Times Square then and now: the area featured a red-maple swamp frequented by beavers, wood ducks, and elk.

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It is remarkable, in the accounts of theearliest European visitors to the

North American continent, how littleinterest some of these explorers seemedto take in the land they had just found.They hardly went ashore. As seamen—and seekers of clear passage to the Ori-ent—they were more interested in thecurrents, tides, soundings, and shoals.The land, rich as it was, was at first notmuch more than an impediment. Ofcourse, all that changed soon enough.

In early September, 1609, HenryHudson and his crew sailed their jacht,the Half Moon, through the Narrowsat the head of New York's lower bay,the point beyond which, it is generallybelieved, Giovanni da Verrazzano had

not progressed, eighty-five years before.This likely made the eighteen or soEnglishmen and Dutchmen aboard theHalf Moon the first Europeans to ven-ture up the Hudson River and thereforethe first to get a good look at the islandknown to the natives as Mannahatta.The only surviving account of this jour-ney is the diary of one of Hudson'screw, Robert Juet (who, on anothervoyage, a year later, helped lead a mu-tiny, stranding Hudson, his young son,and seven others in a small boat nearthe Arctic Circle). Juet's records ofwind directions and river depths areprecise, but from his descriptions it'soften impossible to decipher where ex-actly Hudson was on the river. Conjec-

ture abounds, as do chauvinistic claims;various modern interpreters place aSeptember 13th oyster feast at SpuytenDuyvil or Yonkers. At any rate, thecrew sailed upriver as far as Albany,where shallow waters forced them toturn back: this wasn't the way to Ca-thay. On the trip downriver, a crewmember shot and killed a native whohad sneaked into Juet's quarters andstolen his pillow; in the ensuing meleeanother native tried to tip over theirboat, "but," Juet wrote, "our Cooketooke a Sword, and cut off one of hishands, and he was drowned." The nextday, seven leagues south, the "Sauages"ambushed them. The sailors shot aboutten of them, then took refuge in a baythat sounds as though it may have abut-ted Washington Heights: "Hard by itthere was a Cliife, that looked of thecolour of a white greene, as though itwere either Copper, or Siluer Myne:and I thinke it to be one of them, by theTrees that grow vpon it. For they be allburned, and the other places are greeneas grasse, it is on that side of the Riuerthat is called Manna-hata."

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This is Juet's sole explicit mentionof the island. We can only speculatenow about what impression it made.Whoever drew the night watch mayhave observed an ill wind shifting fromnorthwest to east, carrying the smell ofearly-autumn rot, or the faltering racketof crickets and katydids. (New York hasalways been noisy; Peter Kalm, a Swed-ish botanist, visiting in 1748, noted,"Tree frogs . . . are so loud it is difficultfor a man to make himself heard." PoorKalm: he was also so disfigured by mos-quito bites while here that he couldn'tappear in public.) It may have seemeda menacing place; Hudson and his crewfled from it. Two days later, the HalfMoon was beating back to England,and then eventually on to Holland,which had originally sent Hudson forth.In the coming years, the Dutch dis-patched more ships and, in 1614, estab-lished the colony of New Netherland,with New Amsterdam, at Manhat-tan's southern tip, soon to be its teem-ing gateway and hub. The island beganits accelerated transformation into amanipulated forest of asphalt and steel.Never again would it be so wild and raw,or so under-chronicled. The new inhab-itants, once they got rid of the old ones,spilled far more ink than blood.

To Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecol-ogist with the Wildlife ConservationSociety, the proliferation of documen-tation has been of great but not limitlessuse. The more people there were to dothe observing, the less of the naturallandscape there was to observe. Sander-son is in charge of a W.C.S. projectcalled the Human Footprint, whichseeks to assess and map the humanrace's impact on the surface of the earth.New York, perhaps, is the ultimate case."It's hard to think of any place in theworld with as heavy a footprint, in so

5 short a time, as New York," he said re-cently. "It's probably the fastest, biggestland-coverage swing in history." For

9'z nearly a decade, he has been trying toLT,- determine exactly how Manhattanll would have appeared to Hudson and his8 men in 1609 had they disembarked and=2 explored the place—to summon and

depict the island as it was, just before itcame under the shadow of that foot. He

2 has christened this effort the Manna-hatta Project. Sanderson intends tocomplete it in time for the quadricen-

tennial, two years hence, of Hudson'slandfall. It will include a lavish book; aWeb site; an exhibit, he hopes, at theAmerican Museum of Natural History;and, niftiest of all, a virtual re-creation—a three-dimensional computer map—inwhich you will be able to fly, as it were,above the island, land wherever youwant, and have a look around. In placeof your local cell-phone shop or O.T.B.parlor, you may see a trout stream, or ablack bear browsing amid blueberrypatches.

