The Awakening City

Looking at this image of Lower Manhattan glowing during the blue hour, it's easy to be dazzled by the modernity, the steel, and the glass. But what makes this city truly magical isn't just what reaches for the stars, but what sleeps beneath the asphalt.
If you look at the towering spire of One World Trade Center and the illuminated Battery Park waterfront, you are looking at land that didn't even exist a couple of centuries ago. Much of this tip of the island was reclaimed from the Hudson River using excavation dirt and landfill over the years.
But here is the best-kept secret: beneath those gleaming skyscrapers lies a fleet of "ghost ships." In 2010, during excavations to rebuild the World Trade Center site after 9/11, workers found the intact skeleton of a wooden merchant ship from the 1770s buried over 20 feet underground. And it’s not the only one; resting beneath the streets of the Financial District are dozens of colonial vessels that were purposely sunk centuries ago to expand the island and build the foundations of the New York we know today.
So, when you watch the city lights turn on over the harbor and the modern ferries navigating the dark waters, you are actually looking at a futuristic metropolis built, quite literally, on the masts and timber of its early sailors. A city that awakens every night over the echoes of its own past.