Customer Reviews

Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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).

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.

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.

Manhattan is one of the most urban places in the world. A city whose landscape has been so totally transformed by humans that it is a kind of archetype of both human ability and hubris.

Perhaps that is why Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is so appealing. With considerable scientific ingenuity and an artist's deft touch, Sanderson shows us what Manhattan looked like in 1609, on the morning before Henry Hudson arrived. In doing so, Sanderson has shown us not only where we have been, but where we are and where we are going. The natural history of Manhattan is not only about the past, but about the future, and how we can live on a planet where resources are rapidly diminishing.

The book is also good clean fun. How perplexing is it to stand in Times Square and think it was once a fresh water marsh? Or sit on the steps of the courthouse and imagine that here was the Collect Pond, where NYC got its fresh water for over one hundred years. In a place where nature is effaced, imagination must fill the void.

Posted June 18, 2009, 10:56 AM EST:

I have not been able to put this book down since my financée purchased it for me three weeks ago. Sanderson's account of the early history of Manhattan is truly remarkable. I am a native Manhattanite oft thought of as a country boy stuck in a city body. This book explains why. Manhattan, in its roots, is a majestic tapestry of trees, ponds, streams, bogs, grasslands, fauna and floral. It was as abundant in its diverse ecosystems as is Brooklyn in its immigrant populations. It was every bit as wild with birds and bees buzzing and bears and wolves howling as it is today with young singles in Murray Hill pining after each other in the local bars or Wall Street yuppies crowing at the sound of the opening bell. Sanderson's prose is elegant, weaving history lessons and anecdotal snippets of information into an elaborate portrait of Mannahatta's lush landscape. He brings this lost world to life with clarity in non-judgmental fashion- a remarkable work.

A truly unforgettable experience; you will never look at Manhattan in the same way again.

Eric Sanderson is a landscape ecologist who after moving to New York City a decade ago became obsessed with the question of what NYC looked like on the eve of the arrival of European explorers (1609). Sanderson eventually saw a 1782/83 British military map that laid out the topography of the entirety of Manhattan in great detail at a time when the city was still confined to the southern tip of the island -- great detail, that is, except for the actual height of the many hills depicted (in the language of the Lenape Indians, the name was originally "Island of Many Hills"). Eventually, Sanderson was able to establish the original heights of the hills from a variety of sources, including early 19th century surveying records and modern investigation of surviving bedrock outcroppings. (Over the course of many decades, most of the hills of Manhattan had been lowered or completely leveled and low land filled in.) Using this data and the British military map and other maps and drawings, Sanderson constructed an intricate computer model of the island's 1609 topography, and mated this model with a wealth of information about ecosystems of coastal regions of the northeast US, yielding quite literally a detailed picture of 1609 Manhattan, a picture unveiled in numerous computer-generated images and maps reproduced in Sanderson's new book "Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City".It is almost as if we were looking at aerial photographs taken on the day that Henry Hudson first sailed up the river that later bore his name.

Sanderson, by the way, is quite careful not to describe 1609 as being viginally primeval and untouched; instead, he points out that the native Lenapes had a profound impact on that landscape, especially regarding the open grasslands of Harlem (the Lenapes used fire to clear forest for agricultural purposes and to keep the land clear -- the earliest European explorers made note of the large grassy fields.).

Altogether, this is an extraordinarily vivid window into a vanished world. But, Sanderson goes on to project how Manhattan may look in another 400 years, if we pay heed to the necessity of creating a more sustainable urban landscape.

This is a really lovely book with beautiful graphics that reconstructs Manahattan's ecology just prior to first European contact. Will appeal to historians and ecologists and New-York-ophiles alike.

This book is full of wonderful information and photos of something I have always wondered about...what did this city look like when it was natural, before anything permanent was built here? It is a wonderful coffee table book for those who just want to browse, but also fascinating in its detail and research and deserving of a committed read cover to cover, and a wonderful reference to return to again and again. Also a great value for such a beautiful volumn.

My wife and I had no idea this book existed until we met the author's wife at the NY Botanical Gardens. She matter-of -factly told us an immense number interesting stories in about 15 minutes and threw in a modest plug about Mannahatta. I purchased the book several weeks ago and have not been able to touch it since my wife (a social studies teacher) won't put it down. Actually, I have been able to glance through it and the maps and photos are more than worth the price of admission. Mannahatta is one of those rare classic information books that you can open up at any page and find yourself reading for an extended period of time when you thought you were just going to skim through. Fantastic book- well worth the 10 years the author spent putting it together.

I purchased this book as a gift for a "new yorker" - he was absolutely fascinated by the information provided in it!! He has read this twice and shared it with a friend.