The Mannahatta Project aspires tominute verisimilitude, down to the vari-eties of moss, and will facilitate a kind ofnaturalist's version of George-Washing-ton-slept-here. Eventually, Sandersonwould like to put up plaques aroundtown calling attention to this or that by-gone pond or dune, or even to post re-creations of 1609 vistas on the city's nextgeneration of bus shelters. A visitor toTimes Square, standing alongside theNaked Cowboy on the traffic island atForty-fifth Street and Broadway, mightbe encouraged to see a convergence,under what is now the Marriott Marquis,of two freshwater creeks, one flowing outof a marsh beneath the headquarters ofthe New York Post, and the other fromunder the Jacqueline Kennedy OnassisHigh School. The creeks were dammedby beavers to create a red-maple swamp,frequented by wood ducks and elk. Theidea of all this, of course, is to get us toappreciate the remnants of the naturalworld, even in this degraded place, andthen to work harder to preserve them,here and everywhere else. Still, althoughSanderson might not admit it, such vi-sions also have a way of helping us tosavor our particular range of degrada-tions. We've made a fine mess.

The citizen's urge to know his city isa strong one, and perhaps nowhere

more so than in New York, where cos-mopolitanism refracts into a kind of asuperheated parochial self-regard. NewYorkers can hardly fathom how youcould come into New York Harbor andnot immediately see that this island, toborrow the writer Russell Shorto'sphrase, would soon be at the center ofthe world. Hudson's men didn't evenseem to recognize that it was an island,much less a special one. It would havebeen harder, certainly, for them to imag-

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They must have noticed, though,that the harbor was as deep and fair asthey come, and that the river at its headwas a significant one. Even though theHudson didn't lead to the Orient, it didreach deep into the heart of beaver-peltcountry, and, eventually, it provided ac-cess to the Great Lakes and the terri-tory west of the Appalachians, by way,first, of the Mohawk River, and, later,of the Erie Canal. Geography deter-mined the city's destiny, to a certain de-gree. But what of its ecology? Manhat-tan was at the center of a web of tidalestuaries—a ripe marine environment,a major stop on the eastern flyway formigrating birds. Its temperate seasons,dense hardwood forests, ample fresh-water, great diversity of habitats— --four "ecological communities" in all, ac-cording to Sanderson, from pitch-pinebarrens to peatlands to eelgrass mead-ows—made it an unusually abundantcorner of the continent. Without thecity astride it, the island might still be

one of the hemisphere's marvels. Man-hattan was a superstar, even before itssettlers made it one.

"You could do the same thing fordowntown Cleveland, but it wouldn'thave the same impact," Sanderson said ofhis project. "New York is the archetypalcity, so in some ways the nature that un-derlies it is also archetypal."

The attempt to strip one layer fromthe other, and to see where they matchup, seems to stimulate some as yet un-discovered cerebral nodes devoted tobefore-and-after visualization. The fan-tasy of depopulation, whether retroac-tive or futuristic, appeals to our sense ofvanity and self-loathing. It may help ex-plain the success of the book "TheWorld Without Us," in which the au-thor, Alan Weisman, describes whatwould happen to the earth if humanswere no longer around. (In short, itwould both bounce back and go to hell,in interesting ways.) Ifs Mannahatta inreverse. Weisman devotes a few pages toSanderson's project, surmising that itsfindings will give us a clue as to what

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Manhattan would become in our ab-sence. But, of course, the Manhattan of1609 is lost. The city is far more than aflesh wound.

Sanderson caught his first glimpse ofprelapsarian Manhattan in a map thathad been prepared by the British duringthe Revolutionary War. It is called theBritish Headquarters Map, and it de-picts, in meticulous detail, at a scale ofsix and a half inches to a mile, the is-land's contours and topographical fea-tures, its streams and swamps, so as toaid the British in defending it againstGeneral Washington's ContinentalArmy. The map emphasizes marchabil-ity. In 1782, when the map was likelycompleted, most of the island's pre-Hudson topography and hydrology, ifnot its ecology (the Dutch and Englishhad already introduced dozens of spe-cies, and chased away a few, too), waslargely intact—although the map doesnot show, for example, that the British,cut off from the rest of the continentduring the war, had chopped down allthe trees. ("The island is totally stripped,"George Washington observed in 1781.)After the Revolution, and especiallyafter the adoption of the grid system, in1811, the island's surface, and even itsinnards, were irrevocably altered.

The grid ran roughshod over thelandscape. In 1808, John Randel wasdispatched to survey the entire island,for the purpose of laying out the grid. Adecade later, he began a series of ninety-two maps, called the Farm Maps—me-ticulous closeups, with an elevationreading for the northwest corner ofevery intersection on the new grid.Sanderson pieced these together andalso found Randers notebooks at theNew-York Historical Society, whichcontained even more detail. ThenSanderson, along with some colleagues,went out into the field with an altime-ter and a G.P.S. locator and squaredRanders findings with their own andwith the British Headquarters Map. Fi-nally, they created a new contour map,drawn by hand—a template for the res-toration of 1609.

Sanderson's map depicts a more slen-der and sundered Manhattan than theone we know. The coast is notched withcoves, streams, and tidal marshes. Thereare stretches of sandy beach, induding afour-mile strand from the Battery to

West Thirty-third Street. Over the cen-turies, the island has fattened up. TheDutch started it by dumping their refuseinto the coves and wetlands and bays.By 1782, the shoreline had already ex-panded two blocks east (Pearl Street toWater, Water to Front), thanks to asteady diet of excavated earth, garbage,and sewage. Since then, the shorelinehas been straightened and filled, andgirdled by highways; it seems weirdeven to use the word "shore." The oldcoast would have cut Ground Zero inhalf. (The terrestrial half would haveconsisted of thirty-foot hills, risingquickly from the shore, dense with oakand chestnut trees—so cry not for RadioRow.) Many of the city's hills, especiallythose on the southern half of the island,have been levelled, and its dells andcreeks have been filled. Murray Hill, forexample, used to be a prominent ridge,running from present-day Forty-sixthStreet and Sixth Avenue southeast to itshigh point on East Thirty-seventh. Ap-proaching it from the north, you wouldhave seen a steep hemlock forest. Nowyou hardly notice any incline at all,heading downtown on Fifth Avenue,unless you are on Rollerblades, skatinginto the wind.

One day, I went to visit Sandersonin the W.C.S. offices, which oc-

cupy a cluster of trailers in a parking lotat the Bronx Zoo. He greeted me inbare feet: a morning of torrential rainhad caught him mid-commute, fromhis home on City Island, and soakedhim to the knees. His trailer was a par-adise of field guides and cool maps.Sanderson is forty, with a gentle man-ner and a soft voice but the intense eyesof a functional obsessive. He grew up in(and on) Walnut Creek, California—the East Bay. He recalls that his drive-way was always full of frogs. In the earlyseventies, Sanderson remembers, theArmy Corps of Engineers converted thecreek into a concrete ditch. The frogsdisappeared. Once, when he was a BoyScout, a counsellor told him to sit nextto the Stanislaus River for three hourswithout moving. "I thought I was doneafter fifteen minutes," he said. "Afterthirty minutes, I was totally bored. Andthen things got interesting. I began tonotice things."

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York, to work for the W.C.S.—a hard-luck deployment for a nature boy. Thecity has, somewhat ironically, long beena major nexus for naturalists, both ama-teur and professional, who, congregat-ing here out of institutional or commer-cial necessity, sought an outlet for theirLinnaean inclinations. The ratio of fieldnotes to actual field may be higher inNew York than anywhere else. Sander-son, anyway, began to notice things.

