How One Canal Turned New York Into a Megacity

You are standing on the muddy tip of a long, narrow island. No road, no wall, no name you would know. In four hundred years, twenty million people will live within sight of this exact spot. So why here? In this video you stand on the bare rock that became Manhattan and let the land itself explain the rise of New York. You see how a deep, ice-free natural harbor and the two-way Hudson River set the stage, how a tiny Dutch trading post called New Amsterdam clung to the shore, and how every rival port was walled off from the rich American interior by the Appalachian Mountains. Then you watch the one improbable thing that broke the deadlock: the Erie Canal of 1825, threading through the only sea-level gap in those mountains and turning one good harbor into the door to a continent. If the map made the story click for you, drop a like, tell me which city you want next in the comments, and subscribe for more journeys into why the world's great cities stand exactly where they do. #NewYork #NewYorkCity #NYC #ErieCanal #HudsonRiver #Manhattan #CityHistory #UrbanHistory #Geography #HistoricalGeography #Megacity #WorldCities #CityOrigins #HowCitiesGrow #AmericanHistory #NewAmsterdam #MapHistory #HistoryDocumentary #WhyHere #DoodleHistory