Seeing Downtown, 1609

A conservationist pictures Manhattan Before Europeans Arrived

By Ron Drenger
Images: Markley Boyer for the Wildlife Conservation Society

Who needs a time machine? Just take a walk with Eric Sanderson. During a recent stroll around Lower Manhattan, Sanderson stopped next to Foley Square. Before him was a concrete plaza flanked by imposing courthouses and tall office buildings. But, as is his habit when immersed in Manhattan’s bustling cityscape, Sanderson saw something vastly different. “We’d be on a lily pad in the middle of a pond, with lots of shorebirds, geese and ducks,” he said. “Fringing the pond are willows and green shrubs. There’s a little stream there going toward Canal Street, and a stream on this side to the East River.” “On that side,” he continued, pointing west toward Broadway, “there’s a hill 30 to 40 feet high. It’s all forests like you see in upstate New York. Between the pond and the hill is a valley, with maple trees, American chestnut trees and tulip trees. You’ve got black bears, beavers, and Eastern mountain lions.”
To the east, toward Bayard Street, there would be a Lenape Indian village, he said, “which means there are corn, bean and squash fields nearby.” Sanderson’s visions are not the idle imaginings of a nature lover, though that he certainly is. A landscape ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo, Sanderson is on a quest to reconstruct what Manhattan—the Lenape called it Mannahatta, or “'island of many hills”—looked like in 1609, when Henry Hudson first sailed past. Using a wide array of historical records, coupled with satellite technology, his Mannahatta Project seeks to pinpoint, block by block, where hills, valleys, streams, ponds, forests and marshes were located, as well as what animals, insects and plants inhabited them. “This project pushes the science and the history on almost every front,” he said. At his job, Sanderson works to protect wildlife around the world. He pursues the Mannahatta Project, which is supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society but has limited funding so far, mostly on his own time, with the help of student volunteers and his wife. “Sometimes I feel that I know the Mannahatta of 400 years ago better than today’s Manhattan,” he said. Sanderson’s mission began in 1999, when he came across a reproduction of the British Headquarters Map, circa 1782, drawn by the British while they occupied New York during the American Revolution. It mapped not only roads and forts but also Manhattan’s shoreline, hills and extensive wetlands, which were largely unchanged since the arrival of Europeans. The remarkably precise map inspired Sanderson to try to create a computer model that would show modern New Yorkers the “wild” island that once existed. After identifying landmarks on the map that still exist, such as Trinity Church, he used a Global Positioning System (GPS) device to determine coordinates for those sites and many others. He then created a multi-layered mapping database that allows him to place historical features within a half-block of their locations on today’s street grid.

Collaborating with historians and scientists at city institutions, Sanderson is slowly filling in Mannahatta’s ecological picture, which included 21 lakes or ponds and 62 miles of streams. Lower Manhattan had many streams, including small ones running along what are now Beaver Street, Broad Street and Maiden Lane. (The grassy north bank of this last stream was a popular spot for Dutch laundry women, and thus was first called Maagde Paetje, or Virgins’ Path.) The island was also home to at least 10,000 species and some 50 different ecosystems, such as eelgrass beds, salt marshes and cedar bogs. With the database Sanderson can produce rough images, like the ones shown here, of what different parts of the island probably looked like.
“There will be some suppositions and assumptions along the way,” he said. But he hopes to fill many of those gaps and complete most of the project by 2009, the 400th anniversary of Hudson’s journey. On the recent walk, Sanderson conjured up primeval Downtown. The pond that he described at Foley Square was the Collect Pond, which provided a source of clean water, and fish, for millennia before it was polluted by a nearby tannery in the 1700’s. It was filled in the early 1800’s, with soil obtained by leveling the hill next to it. The Dutch called that hill Kalck-Hoek, or Lime-shell Point, because it was covered by piles of clam and oyster shells—a sign of the abundant supply of shellfish that the Lenape enjoyed. Within 25 years of Dutch settlement, the Lenape were driven away. Walking west to Church Street, Sanderson described the hill sloping down to a corridor of salt marshes along today’s West Broadway.
“There were a low set of hillocks there, maybe five to 10 feet high, and sandy. Diamond-backed terrapin turtles liked it—they need sandy areas to lay their eggs. And there would have been osprey flying around, and egrets and herons.” He pointed out a scraggly patch of grass poking out of of a crack in the sidewalk. “God bless ‘em for trying so hard,” he said. At Greenwich and Chambers Street, he presented an unseen beach, which once extended north to today’s midtown. And half a block further, “This was it, the Hudson River.” The goals of the Mannahatta Project go beyond digitally reconstructing a bygone world. Sanderson wants to instill in others the desire for wildlife conservation. “If we can get people to realize how wonderful nature was, and is, and how it could be seen here in New York, I hope that they’ll be inspired to help preserve and restore it. I don’t expect Mannahatta to come back, but there are lots of Mannahattas around the world that we can still save.” Even in New York itself, he suggested, some natural elements might indeed be brought back; streams that were filled in could be restored. “You can close a few streets and build a few bridges,” he said. Sanderson plans an outreach campaign to educate the public about Manhattan’s ecological past, with an interactive exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, street guides, a Web site and a book. In September, he made a presentation to 4th- and 7th-graders from Brooklyn at City Hall Academy in Tweed Courthouse, headquarters of the city’s Department of Education. In a first-floor classroom, Sanderson described what Manhattan once looked like, showing slides of maps and beautiful landscapes and passing around photos of beavers, bears and bog turtles. A photo of today’s 42nd Street, displayed alongside a computer rendering of what it probably looked like 400 years ago, elicited cries of “Wow” and “Cool” from the students. “Often people forget in a big city that there used to be wildlife here,” Sanderson told them. It is important, he added, to be aware of “how much human beings can change nature, for the better, and for the worse.” Sanderson and several teachers then led walks around the neighborhood with small groups of children, GPS units in hand. “I can’t imagine that New York used to look like that,” Francisco Rosado, 9, said later over lunch. “I thought he was talking about a different place.” Sanderson’s message seemed to have reached Diandre Wong, also 9. “Trees don’t deserve to be cut down,” she said. “They have lives, too.” Sanderson hopes that the Mannahatta Project will elicit many such reactions. “It’s just one small piece to try to get people to love the place they are and appreciate the nature that used to be there,” he said, “and could be there again.”