Sanderson has devised a systematicway of recording and representing anecosystem. He calls it the Muir web,after John Muir, the pioneering Amer-ican naturalist. In the Muir web, eachspecies of plant or animal, and eachcharacteristic of habitat, has a full set ofneeds and associations, which, takentogether, form a tangle of connectionand dependency. If you have a par-ticular bird, it means that you'll have aparticular tree bark, or nut, or bug, andso on. To evoke 1609 Manhattan, hethrows out the non-native species—such as the cardinal, which didn't ex-pand its range this far north until thetwentieth century—and adds those hecan fairly presume were here. He mustcatalogue the conditions under which,say, white pines exist—shallow, sandy,sterile soil—and make an educated guessas to where they may have been. Hesaid, "I may be going out on a limb, butat least I'm trying to document whoselimb I'm out on." By the time he's done,he expects to have four thousand ele-ments in his Muir web. He then plugsthem all into his customized modellingsoftware, which places them on themap, as nature, or a creator, might have.The software mimics that of social-net-working sites. His son, who is six yearsold, once asked him to explain it, and hesaid, "This program writes programsthat tell the mapping program to makethe maps that predict where all the spe-cies were."

Eighty per cent of the work is build-ing the data sets. The glory part is turn-ing that data into 3-D pictures. Thisis the bailiwick of Markley Boyer, adigital-photography entrepreneur whoheard about the Mannahatta Projectwhile working with the W.C.S. inGabon, and volunteered to help. For ex-ample, using line drawings from books,and photographs of bark, seeds, andleaves, Boyer creates computer images

of trees—several varieties of each spe-cies. "Then the software will start plac-ing trees semi-intelligently," Sandersonsaid. He is predicting accuracy down toone block.

For every element of the Manna-hatta project, Sanderson has consulteddozens of sources: "Catalogue of PlantsGrowing Spontaneously within ThirtyMiles of the City of New York" (1817);"The Moss Flora of New York City andVicinity" (1916); various soil guides,which describe much of the city's soil as"coarse anthropogenic material," alsoknown as garbage. As far as phantomwater is concerned, a favorite is JamesReuel Smith's "Springs and Wells ofManhattan and the Bronx, New YorkCity," which Smith researched, begin-ning in 1897, by riding a bicycle aroundtown and taking photographs of springsand wells (an approach unavailable tohim in the preparation of his "Springsand Wells in Greek and Roman Liter-ature"). So far, the only funding San-derson has received is thirty-five thou-sand dollars from the Hudson RiverEstuary Program, which is underwrit-ten by New York's Department of En-vironmental Conservation, plus the bookdeal, which is from Harry N. Abrams.The president of the W.C.S., StevenSanderson (no relation), has allowedhim to devote a great portion of his timeto Mannahatta. Steven Sanderson toldme recently, with a note of admiration,if not quite impatience, "It will be won-derful, finally, to get all of this squeezedout of Eric's head into some availableformat."

" Show him your ephemeral creeks,"

Sanderson said to Amanda Huron,a City University graduate student, whowas busy modelling tidal levels on acomputer. As Sanderson and Boyerlooked on, she pulled up a representa-tion of the Collect Pond, the site of a Le-nape settlement, and later of Five Points,an infamous slum, and now of FoleySquare, home to several governmentbuildings. The pond supplied the citywith drinking water into the nineteenthcentury, until it was polluted by tanner-ies and slaughterhouses; it was then filledwith dirt and garbage that settled andmoldered and stank—which is one rea-son that the neighborhood built over itwas a slum. Huron's diagram showed

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that a pair of streams pouring out of theCollect Pond, one heading east and theother west, joined tidal creeks that me-andered, in turn, into the East and Hud-son Rivers. At high tide, Sandersonthinks, the Lenape could paddle a canoefrom one side of the island to the other."It's like the L train," Boyer said.

