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ture abounds, as do chauvinistic claims; OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS various modern interpreters place a of t: September 13th oyster feast at Spuyten noiA Duyvil or Yonkers. At any rate, the Wh THE MANNAHATTA PROJECT crew sailed upriver as far as Albany, hav( where shallow waters forced them to nort What did look like before we arrived? turn back: this wasn't the way to Ca- earl, thay. On the trip downriver, a crew of ci BY NICK PAUMGARTEN member shot and killed a native who alw had sneaked into Juet's quarters and ish t is remarkable, in the accounts of the not progressed, eighty-five years before. stolen his pillow; in the ensuing melee "To Iearliest European visitors to the This likely made the eighteen or so another native tried to tip over their for North American continent, how little Englishmen and Dutchmen aboard the boat, "but," Juet wrote, "our Cooke KaL interest some of these explorers seemed Half Moon the first Europeans to ven- tooke a Sword, and cut off one of his quit to take in the land they had just found. ture up the and therefore hands, and he was drowned." The next app They hardly went ashore. As seamen— the first to get a good look at the island day, seven leagues south, the "Sauages" am and seekers of clear passage to the Ori- known to the natives as Mannahatta. ambushed them. The sailors shot about fled ent—they were more interested in the The only surviving account of this jour- ten of them, then took refuge in a bay Mo currents, tides, soundings, and shoals. ney is the diary of one of Hudson's that sounds as though it may have abut- and The land, rich as it was, was at first not crew, Robert Juet (who, on another ted Washington Heights: "Hard by it whi much more than an impediment. Of voyage, a year later, helped lead a mu- there was a Cliife, that looked of the In I course, all that changed soon enough. tiny, stranding Hudson, his young son, colour of a white greene, as though it pat( In early September, 1609, Henry and seven others in a small boat near were either Copper, or Siluer Myne: lish Hudson and his crew sailed their jacht, the Arctic Circle). Juet's records of and I thinke it to be one of them, by the wit the Half Moon, through wind directions and river depths are Trees that grow vpon it. For they be all tan' at the head of New York's lower bay, precise, but from his descriptions it's burned, and the other places are greene ing the point beyond which, it is generally often impossible to decipher where ex- as grasse, it is on that side of the Riuer its believed, had actly Hudson was on the river. Conjec- that is called Manna-hata." ma, Ne, or s itar spil

