The data visualization follows the history of New York City’s infrastructure and street system development from 1609 to the present day.

The video was released onto YouTube by Myles Zhang, an undergraduate in architectural history at Columbia University, on October 25, 2018.

The resulting short film presents a sequence of “cartographic snapshots” of the historic extent of urbanized area for every twenty to thirty years.

White’s 1949 soliloquy to New York City flashes across the screen: “The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races, and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.”[3] Over the past 400 years, humans transformed the natural landscape of hills, rivers and wetlands around New York Harbor into a metropolis.

[7] This coherence allowed the rate and trends in urban growth to be read more easily and compared between eras.