A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY

I'll begin this history with a picture of Coney Island (above) circa 1948. I've posted this before, but it was small and unworthy of its subject. Here's it's bigger and clearer. When this version is published I expect it'll sweep past the sidebar, right past the limit of Blogger's template, and right out into the digital ether where only griffins and centaurs live. This is a BIG picture.

Anyway, Coney didn't start out as congested as the top photo suggests. The beach (above) used to be narrow and less crowded. It was a place for "refined" people to bathe. Click to enlarge.

The problem was, too many refined people bathed there. You couldn't find a place to sit in all that refinement. Click to enlarge.

Under pressure from the public, the city fathers enlarged the beach (above), and oooh what a change that made! The public descended on the place like a tsunami. Amusement piers and cheap public transportation added to the chaos.

But the problem wasn't limited to Coney Island. Before long all of New York City became as crowded as Coney.

New York shops are famous the world over, but even shopping became a chore. There were just too many people.

You could try to relieve the stress with a quiet stroll (above), but at any time of the day or night millions of other New Yorkers were relieving stress with a stroll of their own. Yikes! Something had to give.

It was bound to happen. Nature, sensing that the city had exceeded all rational limits, moved to restore the natural balance.

Hideous monsters emerged from The Hudson River.

Excess New Yorkers (above) were eaten. A harsh corrective, to be sure, but Nature has its own ways and its own rules.

Today New York is a model of ecological harmony. The few thousand people who live there look forward to each new day with renewed enthusiasm.

Call New York...a success story.