The Mannahatta Project - New York City: 1609

Today, Times Square is a forest of flashing neon superscreens on the facades of high-rise buildings frequented by tourists and theatergoers. But 400 years ago, this Manhattan area supported a diverse population of plant and animal life.

I was attracted to the cover story, “Before New York”, of the latest National Geographic magazine which features a split photograph: the modern day cityscape on one side and the 1609 rendering of the same region to its left. I spent a month living on the Upper West Side earlier this summer and even more recently I finished reading The Last of the Mohicans, a wilderness survival tale about the clash between tribal communities and European colonists that takes place in (upstate) New York in 1757.

The article introduces the Mannahatta Project, an effort to uncover Manhattan’s original landscape and ecology, which was envisioned by Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society. Ten years later, an interactive map is up and running on the project’s website. Users can type in their addresses or NYC landmarks to learn the details of the region's ecology in 1609.

This map reveals that the site of Times Square once contained a red maple swamp, and I learned that the area surrounding the Manhattan School of Music residence hall where I stayed this summer provided multiple kinds of berries and may have been a lucrative hunting location for the Lenape people.

Today Central Park may be the only place in Manhattan where it is possible to escape from the concrete and bustle of the city. Thank goodness for that.