A Man­hat­tan with­out sky­scrap­ers sounds dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, to imag­ine today. But such a place real­ly did exist, at least up until the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. The video is a pro­duc­tion of CITY 3D TIMELAPSE, a YouTube chan­nel pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its sim­i­lar­ly accel­er­at­ed visu­al­iza­tion of the evo­lu­tion of Paris. Even if we’ve nev­er set foot there, we may well know that even old New York was once New Ams­ter­dam. That Dutch colo­nial era, as depict­ed in the time­lapse, is when the city begins.