Looking for Mannahatta

In 2004, I found my family tree with the help of a genealogist. I say mine, not ours, because my brother, three cousins and I were relinquished at birth in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago, and adopted by two couples (two brothers and their wives). We grew up in Connecticut and New York, not far from the city, and our families were very close. I was the baby.

It is common for adoptees to want to know their lineage, and we frequently end up searching for our biological parents. I had searched on and off since 1981 with no luck. With nothing as convenient as the internet to do the work, and repeated suggestions to go to Evanston to search public records, I found it a daunting task.

If we cousins had ever searched for our birth parents, none of us knew about the activities of the others. However, as our adoptive parents began to pass away, we started to speak out loud of searching. We found a sharp and fun genealogist in the Chicago area, and put her to work on five separate family trees.

I gave her the scant biological information I’d acquired over the years, and within two weeks, she found a huge family tree that contained what we were 99% sure were the names of my relatives.

This story goes two ways – the continued search for my birth mother, which is irrelevant to this article, and the study of this family tree and our ancestors. I followed this tree back from Ohio, Canada, France and Switzerland to Holland in the mid-1600s. My Dutch ancestors immigrated to New York City in 1677. Having grown up in Connecticut and being very familiar with New York, I immediately wondered, ‘What the hell was New York City like in 1677?!’

Mannahatta

Through a series of fortunate events, I recently came across The Mannahatta Project.

From their website: ‘Have you ever wondered what New York looked like before it was a city? Welcome to Mannahatta 1609.’

I hit pay dirt!

Eric Sanderson is the founder and director of The Mannahatta Project and author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. He states that ‘mannahatta’ is Algonquin for ‘island of many hills.’ In 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed up the river now named after him, the Lenni Lenape occupied the island, and Algonquin was their native tongue.

Sanderson is a landscape ecologist with The Wildlife Conservation Society headquartered at the Bronx Zoo. He wanted to know the ecological history of New York City when he moved there from California. Through a decade of research and mapping, he has now completed The Mannahatta Project, which is a virtual recreation of Mannahatta.

In his research, he found amazingly diverse ecosystems, ’55 different ecological community types.’ He states there were 1,000 species of plants and vertebrate animals – bears, wolves, mountain lions, frogs, orchids and a deciduous forest, as a sampling. Apparently, the Lenape lived on this 27 square mile island for 5,000 years before Hudson’s arrival, because food, shelter and water were abundant.

More from the website: There were ’570 hills, more than 60 miles of streams, over 20 ponds and over 300 springs… sandy beaches… a vibrant, dynamic tidal estuary…’

Wow! I certainly found out what New York was like when my ancestors immigrated from Holland! Very different from the concrete, taxis and skyscrapers I have always known.

Aside from a very cool interactive website where you can overlay Mannahatta with Manhattan, ‘this is not merely an academic flight of fancy. Rather, in undertaking this exercise, we will discover ways in which we can restore some of the ecological processes lost to NYC in particular, and more broadly, we will learn how to create cities that are more “livable” for people.’

Manhattan

In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman creates a scenario of humans suddenly vanishing from the earth and the potential, subsequent, yet slow, return of the planet to what is was before us. I stole this book from my 15 year old daughter for Thanksgiving break. She is reading it for her Environmental Science class, and she likes the chapter about New York best. It captured my attention, too, since I have spent a lot of time in the city.

According to Weisman, Sanderson can stand in modern-day Manhattan and retrace the streams, ponds, salt marshes and mountain lion trails of days gone by despite the fill and concrete. As 19th century city planners filled in the natural waterways with the ‘many hills,’ they created a huge water problem for New York City that still exists today. ‘Every day, they must keep 13 million gallons of water from overpowering New York’s subway tunnels.’ That does not include 47.2 inches of annual rainfall. Workers battle 13 million gallons of water that is naturally under the island, displaced with fill and trying to flow down its original course.

‘The only thing that has kept New York from flooding already is the incessant vigilance of its subway crews and 753 pumps.’ You can imagine the disaster when the power goes out…

Weisman’s assumptions are that if there are no humans to man the processes that keep New York dry, water will be the main cause of breakdown and erosion. The soil beneath the city will wash away, the streets and subway tunnels will cave in, and new water courses will be created. Within five years, invasive plants (called pioneer plants, when they are settling into a freshly created growing area) will sprout from accumulated leaf litter and cracks in the pavement, taking over. Within 200 years, the ecosystem will be more advanced with colonizing trees. ‘Gradually, the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one.’

Manhattan to Mannahatta?

Could Manhattan ever revert to Mannahatta? Probably not. Seeds of invasive plants from Europe have naturalized and will likely never go away. Some of our man-made materials will never decompose, and we have deposited heavy metals in the soil. None of these were present in the lives of the Lenni Lenape, so the ecosystem will never be the same.

Weisman makes a good point, though, when he says that the forests Henry Hudson saw in 1609 were not the original ecosystem, either. Sanderson says the Lenni Lenape cut and burned trees to grow corn, beans, squash and sunflowers, and they left piles of mollusk shells on the shores. It was not a virgin forest, by any means; humans had already affected it.

And before the Lenni Lenape arrived? Sanderson says, ‘Nothing was here except for a mile-thick slab of ice.’

I highly recommend visiting The Mannahatta Project if you are at all interested in New York and/or ecology. Couple that with Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and you can come on the fascinating journey I have been on the last few days.

New York City was a big part of my childhood and personal growth as a young adult. If I hadn’t been adopted by this couple in Connecticut and able to experience New York for so many years, Weisman’s chapter about New York and Sanderson’s Mannahatta Project wouldn’t have meant nearly so much to me. These discoveries sweetly felt like going back home and riding a subway and imagining the sounds and smells of the ‘island of many hills’ that my ancestors knew.

If you are wondering, I did finally locate my biological mother, and have a great relationship with a half-sister, who has children the same age as mine. Happy discoveries all the way around!

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Visit the website: The Mannahatta Project

Read the books: