The Island That Time Forgot

A new vision of the lost world that is right under our feet.

From left: courtesy of Stephen Amiaga; courtesy of Markley Boyer/the Mannahatta Project/Wildlife Conservation Society / New York mag

New York | Full Story | PDF | For the last 400 years, since Henry Hudson arrived on these shores, Manhattan has been a place where people have seen what they wanted to see, and then remade it in that image. It’s been a Rauschenberg canvas, built out, cut away, layered thick with new visions, with little thought to what was there before, after which the new visions are torn away themselves. But before the towers and brownstones, before the street grid and infill, before Bloomingdale Road, before Broadway, before the farms, before the British, before the Dutch, before Henry Hudson himself, was a place called Mannahatta, island of many hills. New research by Eric W. Sanderson, a landscape ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo, augmented by digital re-creations by Markley Boyer—their work is the basis of an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York opening May 20 and a new book, Mannahatta, published by Abrams next month—has opened a window onto what New York City was like before Europeans arrived. The window has remarkable resolution—the height of the hills, the species of trees, the wandering paths of the creeks—geo-referenced to the current street grid. >>

Published 09.04.12 02:00:00 -0500 GMT | Posted by Andrew Garib on 09.04.16 | |