New York: What did the city look like 400 years ago?

Mr. Sanderson writes, Mannahatta had more ecological diversity than Yellowstone,
more native plant species than Yosemite, more species of birds than
the Great Smoky Mountains. “If Mannahatta existed today as it did
then, it would be a national park,” Mr. Sanderson writes. “It would be
the crowning glory of American national parks.”

What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “fresh, green breast of the New
World” that greeted Henry Hudson 400 years ago has been reimagined by
a senior ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Drawing on
18th-century British military maps, the ecologist, Eric W. Sanderson,
has painstakingly recreated Manhattan’s rolling landscape — Mannahatta
in an American Indian dialect meant “island of many hills,” many of
which were all but leveled when the street grid was imposed in the
19th century — that Hudson encountered.Mr. Sanderson not only
reimagines Manhattan, he also offers a vision of what New York may
look like 400 years from now.

“New Yorkers in 2409 will still be loud,
direct and pushy,” he predicts, but also “warm and generous and
involved in what happens in the world.” He envisions a city where
fossil fuels will have long since been exhausted and where humans and
nature coexist. Mr. Sanderson’s book is being published this spring. A
companion exhibit will open at the Museum of the City of New York in
May. New York was built on what Kenneth T. Jackson, the Columbia
University historian, calls Hudson’s “river of empire.”

On its banks,
the global financial capital was eventually transplanted from
17th-century Amsterdam, according to a new booklet, “1609: The
Forgotten History of Hudson, Amsterdam and New York,” by the
journalists Geert Mak and Russell Shorto. “That is what began in
1609,” they write, “with the unlikely, brooding, mist-shrouded figure
of Henry Hudson, and the development shortly after he passed from the
scene of a brashly multiethnic and free-trading city on a blank slate
of an island.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/nyregion/25manhattan.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion