Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City [Hardcover]

Eric W. Sanderson (Author), Markley Boyer (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2009

On September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson first set eyes on the land that would become Manhattan. It's difficult for us to imagine what he saw, but for more than a decade, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson has been working to do just that. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the astounding result of those efforts, reconstructing, in words and images, the wild island that millions of New Yorkers now call home.

By geographically matching an 18th-century map of Manhattan's landscape to the modern cityscape, combing through historical and archaeological records, and applying modern principles of ecology and computer modeling, Sanderson is able to re-create the forests of Times Square, the meadows of Harlem, and the wetlands of downtown. Filled with breathtaking illustrations that show what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago, Mannahatta is a groundbreaking work that gives readers not only a window into the past, but inspiration for green cities and wild places of the future.

 

Library Journal:

"You don't have to be a New Yorker to be enthralled by this book. Highly recommended."

San Francisco Chronicle:
"[A]n exuberantly written and beautifully illustrated exploration of pre-European Gotham."

The New York Times Book Review:
"'Mannahatta' is a cartographical detective tale. . ."

"The fact-intense charts, maps and tables offered in abundance here are fascinating, and even kind of sexy. And the middle of the book, the two-page spread of Mannahatta in all its primeval glory-the visual denouement of a decade's research-feels a little like a centerfold." 

"Upon closing the book you feel revved up, at the very least, and are likely to see a way to build a future that is more aligned with what once was than with what can no longer be."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this brilliantly illustrated volume, Sanderson and Boyer recreate the ecology of Manhattan as it was that 1609 September afternoon when Henry Hudson first saw it, "prodigious in its abundance, resplendent in its diversity." The project began as a simple thought exercise, when senior Bronx Zoo ecologist Sanderson (Human Footprint: Challenges for Wilderness and Biodiversity) tried visualizing pre-colonial Manhattan, but was promoted to full-blown science project after Sanderson discovered an "extraordinary" 1776 British Headquarters Map detailing the island's natural terrain. Developing a "georeference" system to coordinate the old map, Sanderson "relates its depiction of the old hills and valleys to their modern addresses." From there, he reconstructs data missing from the historical record using standard scientific tools-examining pollen layers, tree rings, archeological information, etc. Sanderson's text integrates political and sociological history; examines the culture of the original inhabitants, the Lenape (their word Mannahatta means "Island of Many Hills"); and covers a wealth of ecological data; he even shares his vision for the ecologically sustainable city of 2409. This wise and beautiful book, sure to enthrall anyone interested in NYC history, boasts maps, charts, photos and artist renderings, thorough appendices (including Lenape place-names and Manhattan's flora and fauna), and an extensive section of "Notes, Sources, and Elaborations." 120 color illustrations.

About the Author

Eric W. Sanderson is the Associate Director for Landscape Ecology and Geographic Analysis in the Living Landscape Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo. He is an expert in the application of geographic principles and techniques to problems in wildlife, landscape, and ecological conservation. He lives in New York City. Markley Boyer has worked with the Wildlife Conservation Sociey creating maps and visualizations for a new series of National Parks in Gabon. He lives in Brooklyn.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Abrams; First Edition edition (May 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810996332
• ISBN-13: 978-0810996335
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.6 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #48 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Natural History

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Mind-expanding. May 7, 2009

By S. Wilson

Format:Hardcover

Sprinkled throughout this book are 12 digitally-rendered aerial "photos" of New York in 1409, often featured as before-and-after comparisons of present-day Manhattan. These are beautiful and utterly fascinating images and are the heart of this volume and the program behind it (WCS's Mannahatta Project).

The book is also chock-full of historic and computer-rendered maps, wildlife and ecosystem photos and other illustrations. Sanderson's text is informative, entertaining and not preachy.

Through this excellent book, the reader not only learns about the natural history of NYC but sees it as a microcosm of the human impacts on landscapes across the continent and world.

The writing style and tone remind me of the excellent "World Without Us" but with the added bonus of being heavily illustrated.

I only wish that there were more of the large-format digital before-and-after Manhatta Project photos... a coffee table book would be justified!

Highest recommendation (and a must-own if you live in or love NYC).

92 of 112 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Quite What I expected April 15, 2009

By Thomas Graves

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a heavy and substantial tome (inevitably printed in China - where else?) which details the author's amazing work in reconstructing the stunningly-beautiful natural environment of Manhattan Island in 1609, when the Dutch explorer Henry Hudson and his crew first laid eyes on it.

