摩天大楼林立前的曼哈顿，1931年

They'd be really useful in the United States for intra-regional travel. A flight from Orlando to Atlanta takes half a day even though flight time is short. An airship would work just as well with fewer hazardous emissions and more comfort.

Way up high in the sky, but the wind won’t blow, you really shouldn’t go, it only goes to show..

Yea, it's pretty cool to imagine taking a Zeppelin from Europe to the United States or Brazil or wherever in the 1920s or 1930s. Obviously, some voyages ended in tragedy but most didn't.. was probably awesome as long as you weren't on one of those unfortunate ones.

Marketing Ploy. Even then they knew it wasn’t feasible

Quite helpful, yes.

It was also explicitly intended to be public to compete with European cities. Other parks like Gramercy were only for residents (rich people), and Gramercy in particular remains private. There's plenty of good reasons to criticize the economic reality of Central Park (the destruction of Seneca Village, for instance). But "Central Park only exists because rich people lived around it" is not just bad history, it's like... Anti history. Like the exact opposite of what occurred. True brain rot.

Reddit right-wing revisionist history counter-moment conveniently leaving out the most important parts... In the 1850s, wealthy elites, William Cullen Bryant (editor of the Evening Post) and Andrew Jackson Downing (a famous landscape architect) spent years writing editorials, pressuring the city to set aside that specific "useless" acreage to create a world-class park that would mirror European high society and provide them a private escape from the crowded downtown. By 1900, the transformation was complete. After decades of massive construction, the elite moved their mansions to the park's edges, successfully turning a rocky swamp into a gold mine. The city used eminent domain and pushed out Black Americans from Seneca Village, along with Irish immigrants, German immigrants, and poor laborers (under compensating them during the process).

Directly from the link: >Seneca Village was a 19th-century settlement of mostly African American landowners in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, within what would become present-day Central Park. > Land ownership among Black residents was much higher than that in the city as a whole: more than half owned property in 1850, five times the property ownership rate of all New York City residents at the time. Many of Seneca Village's Black residents were landowners and relatively economically secure compared to their downtown counterparts in the Little Africa neighborhood by Greenwich Village. You’re calling it a class struggle, but it was explicitly economically secure Black Americans that were displaced through eminent domain. At this time, Irish Americans also faced racial discrimination. >Park advocates and the press began to describe Seneca Village and other communities in this area as "shantytowns" and the residents there as "squatters" and "vagabonds and scoundrels"; the Irish and Black residents were often described as "wretched" and "debased". It’s disingenuous to imply that race did not play a part in the selection of this tract of land specifically. Edit: And to your counting of the city blocks, saying that Seneca Village was wiped out to create Central Park doesn’t mean that it comprised the entirety of the land that would become Central Park. >Elsewhere in Central Park, the impact of eviction was less intense. Some residents, such as foundry owner Edward Snowden, simply relocated elsewhere. Squatters and hog farmers were the most affected by Central Park's construction, as they were never compensated for their evictions. Racism is part of American history and we can’t ignore it.

sorry for being clueless but what would you say Manhattan is recovering from? ww2? white flight?

It’s above the population from before the rapid unsustainable growth.

More realistically, cars allowed for suburbanization so the population moved out of the city limits.

I’m of the belief that US cities peaked in the 1930s/40s before urban renewal policies got a hold of them. I think they’re going to need another 100 years to density further to even get back to where they were then. It’s just parking lots and freeways now a days.