Mannahatta

eric w. sanderson is the Associate Director

Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the

for Landscape Ecology and Geographic Analysis

revelation, in words and pictures, of a quiet, wooded

in the Living Landscape Program of the Wildlife

island at the mouth of a great river, with a temperate

Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo. He is an

climate and a gentle and enduring people, destined

expert in the application of geographic principles and

to become one of the greatest cities on Earth. The

techniques to problems in wildlife, landscape, and

explorer Henry Hudson was looking for Oriental

ecological conservation, and has published numerous

riches when he came to Manhattan Island’s shore on

articles on the subject. He lives in New York City.

September 12, 1609, but instead he found something much more valuable. Mannahatta, the “island of

markley boyer has worked with the Wildlife

many hills,” was home to over fifty-five different eco-

Conservation Society creating maps and visualiza-

systems, with thousands of species (including wolves,

tions for a new series of national parks in Gabon in

black bears, bald eagles, passenger pigeons, and

central Africa. He is also a silversmith, exploring

sea-run trout) thriving in a landscape shaped over the

similar themes of geomorphology in metal and wood.

millennia, an example of the abundance and diversity

He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

of nature undiminished by the human footprint.

Jacket front: Mannahatta— the original Native American name for Manhattan—is shown here (bottom) the way it appeared on September 12, 1609, just before European discovery, and as it appears today (top). courtesy markley boyer/ wildlife conservation society (bottom) and digitalglobe (top).

Jacket back: Midtown Manhattan, four hundred years ago (top) and today (bottom). courtesy markley boyer/ wildlife conservation society (top) and stephen amiaga (bottom).

z Abrams 115 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011 www.abramsbooks.com

Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

By Eric W. Sanderson Illustrations by Markley Boyer 120 full-color illustrations 352 pages, 7 ½ x 10" Hardcover with jacket

Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city?

Welcome to Mannahatta, 1609.

MANNAHATTA A NATURAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY

Eric Sanderson is a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and this book culminates ten years of primary research into the ecological history of Manhattan—The Mannahatta Project.

Sanderson and his colleagues have reconstructed Mannahatta at the scale of a city block using the latest techniques in computational geography and visualization that allow them to recreate what Manhattan looked like in the hours before Hudson arrived. The story of the project’s creation touches on George

ISBN: 978-0-8109-9633-5 U.S. $40.00 Can. $44.00 U.K. £19.99

Washington and the American Revolution; the origi-

Nature and History Rights: World Pub month: May

of a lost landscape; and the new science of Muir webs,

To place an order: Please call your sales representative or Hachette Book Group at 800.759.0190 or fax 800.286.9471

nal Native American people, the Lenape, who lived on Mannahatta; the remarkable hills, streams, and dales which describe the interconnections that make nature

ERIC W. SANDERSON

and cities work.

More than a history, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a call for us to stretch our imaginations not just back to 1609, but ahead to cities and a world where people and wildlife can thrive for hundreds of years into the future.

To inquire about publicity: Please call 212.519.1232 or fax 212.366.0809

Abrams is an imprint of

U.S. $40.00 Canada $44.00

I LLUSTRATI O N S BY MA R K L EY BOY E R

U.K. £19.99

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Chapter One The Mannahatta Project

8

Chapter Two A Map Found

34

Chapter Three The Fundamentals of Mannahatta

66

Chapter Four The Lenape

102

Chapter Five Ecological Neighborhoods

136

Chapter Six Muir Webs: Connecting the Parts

170

Chapter Seven Manhattan 2409

208

Appendix A: Natural Features Appendix B: Lenape Sites Appendix C: Flora and Fauna Notes Bibliography Illustration Credits Acknowledgments Index

244 258 264 291 310 330 333 336

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Chapter One

The Mannahatta Project As the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees . . . had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 1925

Mannahatta, 1609.

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chapter two

The first time I walked through New York City I wondered what giant or god had created such a place. Buildings like cliffs, avenues like canyons, traffic flowing like rivers, parks brimming with forests and urban fields, a landscape populated by people seemingly from every nation and all parts of the continent, moving rapidly and with a deliberate attitude about their business, even if that business was none at all. I was intoxicated. I felt amazed at the ambition of the place and humbled by the power that had created it, for neither giants nor gods had built the “awful & grand” city; generations of New Yorkers, poor and wealthy, native and immigrant, had created the metropolis over a span of nearly four hundred years. Those people had each come for their own reasons, with their own peculiar visions, to this particular piece of land and shore and decided through some strange, collective logic, to raise a city on a scale beyond the power of the imagination to conceive.

