Mannahatta: A natural history of new york city – Eric W. Sanderson

Image: Manhattan 1609 vs now | Mannahatta: A natural history of new york city

The ‘Mannahatta project’ wants to create an image of what Manhattan looked like before the urbanization, the day Henry Hudson came to Manhattan Island’s shore on the 12^th of September 1609. Manhattan looked very different back then: very green, with 55 ecosystems and thousands of species. If Manhattan looked like this today, it would be a national park. The original Native American people were the Lenape. They named the island ‘Mannahatta’, ‘Island of many hills’.

Image: Lenape, original Native Americans | Mannahatta: A natural history of new york city

Eric Sanderson is a landscape-ecologist and did 10years of research to reconstruct Mannahatta at the scale of a block. But there are very few written sources from 1609, and a few paintings. For example this painting by Thomas Howdell from 1768, which shows the hills of Greenwich Village.

Image: Greenwich Village by Thomas Howdell, 1768 | Mannahatta: A natural history of new york city

But the biggest break-through in the research was the British Headquarters Map from 1783, at the end of the American Revolution. It was designed for military purposes: mapping of roads, buildings, fortresses, hills, swamps, rivers, wetlands, … Many of these elements have disappeared over time, for example the hills. But georeferencing the old map with a contemporary map, allows us to locate this lost landscape.

Image: British Headquarters Map, 1783 | Mannahatta: A natural history of new york city

To reconstruct the history of Manhattan, four steps are needed:

_1 Describe the fundamentals of the landscape or ‘abiota’ (soils, rocks, water, shore, …)

_2 Influence of people on the land  (Lenape, war, urbanization, …)

_3 Describe all species that were living on Mannahatta and how they formed communities, mapping these species by habitat (food, water, shelter, reproductive resources)

_4 Muir webs link these three points into a network, because different species need each other or the same things. A Muir web shows how nature works.

Image: Muir Web | Mannahatta: A natural history of new york city

This info is brought together in an online map at welikia.org which means ‘my good home’. It is possible to check block by block which river, plants, animals, how much Lenape Indians lived there.

Here is the link: http://welikia.org/m-map.php