What was manhattan like before

It's probably just a muskrat, Sanderson thought. Muskrats are more tolerant of stressful city life. He swam right up to us, then he started doing circles in the river. We backed up a little, and he did that beaver alarm call with his tail, slap, slap against the water.

So we decided we'd better take off. The beaver's return to the Big Apple was hailed as a victory by conservationists and volunteers who'd spent more than three decades restoring the health of the Bronx River, once a dumping ground for abandoned cars and trash. For almost a decade he has led a project at WCS to envision as precisely as possible what the island of Manhattan might have looked like before the city took root.

The Mannahatta Project, as it's called after the Lenape people's name for "island of many hills" , is an effort to turn back the clock to the afternoon of September 12, , just before Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into New York Harbor and spotted the island. If people today could picture what a natural wonder Hudson had looked upon, Sanderson figured, maybe they'd fight harder to preserve other wild places.

Sandy beaches ran along stretches of both coasts on the narrow, mile-long island, where the Lenape feasted on clams and oysters. Dressed in black jeans and a Windbreaker, he didn't look much different from the tourists beside him on the curb. But unlike them, in his mind he was following a trail along a swampy creek that disappeared beneath the entrance to the Marriott Marquis Hotel at the corner of Broadway and West 46th Street.

Brook trout probably, as well as eels, pickerel, and sunfish. It would have been much quieter, of course, although today's not so bad. Sanderson conceived the Mannahatta Project one evening in , after buying a coffee-table book of historical maps of the city.

A recent transplant to New York from northern California, he was curious about how the city had evolved. Not a tree or a plant. How did a place become like that?

One map in particular caught his eye: a beautifully colored print from or that showed the hills, streams, and swamps as well as roads, orchards, and farms on the entire island—something no other contemporary map had done.

More than ten feet long and three feet wide, the map had been created by British military cartographers during the eight-year occupation of New York during the American Revolution. Later called the "British Headquarters Map," it showed the island's topography in unusual detail because British officers needed that information to plan their defense of Manhattan.

To Sanderson the map presented a unique opportunity to strip away the city's skyscrapers and asphalt and look at least partway back to the island's original landscape. What would happen, he wondered, if he laid a street grid of today's city over this 18th-century rendering? Would anything line up?

To find out, Sanderson enlisted family and friends, starting with his wife, Han-Yu Hung, and their young son, Everett, to join him on weekend expeditions to visit places on the map that still existed. During the s and s, the city was a center of anti-British activity—for instance, after the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act in , New Yorkers closed their businesses in protest and burned the royal governor in effigy.

However, the city was also strategically important, and the British tried to seize it almost as soon as the Revolutionary War began. It served as a British military base until It played a particularly significant role in the cotton economy: Southern planters sent their crop to the East River docks, where it was shipped to the mills of Manchester and other English industrial cities.

Then, textile manufacturers shipped their finished goods back to New York. But there was no easy way to carry goods back and forth from the growing agricultural hinterlands to the north and west until , when work began on a mile canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The Erie Canal was completed in At last, New York City was the trading capital of the nation. As the city grew, it made other infrastructural improvements. Eight years after that, the city established its first municipal agency: the New York City Police Department.

Meanwhile, increasing number of immigrants, first from Germany and Ireland during the s and 50s and then from Southern and Eastern Europe, changed the face of the city.

They settled in distinct ethnic neighborhoods, started businesses, joined trade unions and political organizations and built churches and social clubs. At the turn of the 20th century, New York City became the city we know today. The 20th century was an era of great struggle for American cities, and New York was no exception. Owing to the Chinese Exclusion Act of , the only Chinese immigrants to live in Chinatown were tradesmen and professionals. During the early s, a large number of blacks entered Harlem so that by , Central Harlem was essentially African American.

The African-American culture flowered there in the s, and the area went through what was called the "Harlem Renaissance. Although romanticized, this was a tough time for Harlem blacks. Many suffered through extreme poverty, an increase in crime, and overpopulation in slum-like Tenements. During the s, the Apollo Club opened, and the Savoy Ballroom became a renowned place for swing dancing.

Over the next 70 years, crime in Harlem skyrocketed until Mayor Rudolph Guiliani introduced aggressive policing tactics to bring the problem under control. By , the crime rate in Harlem became comparable with the wealthy, predominately white neighborhoods of American cities such as Santa Monica, California. Other accomplishments of the late s Accomplishments of the s included the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in , the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in , and The Wall Street Journal was first published in As the coronavirus lockdown has made the city quieter than it can have been for some time, the New York Times has been investigating what the city looked like in , with some fascinating images created by Eric W.

Sanderson, a senior conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo. Sanderson's book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City geolocated old maps onto the modern city to build up a picture of the area in its natural state, forested and criss-crossed by waterways. Manhattan had "had vast forests of timber.