subway into long-unserved parts of the city, the unification of the region’s commuter lines, and the modernization of its pioneering but now aging airports. Above all, the Plan called for the creation of a grand and spacious gateway at Penn Station and the construction of new rail tunnels under the Hudson— the Gateway project—to preserve critical links to the Northeast and pave the way for a high-speed rail system along the entire Eastern seaboard.

In addition to proposals for improvement to rail, transit, shipping, and air travel, the Fourth Plan sought to reimagine the most heavily used movement system of all: the streets and sidewalks (1). Building on the innovations of the last two decades—including 600 miles of new bike lanes and 1,300 Citibike stations and the pedestrianization of much of Broadway— the Plan called for no less than three-quarters of the city’s shared surface to be given over to walking, cycling, and faster bus service, the last especially important to communities poorly served by existing subway and commuter lines.

The largest and busiest commuter rail network in the country remains hobbled to this day by its origins as several private railroads serving Long Island, New Jersey, Westchester, the Hudson Valley, and Connecticut. The Fourth Plan proposed interconnecting and expanding these lines to serve the region more equitably and efficiently. Its visionary ​“T-REX” network would lock together the entire region with fast and convenient rail service (2). A major step toward that vision has come with East Side Access, a massive project connecting the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal (3).

Among the most impactful proposals in the Fourth Plan was the ​“Triboro” line linking the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, ingeniously reusing existing tracks to avoid costly land acquisition (4). Renamed the Interborough Express or IBX, the project (covering Queens and Brooklyn) was formally announced in 2022 by Governor Kathy Hochul. Laid out not along the traditional ​“hub-and-spoke” pattern connecting the outer boroughs to Manhattan, the IBX is instead a peripheral line responding to decentralized growth and linking long-underserved parts of the city—thus fulfilling the promise of the 1929 Plan.

TODAY AND TOMORROW

As we work to address the current crises of the Covid-19 pandemic [and] racial injustice…I am heartened that we have an institution like RPA working to anticipate the challenges of the future. That has been its history and its legacy. Yet RPA has also turned its sights to more inclusive collaboration in the region—on infrastructure initiatives that can create jobs, reduce inequality, preserve affordable housing, and prepare us for climate change.
— Peggy Shepard, 2021

In the years since the release of the Fourth Regional Plan in 2017, the region has experienced a crisis unlike any in its history: a global pandemic which—shutting down the entire metropolis for much of 2020—called into question the bedrock principles of density and concentration upon which New York is built. Though the region has since staged a solid (if uneven) recovery, the long-term impact of the pandemic on patterns of urban life—transit use, shopping, office occupancy, remote work—is still unfolding, and will continue to evolve in unexpected and often challenging ways.

If climate change remained the region’s greatest long-term peril, its most pressing challenge was affordable housing. Though the city had added tens of thousands of units in recent years, demand has continued to exceed supply, placing more than a million households at risk of being displaced and leaving 60,000 people homeless in New York City alone. Working with community partners such as the immigrant-rights group Make the Road (1), RPA has called for a range of measures to address the crisis: turning over tracts of government-owned land for new units, allowing accessory dwellings, and removing zoning barriers to mixed-use projects, among them.

The stunning impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in Spring 2020, which eerily emptied the streets and spaces of Manhattan as nothing else in history (2, 3), caused many to wonder if the dense, bustling, compact character that had always defined New York would offer a viable model in the future. It also served to remind everyone in unforgettable ways of the life-and-death significance of public health—one of the greatest concerns of the original 1929 Plan—which in recent years has again become one of RPA’s highest priorities.

THE CONSTANT FUTURE

Since 1922, planning for the metropolitan region has meant thinking long-term, thinking across a range of issues, and thinking beyond political boundaries. Only an independent civic group can think—and plan—this way. That’s why we believe there must always be an RPA, and its Regional Plans, to guide us forward.
— Tom Wright, 2022

As New York moves into a ​“post-pandemic” era—while still struggling with challenges of housing, public health, transportation, climate change—the Regional Plan Association has in many ways never been more crucial. An independent voice that, as one observer notes, ​“can speak truth to power—especially when power isn’t doing its job”—RPA carries out much the same role it has filled since 1922: to coordinate the region’s multiple (and sometimes conflicting) agencies, to bring a diverse range of voices to the planning process, to promote ideas that are at once imaginative and pragmatic, and—through the power and persuasiveness of its vision—to inspire extraordinary possibilities for the future of New York and its region.

RPA today carries forward its outreach efforts of earlier decades, when it mobilized public television and early interactive digital programs to engage the region’s communities. ​“If there is one thing that sets the Fourth Plan apart from previous RPA plans,” its authors observe, ​“it’s the effort we made to reach deep into communities, particularly those that have been excluded for so long from the planning process” (1, a survey by RPA partner Participatory Budgeting). Its efforts have placed special focus on the young—who will, after all, live most of their lives in the long-term future charted by the Plan (2).

Arguing for the adoption of congestion pricing—an approach to reducing traffic congestion and improving mass transit first presented in the 1996 Third Regional Plan and now, three decades later, on the verge of approval by city and state—RPA staff speak at a rally of coalition partners at Grand Central Terminal. (3)

New York will never appear as we picture it. Our only hope is that the lines we have drawn will inspire the citizens to express themselves with a greater love of order and a higher sense of beauty in the building of the city.

— Thomas Adams, 1929

What is the Regional Plan Association?

First incorporated in 1929 to implement the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs, Regional Plan Association (RPA) today remains an independent non-profit civic organization working to improve the quality of life of the New York metropolitan region. Central to our work is the belief that communities can improve their standard of living if they plan ahead for growth. Guided by the Fourth Regional Plan’s underpinning values of equity, health, prosperity, and sustainability, RPA advises cities, communities, and public agencies, and conducts research, planning and advocacy on the environment, land use, transportation, and good governance.

Thank You

RPA is grateful for all the individuals and organizations who have shaped its work and the landscape of the region. This includes dozens of civic and community groups, businesses and elected officials from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut

Special thanks to Janno Lieber, Chair & CEO, Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Alfred C. Cerullo, III, President & CEO, Grand Central Partnership

Images from RPA’s Fourth Regional Plan were produced as part of the Four Corridors Design Initiative led by Juliette Michaelson, Guy Nordenson, Robert Lane, Paul Lewis and Catherine Seavitt

In memory of RPA Board Members Governor James Florio and Susan Solomon

Image Credits

SPONSORS

Regional Plan Association thanks our generous exhibition sponsors for helping us improve the economic health, environmental resiliency, and quality of life of the New York metropolitan area.