When I started reading this article, the first things that came to my mind were a Geology course I took in high school and the first IDC last fall. In this geology class, I had a class trip to Fort Tryon, the highest elevation point in Manhattan (located near Inwood). As I was reading the article, I pictured myself standing at the top of that park overlooking Manhattan, trying to imagine what it had looked like prior to all the human developments. Additionally, for the IDC class last year, I went to the New York Historical Society, where I got to see maps of Manhattan dating as far back as the one discussed in this article. Having a visual representation changed my outlook on the Manhattan landscape — the way it looked hundreds of years ago and how developed it is today.
What I found most interesting in the article is how much human settlement changed the island; not just in terms of removing essentially all of its biodiversity, but expanding the island. This past summer I would walk through Battery Park to get to work and see how certain parts of the park have indications and markings of the shorelines dating to the 1800s. As this article states, people have been expanding the shoreline, but I don’t think anyone can really imagine the magnitude to which this was done. We’re not talking about adding a few extra square meters to the shore — from what I saw at Battery Park, it may be said that maybe as much as a street block has been expanded out into the river.
With that said, what I found most difficult to imagine was that certain parts of the island, such as Tribeca, used to have sandy beaches. When we think of New York beaches, usually we think of Coney Island or Far Rockaway, but imagine what the city would have looked like if there was a beach on the shores of Manhattan. Taking a different direction, the authors write about swamps, streams, rivers, and other bodies of water that once populated the island. If you were to ask anyone who doesn’t know much about the island’s ecosystem about these bodies of water, they wouldn’t be able to picture such a landscape. That goes to show how much human development has shaped one of the world’s largest cities.
I agree with what others have stated regarding “providing a vivid, ecologically sound, geographically referenced reconstruction of Mannahatta, we can encourage interest in conservation of wild places and wildlife in the city.” Manhattan is known for its impressive architecture, and there is no space available to reconstruct it to what it once was. If people want to reconstruct and show what Manhattan once was, all they should do is look to another borough. Staten Island, for example, is known as the “borough of parks” and there is enough space there for such a massive project. With that said, the concept of Not In My Back Yard applies. I think that New Yorkers would be appreciative of this project, but no one would like to make the effort of giving up Manhattan real estate.