Pre-Manhattan Manhattan

Whenever I'm walking around the Financial District or Midtown, I get caught up wondering what this place was like before the Dutch and British arrived and the city slowly overtook the all the marsh and forest. I've read about the old Collect Pond at Five Points that used to supply the city with water, the canal that is now Canal Street, and the pastoral farmland that has become Uptown; the inexorable Northbound transformation of Mannahatta into Manhattan is one of the great stories of New York. One of my private joys is trying to superimpose the old landscape over today's street grid.

This week's New Yorker has an article about an ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society who's embarked on a massive project to discover and depict what early Manhattan was like--including "a coffee-table book, interactive exhibits, a series of printed street guides, and a three-dimensional virtual re-creation". Consider me publicly thrilled.

There's a slideshow on newyorker.com with images from the Mannahatta Project.

(image courtesy newyorker.com and Markley Boyer / Wildlife Conservation Society)