Manhattan, 1609...
Manhattan 400 years ago and today.
Where the Chrysler Building stands, there may have been gray wolves and hoary bats. Chinatown was home to a long tidal creek and salty marsh. A Lenape trail wound through the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, Kelsey Campbell-Dolleghan reports on gizmodo.com.
This was Manhattan in 1609, on the brink of European settlement, the year Henry Hudson sailed into New York Bay. It was a hugely diverse and rich landscape, threaded with trails used by Lenape Indians, Cambell-Dolleghan wrote.
The island’s biodiversity per acre was “rivaled that of national parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Great Smoky Mountains,” writes the creator of the Welikia Project, landscape ecologist Dr. Eric Sanderson, who founded the project almost 20 years ago, according to Campbell-Dolleghan.
Welikia, which means “my good home” in Lenape, is the expansion of Sanderson’s original goal — to create a map of pre-modern Manhattan’s natural landscape to include all of the city’s boroughs. As 6SQFT pointed out recently, the project has launched a Google Maps-powered interactive map of its research, which allows you to search through every block of the city to find out what was there 400 years ago — from a comprehensive list of mammals and plant life to information about Lenape trails and camps, Campbell-Dollegan added.
For more about this fascinating project: http://gizmodo.com/what-every-block-of-nyc-looked-like-400-years-ago-1733614748?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
No comments:
Post a Comment