Today, that populations more than eight million.

It's the most populated city in America.

But that's not its only change.

The island of Manhattan has grown vertically, of course, with skyscrapers, but outwardly as well as dirt.

And the garbage generated by all those people was used to expand the area they could live on.

Today we're joining a local architecture critic for a tour of New York City's ever changing waterfront.

We generally think of New York is having five boroughs Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island.

But there's really 1/6 borough, and it's the largest, which is the water that connects the other five.

So the first pier in New York started right here, standing here.

You don't really feel like you're in a maritime city.

You don't feel like you're close to the water.

But in New Amsterdam days, this was really the edge of Manhattan, and everything from here to what is now.

The river is landfill.

It is really the most profitable kind of recycling is you take garbage put in the water and turn it into real estate.

Yeah, one of the best places to get a sense of how the city has changed and the waterfront has changed is right here.

Pierre, 15.

It's a wonderful example of the way a relatively small, relatively modest design intervention can create a space people really didn't know about.

So this is Soissons Landing.

This is the entry point to Governor's Island.

If you take the ferry from Manhattan, it's just a five minute ferry ride.

Everybody disembarks here and then finds their ways to different points on the Island way.

I don't know.

On there's a map, which shows you the two parts of the island theory journal Governors Island, which was where the Dutch first settled on then.

All of this is landfill.

I'm here in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is a wonderful place to tell the story of New York's tempestuous love affair with the water and the waterfront.

And right where we're standing here was just a oily, polluted shoreline, isolated behind chain link fences that you really couldn't access.

It was really kind of an abandoned area of the city.

Now, thanks to 20 years of Landscaping of Reclamation.

Uh, this park is now full of people.

It's a destination park, not just a neighborhood park.

To me, this story of New York re embracing its waterfront is a very optimistic one.

It's not just about the waterfront.

It's really about the idea of seeing some of the hardest hit areas of the city some of the weaknesses and finding the imagination and the long term commitment to build something new.