In September's National Geographic, there was an interesting article about a landscape ecologist who has digitally recreated an exhaustively detailed map of Manhattan as Henry Hudson would've found it 400 years ago. He and his team essentially worked backward from the present day, superimposing a current street grid of Manhattan over a Revolutionary War era map, and then stripping away all of the manmade elements, leaving the island as untouched as it would've been in 1609. They also worked in great detail to identify the wildlife within the ecosystem by creating a network of flora and fauna that had to have relied on the other for existence. I'm glad that there are folks out there that work on projects like this for the enjoyment of rubes like me.
Read the National Geographic article here - http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/09/manhattan/miller-text
Learn more about the project, and explore the map in detail, here (you can even enter any Manhattan address and see what it would've looked like 400 years ago) - http://themannahattaproject.org/home/
Saturday, November 7, 2009
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