THE CITY THAT NEVER WAS by...

THE CITY THAT NEVER WAS by Rebecca Read Shanor (Penguin: $19.95, illustrated). Shanor’s informal history documents some of the stranger development schemes people have hatched for New York City over the decades. In 1910, Mayor William Gaynor wanted to raze some of Manhattan’s choicest real estate to cut a wide, new thoroughfare between 5th and 6th Avenues from 8th Street to 59th Street. Sixty-one years later, his successor, John V. Lindsay, provoked howls of protests from merchants when he proposed turning Madison Avenue into a pedestrian mall. A series of designs for a monument to George Washington, proposed in the 1840s, encapsulates the history of bad architecture, from ugly pseudo-Egyptian to ugly pseudo-Gothic. Perhaps the most egregious structure in the book is the hilarious victory arch designed for Times Square in 1943: two Gargantuan palm fronds curving over the traffic on lower Broadway. The archival drawings and photographs are interesting, if dimly reproduced. Shanor’s book proves that the saddest words of tongue or pen aren’t necessarily “it might have been.”