MANNAHATTA 400 years later

This is a big week for New York City.  400 years ago this week, Henry Hudson made a fateful journey up the Hudson river, floating past a rocky land mass lush with hills, forests, rivers and extraordinary bio diversity enjoyed by a diverse range of indigenous communities.  New York's future must learn from its pasts.  Viewing Eric W. Sanderson's Mannahatta cartographic rendering of Manhattan in 1609, helps us to reimagine a different approach to overbuilt sites.  What grew here in 1609 can influence how we develop in 2009.  This is not a nostalgic return to some pre-modern past, but rather an iterative ecological rethinking of built environments and their future potential. The meatpacking district is however an example of what should be avoided at any cost for future neigborhoods.  In September 2009, this neighborhood is a travesty of trashy high end commercialism and the erosion of a historic district's neighborhood identity.  The once sleepy Gansevoort Street, with its unusual historic origins in Native American village life, and later the site of one of New Amsterdam's Dutch forts, Fort Gansevoort, is now an unsustainable circus of human and vehicular traffic.  The area is not built to contain the large influx of people flooding its streets.  Furthermore, neighborhood residents  do not benefit from the exponential influx of foot traffic on its narrow cobblestreet lanes.  The demise of neighborhood restaurants, one of a kind small businesses and the ghostly hulls of former commercial spaces bear witness to the conflicting cultures of high end consumption and emptied out neighborhood spaces.