Have you ever walked around in the city and started wondering to yourself what the land that you’re walking on looked like 400 years ago?  You start asking yourself questions such as, “Were there wild animals aimlessly exploring the land for food and shelter? Did trees and shrubs blanket this land? Did the Indians have settlements surrounding this area?” It is truly incredible to observe how much a piece of land can change in the relatively small time period of 400 years. The landscape can become completely altered, the people may evolve, and the entire culture can transform. That’s exactly what happened to New York City.

After taking a trip to the Museum of the City of New York and watching the Timescapes short documentary, it was incredible to see how much the city of New York changed from when the Lenape first inhabited the land to what it looks like today. One of the things mentioned in the documentary that I took close notice to was the major role Dewitt Clinton played in shaping the city. Clinton was a visionary and huge proponent of the development of the Erie Canal, a project that many people thought would be a huge waste of money and was continuously mocked. However, in 1817 he was finally able to convince the state legislature to allocate seven million dollars for the construction of the canal. After eight years of construction, the canal was finished and transformed the whole state of New York. The canal provided an easy route for passenger and freight traffic from the Hudson River to Lake Erie with various stops on the way. Without the canal, who knows what today’s New York could have looked like?

The other exhibit in the museum that I found particularly interesting was “City as Canvas.” The exhibit featured numerous works of graffiti in its early days as a style of art as well as pictures of graffiti found around the city. There were a few pictures of graffiti on subway trains that I thought were fascinating and thought to myself, “why doesn’t the government promote ‘graffiti’ on subway trains?” Of course the graffiti would have to be relevant to the city of New York and commissioned by the city legislature, but it would be another unique aspect of New York. By taking a huge feature of the city and putting it to meaningful use, it would portray how astonishing this city really is.