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New York City has more than eight million people, inhabits about one million buildings, speaks 700 languages and, as of 2025, has existed for 400 years.
Early last year, when Dan Saltzstein, an editor on The Times’s Projects and Collaborations desk, was planning a special section to observe the milestone, he asked his team: “How are we going to cover so many years of history?”
After much deliberation, they decided on a somewhat counterintuitive solution: exploring the city’s future, rather than its past.
Surveying history, Mr. Saltzstein said, was “not as satisfying or fun as taking some of the things that New York is most famous for — culture, transit, diversity — and looking at how those themes might evolve in the coming years and decades.”
“The Future of New York,” the resulting nine-article series, appeared online and in print late last year. Several pieces were practical, like those examining the future of bodegas and food vendors, and the city’s preparedness for a potential flood brought on by climate change. In another article, cultural figures including the writer Gary Shteyngart and the actors Ilana Glazer and Leslie Odom Jr. mused on what form the city’s arts scene might take. And in one piece, nearly 350 Times readers responded to a callout by The Times with their wishes, predictions and wildest dreams for the city’s future.
“As a newsroom, we don’t do a lot of speculative journalism,” Mr. Saltzstein said. “But it’s interesting to experiment thinking about how today’s issues will evolve.”
Some stories did, in fact, look to the past, though a fictional one. Mr. Saltzstein laid out Hollywood’s long-running tendency to envision New York’s future as dystopian. Another piece walked through unrealized plans for the city’s waterfront — one 1989 proposal, by the architect Steven Holl, envisioned 10 silver towers of housing and office space over the Hudson River, connected by lateral elevators and underwater tunnels.
In an interview with Times Insider, Mr. Saltzstein discussed how the project came together, and what especially stood out to him about New York and its future. This interview has been condensed and edited.
How do you begin this kind of project? The first thing we did was have a big brainstorm with reporters and editors from the Metro desk. New York is their bread and butter. And then we started reaching out to colleagues from several other desks, like Real Estate, Food, Culture and Climate.
Throughout this whole process, is there something that you didn’t know about New York that really stood out? In the piece about flooding preparedness, there were loads of stuff that I didn’t know. We went out at one point to visit the bluebelts in Staten Island, which are natural drainage systems that have been reopened, allowing water to go where it wants to go. We went with the Department of Environmental Protection commissioner and some of his staff — they’ve done an amazing job there. But the big challenge is that Staten Island has lots of open space and Manhattan doesn’t. So they can’t just replicate what they’ve done there.
There is an ecologist named Eric Sanderson who wrote a book called “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City,” and he gave us some really interesting data. One aspect that is visualized in the piece shows all the streams and springs that were once part of Manhattan — the entire island used to be just covered with them — and how much of them have been built over with impervious surfaces.
What was the role of graphics and visuals in the series? Folks who work on our Graphics team — their brains function differently. They have a really great ability to think about how to present information in ways that are interesting and intuitive for people who aren’t data wonks.
For a story on the proposed Interborough Express — a proposed light-rail train that would link Queens and Brooklyn — we collaborated with Stefanos Chen, the Metro desk’s transit reporter. He’d already worked on a video-forward story in which readers could basically tour the route, so we wanted to do something a step beyond that. The Graphics team made a map that gave readers a visual representation of who would benefit most from the new route.
For example, Stefanos found a fascinating dynamic in this fast-growing Bangladeshi community that’s centered near the two ends of the route. Bachelors who live in south Brooklyn because it’s cheaper have the goal of getting married and settling with a family in Queens. It’s almost like this literal journey that they’re trying to make.
You asked Times readers about their visions for the future. What did you hear? We told people: Don’t think about likelihood or cost. We just wanted to hear what, in some idealized world, they would love to see. There was a really lovely response about just being able to hear nature. New York has green spaces, but we’re not adjacent to them — most of us, anyway.
What would you like to see personally? New York is really struggling right now with maintaining cultural spaces, especially ones that aren’t top tier. Those seem pretty safe — the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center. I’m talking more neighborhood-level cultural spaces. I know people who work in those areas and it’s a real struggle, especially now with funding getting cut and New York real estate being so wildly expensive.
I would love to see a concerted effort to bring art to people in the literal sense, like physically closer to them. There should be more of that in our lives.
Stefano Montali is a news assistant at The Times who contributes reporting across various sections.
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