Immerse yourself in the New York of the 1600s

Eric Sanderson came up with the Mannahatta Project one evening in 1999 after acquiring a beautiful book with historical maps of the city. A recent defector from Northern California, he was curious to learn about developments in his host city. “Manhattan’s landscape has changed so much that it makes you wonder what was there before,” he said. There are certain places in this town where you don’t see a single other living thing, except maybe a person or a dog. Not a tree, not a plant. How did a place become like this? »

One map in particular caught his eye: a beautifully colored print from 1782 or 1783 showing hills, streams and swamps, but also roads, orchards and farms, all over the island; a unique feat of its kind for the time. Three meters long and one wide, this map was drawn up by British military cartographers during their eight-year occupation during the American Revolution. This now-famous map, dubbed the “British Headquarters Map,” shows the topography of the island in an unusual light, as British officers needed special information to be able to defend Manhattan.

Eric Sanderson wondered what would happen if we superimposed the Hippodamian plan of the current city on this rendering dating from the 18^e century. Would they line up even a little? To find out, Eric Sanderson recruited family and friends, starting with his wife Han-Yu Hung and their young son Everett, to accompany him on weekends to the still-visible locations marked on the old map. Trinity Church in Downtown Manhattan, founded in the late 17^e century, is one example among many. On a typical tombstone in the aster one can read: “Here lies the body of John Abrell whose days ended on January 10, 1762 at the age of 40 years”. As the cemetery is locatable on both the British Headquarters Map and the current grid, Eric Sanderson was able, so to speak, to drive a thumbtack through both maps by taking a GPS survey of the site and projecting it on a digitized version of the old map. After repeating the process about 200 times, pin after pin, he and his team managed to match the “British Headquarters Map” and the current Hippodamian plan with an accuracy of half a block, or about 39 meters. From Eric Sanderson’s perspective, a whole new dimension had been added to the modern cityscape. Now he could stand anywhere in Manhattan and more or less imagine what was there in 1782.

Take the Fifth Avenue false flat as you pass the New York Public Library (NYPL). “There’s a good reason that standing on the sidewalk here you can see the tops of the heads of people a few blocks away,” he explained. We are near the top of Murray Hill, where the Murray family had a farm and orchard in 1782. During the New York campaign, the British landed at Kips Bay on the East River and marched to here, squeezing half of Washington’s army that was trapped in Downtown Manhattan. A legend says that Mrs. Murray reportedly offered tea to the British officers. They stopped here at the farm, and while they were drinking tea, Washington’s troops slipped through their lines via Bloomingdale Road, now Broadway, and escaped. »

As fascinating as the famous map of British officers was, Eric Sanderson had no intention of stopping his time machine in 1782. It was 1609 or nothing. With his colleagues, they then removed from the map everything that had been added by the settlers and by the soldiers (roads, farms, fortifications, etc.) until his digitized version only had construction cubes. elements of the physical landscape: coastline, hills, cliffs, land use, watercourses and ponds. As a landscape ecologist, Eric Sanderson used to mentally dissect wilderness areas to understand how they functioned; for example, separating a Gabonese tropical forest into geological, hydrological, ecological and cultural layers. But in this case, he and his colleagues decided to build a landscape from the bottom up, starting with the land and filling it in with the plants and animals that presumably lived there.

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