The Mannahatta Project

“Ever wondered what New York looked like before it was a city? Welcome to Mannahatta, 1609.”

That’s the opening to The Mannahatta Project website, found at http://themannahattaproject.org/home/ At this site you can view a digital map of Manhattan and see how the same block looked in 1609, as compared to now. Why 1609? It’s the year Henry Hudson arrived at the land that would eventually become New York.

This website takes some of the most well-known landscapes on earth and shows us in a fairly reliable manner how it may have looked. This is not simply someone sitting and imagining what the landscape must have been liked, but it is, in the truest sense, an educated guess.
I’m not going to go into the full explanation of how they developed the map – you can read that on the website if you’re interested – but it was the result of a decade-long study. There’s also an article, complete with before and after pictures, in the September 2009 issue of National Geographic.

The authors of the study say their goal has “never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state.” Rather, they seek to “discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life.”

It is a unique way of looking at sights we all think we know.