According to the 1782 map, Man-hattan had more than seventy miles ofstreams and at least twenty-one ponds.The longest stream was the Saw Kill; itflowed from present-day Central Parkto what is now the Seventy-first Streetexit off the F.D.R. Drive. The GreatKill went from Times Square to theHudson, near the entrance to the Lin-coln Tunnel. The soggy ground of theLispenard Meadows, under what is nowSoHo and the northern part of Tribeca,is responsible for the dearth of skyscrap-ers in that part of the city and the dip inthe skyline between downtown andmidtown. (It's no obstacle to today's en-gineers, who can reach the bedrock deepbelow the muck. Witness, if you must,

the forty-six-story Trump SoHo hotelrising above Spring Street.) There was apebbly brook on Maiden Lane, wherethe Dutch girls would do their washing.There are still stories of streams runningthrough the kitchens of fancy restau-rants or the basements of schools. Bestknown, perhaps, is Minetta Brook, acreek whose burbling waters supposedlysurface, after storms, in the lobby of anapartment building on lower Fifth Ave-nue, into a bonglike contraption of cleartubing.

At Astor Place, a series of sand hills-zandbergen—supported pitch-pine andscrub-oak barrens, like those you see insouthern New Jersey or eastern Long Is-land. The Upper West Side was a pla-teau of upland forest and meadow,abloom with asters (not Astors), cardi-nal flowers, monkey flowers, red colum-bine, and black snakeroot. For this rea-son, the Dutch called it Bloemendael,which became Bloomingdale, a namethat stuck until the mid-nineteenth cen-tury. Broadway, parts ofwhich were for-

merly Bloomingdale Road, had followedthe course of an old Lenape trail up thespine of the island. The Lenape hadlikely followed the game; Broadway be-longed to cougar and deer.

One day this summer, I met Sander-son and Boyer at the entrance to

Inwood Hill Park, on Isham and Sea-man Streets, near the northern tip ofManhattan, where the woods are as nearas anything in town to an original state.(The term "original" is tricky, sincetwenty thousand years ago the island layunder a thirty-stories-deep sheet of ice.)Boyer said, "This is one of the few partsof Manhattan where you can get aroundsuccessfully with a 1782 map." The ideawas to start our field trip as far back intime as possible. The further uptownyou go, the more traces you'll find of1609, as if a multigenerational campaignto obliterate them lost steam as it ad-vanced north. For this reason, Inwood isSanderson's favorite part of Manhattan.

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stretch of uncut grass between somehandball courts and a row of tenementstrawling denim-strewn laundry lines.Well-trod paths cut through an adjoin-ing thicket. Boyer said, "One thing we'vefound is that the places we like to go areplaces where gay cruisers like to go."Sanderson was wearing a panama hatand navy-colored bushwhacking clothes.Boyer, lean and bright-eyed, had onblack jeans and a white shirt. They hada G.P.S. and an enlarged printout ofa portion of the British HeadquartersMap, on which they'd superimposed thestreet grid—an oddly thrilling docu-ment, as endlessly scrutinizable as thecover of "Led Zeppelin IV."

Sanderson's hybrid map indicatedthat there had been a creek a few blockssouth. We hopped down off the grassonto a sidewalk, and then over an oldstone wall and into the woods. Therewere wild raspberries, and empty Ba-cardi bottles, and a sign saying, "DoNot Feed Pigeons." We came into aslight clearing and an almost impercep-tible depression in the earth, whichBoyer and Sanderson thought could bea sign of the stream. From the phan-tom creek bed, we headed north alonga path of crumbling asphalt, whichseemed to follow the course of an oldroad on the map. Up here, there weregiant, healthy oaks. 'We think that thisis more or less what it looked like,"Boyer said. A parks-department em-ployee sped by in a golf cart; we passed

a leopard-skin umbrella and a guy (myguess was Senegalese) in a Che Gue-vara T-shirt talking on his cell phone.From a promontory, we followed thepath down into a gulch and the oaksgave way to immense tulip poplars,many of them as old as the BritishHeadquarters Map. "There were Le-nape living in here," Sanderson said.He pointed to some caves on a talusslope, which were largely sealed offabout seventy years ago. "The ridgegave them protection against the pre-vailing winter winds," he said. Wecame out of the woods at the spotwhere, as a plaque explained, PeterMinuit supposedly bought Manhattanfrom the Lenape for trinkets worthsixty guilders. Acres of landfill nowseparated it from the waters of SpuytenDuyvil. A pair of tourists were standingthere, trying to make sense of theirmap. They looked at ours and said,"You guys have a good map."