This much I already knew before purchasing the book, but frankly, I was disappointed when I actually got it. In part this is because the book seems to struggle to decide what it wants to be. A major portion does indeed deal with Manhattan Island in 1609. There are a number of amazing images put together with the latest computer-generated image technology after painstaking field research and with the 18th century British headquarters map. They depict a Manhattan so beautiful it brings tears to the eyes, particularly when you consider how totally the natural environment of the island has been destroyed. Still, I was left only half-satisfied, and would love to have seen something other than simulated aerial views, i.e. some neighborhood by neighborhood ground-level close-ups with descriptions (maybe they exist somewhere, but the link to the [...] website printed on the book's jacket didn't work; perhaps it's not up yet). But apart from reprints of historical paintings and drawings, there is less detail than I would have expected. Nor is there much discussion (apart from references to the laying-out of the grid street-plan and the grading involved) of the Manhattan archeological record, or of the massive and traumatic process of changing the primitive woodland paradise of 1609 into an unrecognizable agricultural and then urban environment. Since the earliest Dutch prints of New Amsterdam in the book already show a treeless tip of southern Manhattan, the colonists clearly wasted no time in proceeding with an aggressive program of land-clearing and filling. Perhaps few records exist, but it would have been interesting to learn more about how this happened, and how the deforestation progressed over the decades. For that matter, the calculated rapaciousness with which the natural environment of Manhattan was destroyed over 3 centuries also gets short shrift; to anyone acquainted with the degraded environment of NY City today & the meager environmental consciousness of its citizenry, Sanderson is oddly optimistic as he compares the 'natural biosphere' of the virgin landscape of 1609 to the 'human biosphere' of Times Square in 2009, and talks enthusiastically about a green NY which sounds more like Portland, Oregon.

Dr. Sanderson also digresses with lengthy chapters best described as philosophical ruminations on the nature of environmental research, the composition of biospheres, and the super-green Manhattan of 2409 (a wildly-optimistic scenario which combines elements of agriculture and a Disney 'city of tomorrow') only indirectly related to recreating Manhattan's lush original environment. The chapter on Manhattan's original inhabitants, the Lenni Lenape indians is fascinating, but only emphasizes how utterly the historical record of these people, who dwelt on Manhattan for hundreds of generations, has been erased.

Fully the last quarter of the book is a series of appendices, some of which are fascinating (catalog of the brooks, streams, and ponds of Manhattan), though one wonders whether so many lists were really needed.

Dr. Sanderson's enthusiasm for his topic comes through loud and clear. I just wish a bit more of it had been translated into the concrete and included in this book.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars great project, so-so book September 22, 2009

By C. P. Anderson

Format:Hardcover

The Mannahatta project is basically an extremely detailed computer simulation of what Manhattan might have looked at on the eve of European discovery. The graphics are particularly cool.

That said, I think the project is a lot more interesting than the book. The book is okay, just rather plodding. It seemed like the author really didn't have that much to say and padded the book out with some very generic, rather flowery prose. Here's an example:

"Yet it is exactly these processes of destruction that keep nature refreshed and alive. Take the death of one of those huge old-growth American chestnuts on Mannahatta, perhaps already 350 years old that night that a big wind knocks it down. The next morning, the gap in the forest canopy floods the ground with sunlight, and all those younger trees that have struggled in the shade through the decades are let loose to grow as fast as they can toward the light. In the course of the twenty years it will take the trees to fill the place of that mighty chestnut, the sun-drenched meadow will accommodate ephemeral flowers and insects that wait for just this chance to reproduce. The meadow is drenched with birdsong from nests that dot its fringes; white-tailed deer graze the lush secondary growth, where wolves come to hunt. Even the dead body of the chestnut, laid to rest in the undergrowth, becomes a habitat for mushrooms and insects, the perfect burrowing place for chipmunks and ground squirrels - until a weasel comes to ferret them out. At night a great horned owl silently falls on the timid deer mouse, and the frost descends beneath the starry sky to eclipse delicate flower buds where once the mighty chestnut grew."

How much better it would have been if he had talked a little bit more about the project or about Manhattan. Just as an example, there is an excellent map of the streams that existed in 1609, but only about a page of specifics on them. Instead, we get this:

"Streams are the conduits for water flowing aboveground; springs form where the underground water flow breaks the surface. Both are fed by rainwater and snowmelt. The rain falls, running down the leaves, stems, and trunks of trees (known respectively as leaf flow, stem flow, and trunk flow; trees can hold up to nearly a quarter inch of rainfall, which is why they are a convenient place to hide when it begins to rain, but not later)..."

Ironically, there is a whole appendix devoted to moer specific info. Why wasn't that tied in to the main body of the text?

One final gripe ... In general, the illustrations are knock-outs. Some of the maps, though, are uninterpretable. Take, for example, the one on ecological communities, on p. 139. It shows 44 different communities, in 44 different shades of brown, green, and blue. How we're supposed to distinguish one from the other on the map is beyond me.

Overall, I think this could have been a great coffee-table book or a real read, but ended up trying to be both, and never really succeeded at being either.