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. 

ERIC W. SANDERSON: THE MANNAHATTA PROJECT

July 9, 2009

At the Museum of the City of New York is an extraordinary constellation of maps and ideas.  In one exhibition titlted: MANNAHATTA/MANHATTAN is located 4 key maps of New York City's emergence: the British Headquarters' Map, the Viele Map, the Commisioner's Map and finally, Randal's extraordinary drawings of lot by lot in his series of maps of New York City, known as the Randall's Map.  A reproduction of the Costello Map of New Amsterdam is also on show at the exhibit.  What makes this collection of cartographic renderings significant is their symbiotic importance in the understanding of New York City's landscape, materiality and topography.  The projected future in each one of these maps is vastly different.   Cumulatively, these different interpretations of information produce layered conceptions of what New York is and can become.