"Ours is a little old," Boyer said.We made our way back to where

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been nearly bisected here by water.Harlem was, first and foremost, definedby this creek. (It is odd, in this sense,that Ninety-sixth Street, and not 106th,became the de-facto boundary betweenEast Harlem and the Upper East Side.)The Dutch called the south bank Ot-terspoor, owing to a preponderance ofriver otters. On the British Headquar-ters Map, a thin strip of dry land be-tween Pension's Creek and a rocky hill,in what is now the Park, was called Mc-Gowan's Pass, in honor of the familythat owned a nearby tavern. It's theKarbala Gap of the Upper East Side.Washington shot through the passprior to the Battle of Harlem, and dur-ing the War of 1812 the locals built afort there as a defense against the Brit-ish, who had attacked Connecticut.

Nowadays, McGowan's Pass is de-fended by Knish Nosh, a snack bar nextto the Conservatory Garden. On theday we visited, it was manned by a youngRussian who daimed to have pumpkinbagels (he meant muffins). The patrons,that morning, consisted of a group ofsummer campers engaged in a scaven-ger hunt, and a fleet of hospital patientsin wheelchairs, attended by a few nurses.A man drifted by on a bicycle, with"Brick House" playing from a boombox. As tempting as it was to rue the ab-sence of otters, egrets, and acres uponacres of spartina grass waving in thebreeze, there was something beguilingabout this assemblage in the Park on asummer weekday morning.

We climbed up onto the hill overthe pass, and looked north and east outover the barrio. In place of the brown-stones and bodegas, there would havebeen a vast grassy plain. There wouldhave been heath hen, now extinct. Theground was flatter than in most ofManhattan, because the rock there ismarble (called Inwood marble), ratherthan the schist that undergirds, and oc-casionally juts out of, the soil in most ofManhattan; it is softer, and so it hadbeen ground down by the ice duringthe last ice age. The Lenape had prob-ably burned the plain every ten years orso, to keep it clear, for better farmingand hunting.

As for the Harlem Meer, directlybelow us, it is, like most of the water-ways of Central Park, man-made. "I wastalking to a palynologist," Sanderson

52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007

said. "I was thinking that maybe wecould get some salt-marsh core samplesfrom beneath the Meer. But it turns outifs lined with cement."

T ater, we drove down Fifth Avenue,along the edge of what used to be

hilly, boggy wilderness, the intransigenceof which helped preserve it long enoughfor it to be viable as a park (although itgave the Park's landscapers fits). Like-wise, the other parks, to the north—suchas Morningside, Fort Lyon, and MountMorris—are on land too steep and rockyto be easily developed. We emerged intothe blinding mayhem of midtown, parkedin a garage on West Forty-eighth Street,and walked down a block to the Dia-mond District, into what was once apond-pocked hemlock forest. Five blocksto our south, on the ridge of Murray Hill,there had been stands of white pine, tento fifteen stories tall—which, ideal forships' masts, were doomed, well beforeany Coliseum Books could sprout up, andthen close, in their place. Looking downSixth Avenue, Sanderson gestured to-ward the herds of pedestrians stretchingaway from us and said, "You see all thoseheads, and you think that the six hundredLenape who used to live on Manhattancould have fit on that one block."

We stood on the north side of Forty-seventh, looking across the street at therow ofjewelry shops—the Futurama Di-amond Exchange—and tried to picture acool, shady forest. The citizens of theworld streamed past, intent on makingdeals. A Chinese-restaurant deliverymanasked us to move so that he could unlockhis bike. Boyer had his G.P.S. out. Wewere searching for the site of an ancientpond, which they had seen on the 1782map. Gradually, we dosed in on it. "Righthere," Boyer said. The pond's shorestretched from David S. Diamonds to theNational Jewelry Exchange. It occurredto me that the stall where I'd purchasedan engagement ring ten years earlier wasright on top of it. We decided to stop by.The dealer, recognizing me, said, "Whatare you doing here?" We tried to explain.He said that he knew nothing about anypond and then gave us a look suggest-ing we'd better just move along.

NEWYORKER.COMMore images from the Mannahatta Project.