[High-resolution version. Via Los Angeles Metro] 1925 Rapid Transit Plan for the City and County of Los Angeles One day spent in the gridlock traffic of Los Angeles makes it hard to believe the city once had one of the largest trolley networks in the nation -- and abandoned it. At the height of the automobile boom of the early 20th century, the city changed course and ripped up the tracks in order to build a sprawling network of freeways. What would have happened if Los Angeles hadn’t abandoned mass transit? This 1925 plan gives us a glimpse of that world. At the time, the city had cut a number of trolley tunnels through large hills and connected them to a large terminal in downtown L.A. The 1925 plan looked to unite and expand these tunnels into a comprehensive system that spread out across the entire city. Los Angeles’ current subway system, which began operating in the 1990s, follows many of these same routes, and if expanded out as planned will resemble a future first drawn almost 90 years ago.

[High-resolution version. Via WalkingSF/Flickr. Caption below.] Maps can direct us from here to there, show where one thing is in relation to another, or add layers information to our surroundings. Whatever its form, a map’s main purpose is to make the complex world we live in more comprehensible. But there are also maps that describe the world as it never came to be. Those are the maps that interest Andrew Lynch, who runs a Tumblr called Hyperreal Cartography & The Unrealized City that's full of city maps collected from libraries, municipal archives, and dark corners of the internet. Lynch recently shared a few of his favorite “dream cities” with WIRED’s MapLab. “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’” - G.B. ShawIn postmodernist philosophy, “hyperreality” is the point where fiction and reality become indistinguishable. In Lynch's collection we see familiar cities like New York and Los Angeles, but it’s as if we are viewing them along a different timeline. What if a web of highways criss-crossed downtown San Francisco? What if the orderly grid of Manhattan were organized like the wheel spokes of Washington D.C.? The maps in this gallery illustrate these alternate realities. Lynch’s parents were active in historical preservation, and his father, an architect, would often decipher the story of a city block just by looking at its buildings. It’s only natural that Lynch sees layers of history written into the maps he collects. “It’s about looking at the past through the present eyes and figuring out what they were trying to achieve,” he said. In college, Lynch first studied industrial design, but quickly fell in love with urban planning. After completing a degree in geography, the idea of a traditional job didn’t appeal to him, so while working as a realtor in New York City, he designed and sold minimalist maps and pored over urban plans in his spare time. Before he knew it, he had amassed hundreds of unrealized urban plans. Many of the works featured on Lynch’s Tumblr date to idyllic post-war America. I asked him if these represent dreams of a perfect future. “Old plans are always so optimistic,” he said. “There are these beautiful, sometimes utopian visions of what these cities could be.” Of course, while a car for every home and a highway through every neighborhood seemed charming at the time, such an idea would make a modern urban planner shudder. One era’s Utopia is another’s hell. Lynch embraces these contradictions. The maps featured on his blog are not reality, but they are not entirely fictional. They serve as a reminder that every city is built on the past while keeping an eye on the future. Somewhere underneath these maps is the skeleton of a recognizable place, but the flesh on the bones is both foreign and oddly familiar. Welcome to the uncanny valley of retrofuturism. Above: 1948 San Francisco Highway Plan San Francisco is one of the few American cities that was not completely carved up by the postwar highway building frenzy, but that doesn’t mean no one tried to do so. This 1948 plan details a projected network of elevated freeways throughout the city. Parts of the Central and Embarcadero freeways were constructed, but angry citizens of the city successfully rallied for the cancellation of further roads. This “Highway Revolt” was not limited to San Francisco. Many other cities fought back against plans to raze whole neighborhoods for elevated roads, and today many urban highways are being cut back or demolished entirely. The dismantling of the Embarcadero freeway following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake helped usher in a rebirth of the San Francisco waterfront and the SoMa district.

