Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #8 "The Mannahatta Project"

New Yorker illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "The Mannahatta Project"

Nick Paumgarten’s wonderful “The Mannahatta Project” (October 1, 2007) is about ecologist Eric Sanderson’s attempt to map Manhattan’s natural landscape as it looked before it was settled by European colonists and began “its accelerated transformation into a manipulated forest of asphalt and steel.” Paumgarten writes,

The Mannahatta Project aspires to minute verisimilitude, down to the varieties of moss, and will facilitate a kind of naturalist’s version of George-Washington-slept-here. Eventually, Sanderson would like to put up plaques around town calling attention to this or that bygone pond or dune, or even to post re-creations of 1609 vistas on the city’s next generation of bus shelters. A visitor to Times Square, standing alongside the Naked Cowboy on the traffic island at Forty-fifth Street and Broadway, might be encouraged to see a convergence, under what is now the Marriott Marquis, of two freshwater creeks, one flowing out of a marsh beneath the headquarters of the New York Post, and the other from under the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School. The creeks were dammed by beavers to create a red-maple swamp, frequented by wood ducks and elk. The idea of all this, of course, is to get us to appreciate the remnants of the natural world, even in this degraded place, and then to work harder to preserve them, here and everywhere else. Still, although Sanderson might not admit it, such visions also have a way of helping us to savor our particular range of degradations. We’ve made a fine mess.

The piece is divided into six sections.  Section 1 tells about Henry Hudson and his crew sailing their ship, the Half Moon, up the Hudson River in 1609. 

Section 2 describes Manhattan’s 1609 ecology (“Its temperate seasons, dense hardwood forests, ample freshwater, great diversity of habitats—fifty-four ‘ecological communities’ in all, according to Sanderson, from pitch-pine barrens to peatlands to eelgrass meadows—made it an unusually abundant corner of the continent”). 

Section 3 tells about Paumgarten’s visit with Sanderson in the Wildlife Conservation Society’s offices, which occupy a cluster of trailers in a parking lot of the Bronx Zoo (“His trailer was a paradise of field guides and cool maps”). It also introduces Sanderson’s associate, Mark Boyer, “a digital-photography entrepreneur,” who translates Sanderson’s data into 3-D pictures. 

Section 4 describes a number of Manhattan locations in terms of what used to exist there circa 1609 (“Broadway, parts of which were formerly Bloomingdale Road, had followed the course of an old Lenape trail up the spine of the island. The Lenape had likely followed the game; Broadway belonged to cougar and deer”). 

Section 5 tells about a field trip that Paumgarten, Sanderson and Boyer took, hunting for traces of 1609 Manhattan (“We took Dyckman Street to the Harlem River Drive and drove down to East 106th Street, where another F.D.R. exit follows the course of a vanished tidal creek. This one, called Pension’s Creek, ran west from the East River all the way past Fifth Avenue to the current shore of the Harlem Meer, in Central Park, before turning north”).

Section 6 continues the field trip (“We stood on the north side of Forty-seventh, looking across the street at the row of jewelry shops—the Futurama Diamond Exchange—and tried to picture a cool, shady forest”).

My favorite part is section 5, containing this superb passage:

Nowadays, McGowan’s Pass is defended by Knish Nosh, a snack bar next to the Conservatory Garden. On the day we visited, it was manned by a young Russian who claimed to have pumpkin bagels (he meant muffins). The patrons, that morning, consisted of a group of summer campers engaged in a scavenger hunt, and a fleet of hospital patients in wheelchairs, attended by a few nurses. A man drifted by on a bicycle, with “Brick House” playing from a boom box. As tempting as it was to rue the absence of otters, egrets, and acres upon acres of spartina grass waving in the breeze, there was something beguiling about this assemblage in the Park on a summer weekday morning.

Even as he searches for a vanished tidal creek, Paumgarten notes the beguiling, vibrant overlay of city life. “The Mannahatta Project” is a brilliant reminder that the nature we inhabit is never just first or second nature, but rather a complex mingling of the two.