A law professor once described to me lying beneath the pillars of the George Washington Bridge as a child, cupping his hands around his eyes, and peering up the river to imagine the view that Henry Hudson might have seen as he sailed in on his small wooden ship. Jacob Astor, the industrialist, imagined a city where the wealth of an entire continent could accumulate in the hands of just a few men (and preferably one). Robert Moses, the planner, had a vision for New York City that included the automobile and access to ball fields and swimming pools and, in the midst of the Great Depression, reconfigured the city for the future. Michael Bloomberg, the recent mayor and billionaire, envisioned a future where the economy always hummed, with less traffic congestion, no smoking, and better subways.

Hudson’s vision, to the extent that he had one, was to get rich and then get out of town. Adrian van der Donck, the Jonkheer who gave his name to Yonkers, New York, came to New Netherland in 1641, stayed, and became wealthy. He wanted others to join him and populate his lands; he wrote a lengthy paean to his new home called the Narrative of New Netherland (1650), describing the land as “naturally fruitful and capable of supporting a large population, if it were judiciously allotted according to location. . . . [It] is adapted to the production of all kinds of winter and summer fruits, and with less trouble and tilling than in the Netherlands. . . . The air is pleasant here, and more temperate. . . . ” Many others agreed, describing not only the “sweetness of the air” (Daniel Denton, 1670), but also the “wonderful size of the trees” (Johann de Laet, 1633), “all sorts of fowls, such as cranes, bitterns, swans, geese, ducks,

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introduction

5

top The Visscher Map, circa 1651, shows northeastern North America as the Dutch understood it in the years following Henry Hudson’s voyage. Manhattan is at the center of the map, at the mouth of the Hudson River, which in turn is the focus of the New Netherland colony.

Europeans at the time knew the outlines of the continent, but were only beginning to explore its heart. bottom The inset image shows the small village of New Amsterdam as it appeared from just off the tip of Manhattan. Note the windmill, gallows, and rolling hills.

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The British Headquarters Map, circa 1782–83, once described as a “topographical and historical encyclopedia” of Manhattan before modern development, shows most of the original hills, streams, shoreline, and wetlands of the island.

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top Freshwater wetlands form complex mosaics that vary according to how often and how deeply they flood. Sunny and wet, they are strongholds of biodiversity. These wetlands in Sterling Forest State Park, in Orange County, New York, are similar to those that were found on Mannahatta. bottom Deep emergent marshes, like these recreated at the New York Botanical Garden, form in deep standing waters.

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top Swamps are forested wetlands. Times Square was once at least in part a red-maple swamp, like this one in Sterling Forest State Park. bottom Highbush blueberry bogs were once a favorite of black bears in Central Park. A similar community occurred where Belvedere Lake is today.

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The Mannahatta Muir web. Computer algorithms map the structure based on the numbers of relationships between elements, putting related elements close together. The true Muir web structure is multi-dimensional.

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muir webs: connecting the parts

193

these elements function as a subject, other times as an object. Each connection is a relationship based on food, shelter, water, or reproduction, or in the case of abiotic elements, on physical process dependencies like soil formation or how topography defines slope and slope determines water flow. In honor of Muir and his insight, I called these new networks “Muir webs.” They became the key, the magic decoder ring, to mapping where all the plants and animals of Mannahatta occurred those four hundred years ago.

In its initial iteration, the Muir web built on the list of likely species contained a total of 1,623 elements, comprised of 80 percent species or groups of species, 10 percent abiotic elements or groups of elements, 5 percent ecological communities or groups of communities, and 5 percent “combinations,” composed of living and nonliving elements. In other words, species dominated the network, but the abiotic environment (the “fundamentals” of Mannahatta) was also strongly present, and various combinations of elements —whether of ecological communities or of life and not-life (the aspens near the stream)—were critically important.

If species are like the people in a city, then by analogy this suggests that not only are relationships between people important, but so are our relationships to the infrastructure of the city (the buildings, the cars, the streets), to the neighborhoods (akin to ecological communities), and to the restaurants, offices, parks, and other places that only function when people come together (the combinations).

Between those 1,623 elements, we wrote 8,245 explicit habitat sentences based on descriptions available in field guides and natural histories of the food, water, shelter, and, where applicable, reproductive requirements, of the plants and animals of Mannahatta. Many species are just passing through in September; they aren’t staying to reproduce (which is largely a spring- and summertime activity in the temperate northern latitudes), so their reproductive requirements are not included in the Mannahatta Muir web. Of the relationships in the 8,245 habitat sentences, 55 percent were central or primary relationships with other elements—the bread and butter of habitat relationships; 37 percent were relationships identifying membership within groups; and 6 percent were enhancing relationships—that is, relationships that were positive but not required parts of the habitat. The remaining relationships involved a small number of elements of lesser strength; very few were negative relationships that attenuated or excluded another species.

These kinds of negative relationships were probably more important than this initial analysis would suggest, as we didn’t include the not-so-nice sides of nature—competition, parasitism, and disease. They represent the next frontier

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eric w. sanderson is the Associate Director

Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the

for Landscape Ecology and Geographic Analysis

revelation, in words and pictures, of a quiet, wooded

in the Living Landscape Program of the Wildlife

island at the mouth of a great river, with a temperate

Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo. He is an

climate and a gentle and enduring people, destined

expert in the application of geographic principles and

to become one of the greatest cities on Earth. The

techniques to problems in wildlife, landscape, and

explorer Henry Hudson was looking for Oriental

ecological conservation, and has published numerous

riches when he came to Manhattan Island’s shore on

articles on the subject. He lives in New York City.

September 12, 1609, but instead he found something much more valuable. Mannahatta, the “island of

markley boyer has worked with the Wildlife

many hills,” was home to over fifty-five different eco-

Conservation Society creating maps and visualiza-

systems, with thousands of species (including wolves,

tions for a new series of national parks in Gabon in

black bears, bald eagles, passenger pigeons, and

central Africa. He is also a silversmith, exploring

sea-run trout) thriving in a landscape shaped over the

similar themes of geomorphology in metal and wood.

millennia, an example of the abundance and diversity

He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

of nature undiminished by the human footprint.

Jacket front: Mannahatta— the original Native American name for Manhattan—is shown here (bottom) the way it appeared on September 12, 1609, just before European discovery, and as it appears today (top). courtesy markley boyer/ wildlife conservation society (bottom) and digitalglobe (top).

Jacket back: Midtown Manhattan, four hundred years ago (top) and today (bottom). courtesy markley boyer/ wildlife conservation society (top) and stephen amiaga (bottom).

z Abrams 115 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011 www.abramsbooks.com

Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

By Eric W. Sanderson Illustrations by Markley Boyer 120 full-color illustrations 352 pages, 7 ½ x 10" Hardcover with jacket

Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city?

Welcome to Mannahatta, 1609.

MANNAHATTA A NATURAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY

Eric Sanderson is a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and this book culminates ten years of primary research into the ecological history of Manhattan—The Mannahatta Project.

Sanderson and his colleagues have reconstructed Mannahatta at the scale of a city block using the latest techniques in computational geography and visualization that allow them to recreate what Manhattan looked like in the hours before Hudson arrived. The story of the project’s creation touches on George

ISBN: 978-0-8109-9633-5 U.S. $40.00 Can. $44.00 U.K. £19.99

Washington and the American Revolution; the origi-

Nature and History Rights: World Pub month: May

of a lost landscape; and the new science of Muir webs,

To place an order: Please call your sales representative or Hachette Book Group at 800.759.0190 or fax 800.286.9471

nal Native American people, the Lenape, who lived on Mannahatta; the remarkable hills, streams, and dales which describe the interconnections that make nature

ERIC W. SANDERSON

and cities work.

More than a history, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a call for us to stretch our imaginations not just back to 1609, but ahead to cities and a world where people and wildlife can thrive for hundreds of years into the future.

To inquire about publicity: Please call 212.519.1232 or fax 212.366.0809

Abrams is an imprint of

U.S. $40.00 Canada $44.00

I LLUSTRATI O N S BY MA R K L EY BOY E R

U.K. £19.99