This re-envisioning of Manhattan is the focus of the Mannahatta Project at New York’s Wildlife Conservation Society. It reflects nearly a decade of research led by Eric Sanderson, a senior conservation ecologist for WCS at the Bronx Zoo, after he came across a British Headquarters map from 1782. In turn, he speculated what life might have been like in 1609, before the skyscrapers, subways and crowded sidewalks, when Henry Hudson first gazed upon the region. The results are amazing: computer-generated, interactive images of the island, called “Mannahatta” by the native peoples, as it might have looked then. Sanderson describes the evolution of the project in this video. The Mannahatta exhibition continues at the Museum of the City of New York through October 12. Sanderson, who’s an expert in the application of geographic principles and techniques to problems in wildlife, landscape, and ecological conservation, also published a book on the project, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, last May.
Still, the project’s centerpiece is the online presentation, a place to explore the island block by block from the present back to 1609. I decided to examine the area surrounding the Chrysler Building at 405 Lexington Avenue, bounded by 43rd and 44th Streets between Third Avenue and Lexington. The project site features a detailed reconstruction of the immediate landscape, wildlife and human habitat that likely existed here four centuries ago, contrasted with the dense urban space of today. Incredible.