[High-resolution version. Via Andrew Lynch] 1945 Boston Subway Expansion This 1945 map shows a proposed expansion of the Boston metro rail system into the suburbs. Boston is home to America’s oldest subway, and as the population moved beyond the dense, central service area, the predecessor of the MBTA drew up this plan to absorb commuter rail lines into the city’s transit network. The map is notable for another reason. Instead of the abstract, rainbow spaghetti that make up the subway maps of today, this Boston map includes drawings of each station, each rail line, and the important landmarks along the way. As unrealized future visions go, this one had some legs. Several of the proposed 1945 expansions became reality over the following decades.

[High-resolution version. Via Wikipedia] 1929 New York City IND Second System In the 1920’s, New York City’s subways and elevated rail lines were operated by two private transit companies: the Interborough Rapid Transit Co. (IRT) and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Co. (BMT). Mayor John F. Hylan wanted New Yorkers to have a publicly-owned alternative to the privately-operated lines. Also, he had been fired from the BMT. So Hylan set about creating the Independent Subway System (IND) in an effort to stifle the expansion of the private companies during his time in office. The IND opened its first route, the 8th Avenue line, in 1932, and New York City’s current A-G lines today follow IND’s original routes. This map is dated August 23, 1929, just months before the stock market crash that extinguished IND’s ambitious expansion plans. The most notable of these plans was the new subway under 2nd Avenue, drawn above. This plan became known as the IND Second System and is considered the birth of the 2nd Avenue subway, slated to open in 2016, 87 years after being proposed.

[High-resolution version. Via Andrew Lynch] Lower Manhattan Plan of 1966 Fueled by the energy that spawned the original World Trade Center, this plan set out to turn the tip of lower Manhattan from a forgotten shipping district into a futuristic 24-hour mixed use neighborhood. Superblocks built on landfill would extend the footprint of the island into the East River, new houses and offices would ring the tip of the island from Canal St. to the Battery and up to the Brooklyn Bridge, and new underground highways would pull traffic off the streets. Things didn’t go exactly as planned. The World Trade Center opened in the middle of an economic decline for the entire city. The first phase of the new mixed use plan languished for a generation before Battery Park City was reorganized along more traditional urban planning theories. The lower Manhattan plan never came to pass as envisioned. The 1966 plan lives on in Mayor Bloomberg’s recently announced plans to build a Seaport City along the East River, a residential and office district built on top of an elaborate storm surge and flood control system.

[High-resolution version. Via Andrew Lynch] Welthauptstadt Germania Adolph Hitler wanted to create a German Reich that would last 1,000 years, with Berlin at its heart. Hitler commissioned Albert Speer, his chief architect, to design a capital worthy of such an empire. Speer’s eventual plan was impossibly grandiose. Welthauptstadt Germania translates to "World Capital Germania." Speer planned a vast north-south parade route with an underground highway, a massive new train station at the southern end and at the northern end a gigantic Volkshalle. This “People’s Hall,” if built, would have been the largest indoor space in the world by volume. Between the two ends was to be a 1,000-feet tall arch so large that the Arc de Triomphe could have fit beneath it. Hitler imagined winning the war by 1945 and having the new city ready for a World’s Fair in 1950. Instead, Germany’s defeat brought with it a new plan for the city in the form of a divided Berlin.

[High-resolution version. Via Historical Society of Washington D.C.] 1941 Development of the Central Area West and East of the Capitol – Washington D.C. Washington D.C. was masterfully designed by Pierre L’Enfant as a grand capital for the new nation. But as time passed and the needs of the city changed, the optimism of the original plan gave way to industrial slums and a growing federal government gobbling up free space within the city. The burgeoning capital required a new urban plan. The 1941 redesign is notable because it strikes the balance between the City Beautiful movement, an effort to preserve monumental grandeur in cities like Washington D.C., with the needs of a growing federal government during and after World War II. Much of the plan for west side of the Capitol came to pass in some form, often using more modern designs. The east side of the Capitol, however, called for a second mall lined with government offices, schools, museums, and a vast sports complex. While such large scale urban renewal took place in cities across the nation after the war, including in other parts of Washington D.C., this vast plan for the east side was never carried out.