ogi Soc tati use the Ian, so r cal E see rao Ne "It' `•Y- wo 3 shc • cer lan zo ne del wo o me ▪exi ,t car :?-= hat ha Times Square then and now: the area featured a red-maple swamp frequented by beavers, wood ducks, and elk. col This is Juet's sole explicit mention tennial, two years hence, of Hudson's Information is of the island. We can only speculate landfall. It will include a lavish book; a now about what impression it made. Web site; an exhibit, he hopes, at the shock resistance. Whoever drew the night watch may American Museum of Natural History; have observed an ill wind shifting from and, niftiest of all, a virtual re-creation— ARM northwest to east, carrying the smell of a three-dimensional computer map—in early-autumn rot, or the faltering racket which you will be able to fly, as it were, YOURSELF. of crickets and katydids. (New York has above the island, land wherever you always been noisy; Peter Kalm, a Swed- want, and have a look around. In place ish botanist, visiting in 1748, noted, of your local cell-phone shop or O.T.B. "Tree frogs . . . are so loud it is difficult parlor, you may see a trout stream, or a for a man to make himself heard." Poor black bear browsing amid blueberry Kalm: he was also so disfigured by mos- patches. quito bites while here that he couldn't The Mannahatta Project aspires to appear in public.) It may have seemed minute verisimilitude, down to the vari- a menacing place; Hudson and his crew eties of moss, and will facilitate a kind of fled from it. Two days later, the Half naturalist's version of George-Washing- Moon was beating back to England, ton-slept-here. Eventually, Sanderson and then eventually on to Holland, would like to put up plaques around which had originally sent Hudson forth. town calling attention to this or that by- In the coming years, the Dutch dis- gone pond or dune, or even to post re- patched more ships and, in 1614, estab- creations of 1609 vistas on the city's next lished the colony of , generation of bus shelters. A visitor to with New Amsterdam, at Manhat- Times Square, standing alongside the tan's southern tip, soon to be its teem- Naked Cowboy on the traffic island at ing gateway and hub. The island began Forty-fifth Street and Broadway, might its accelerated transformation into a be encouraged to see a convergence, manipulated forest of asphalt and steel. under what is now the Marriott Marquis, "Klein has turned Never again would it be so wild and raw, of two freshwater creeks, one flowing out or so under-chronicled. The new inhab- of a marsh beneath the headquarters of globalism inside out, itants, once they got rid of the old ones, the New York Post, and the other from and given all of us a new way spilled far more ink than blood. under the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis of looking at our seemingly To Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecol- High School. The creeks were dammed unending disaster in Iraq." ogist with the Wildlife Conservation by beavers to create a red-maple swamp, —Seymour M. Hersh Society, the proliferation of documen- frequented by wood ducks and elk. The tation has been of great but not limitless idea of all this, of course, is to get us to use. The more people there were to do appreciate the remnants of the natural "Brave and terrifying.... the observing, the less of the natural world, even in this degraded place, and It's nothing less than the landscape there was to observe. Sander- then to work harder to preserve them, secret history of what we son is in charge of a W.C.S. project here and everywhere else. Still, although call the 'free market." called the Human Footprint, which Sanderson might not admit it, such vi- —Arundhati Roy seeks to assess and map the human sions also have a way of helping us to race's impact on the surface of the earth. savor our particular range of degrada- "An essential book; tions. We've made a fine mess. New York, perhaps, is the ultimate case. only Klein could write it." "It's hard to think of any place in the —Anthony Shadid world with as heavy a footprint, in so he citizen's urge to know his city is 5 short a time, as New York," he said re- Ta strong one, and perhaps nowhere cently. "It's probably the fastest, biggest more so than in New York, where cos- "Brilliant." land-coverage swing in history." For mopolitanism refracts into a kind of a —Howard Zinn 9'z nearly a decade, he has been trying to superheated parochial self-regard. New LT,- determine exactly how Yorkers can hardly fathom how you ll would have appeared to Hudson and his could come into and 8 men in 1609 had they disembarked and not immediately see that this island, to To view The Shock Doctrine: =2 explored the place—to summon and borrow the writer Russell Shorto's A Short Film, visit depict the island as it was, just before it phrase, would soon be at the center of www.naomiklein.org came under the shadow of that foot. He the world. Hudson's men didn't even 2 has christened this effort the Manna- seem to recognize that it was an island, M Metropolitan Books hatta Project. Sanderson intends to much less a special one. It would have I An imprint of Henry Holt and Company complete it in time for the quadricen- been harder, certainly, for them to imag-

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007 45 -

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by MARKUS ZUSAK "Brilliant. . . . It's the kind of book that can be life-changing." —The New York Times Book Review "Poised to become a classic." —USA Today "A major achievement." —People Magazine - , - "An absorbing and Z-- searing narrative." "I love travel—it's so much fun to spend money in a different place." —The Washington Post Book-World • "Intricate and extraordinary." —Newsday me the place's future than it is for us to one of the hemisphere's marvels. Man- summon its past. hattan was a superstar, even before its They must have noticed, though, settlers made it one. that the harbor was as deep and fair as "You could do the same thing for they come, and that the river at its head downtown Cleveland, but it wouldn't was a significant one. Even though the have the same impact," Sanderson said of Hudson didn't lead to the Orient, it did his project. "New York is the archetypal reach deep into the heart of beaver-pelt city, so in some ways the nature that un- country, and, eventually, it provided ac- derlies it is also archetypal." cess to the Great Lakes and the terri- The attempt to strip one layer from tory west of the Appalachians, by way, the other, and to see where they match first, of the Mohawk River, and, later, up, seems to stimulate some as yet un- of the Erie Canal. Geography deter- discovered cerebral nodes devoted to mined the city's destiny, to a certain de- before-and-after visualization. The fan- gree. But what of its ecology? Manhat- tasy of depopulation, whether retroac- tan was at the center of a web of tidal tive or futuristic, appeals to our sense of estuaries—a ripe marine environment, vanity and self-loathing. It may help ex- a major stop on the eastern flyway for plain the success of the book "The migrating birds. Its temperate seasons, World Without Us," in which the au- dense hardwood forests, ample fresh- thor, Alan Weisman, describes what A #1 New York Times Bestseller water, great diversity of habitats— -- would happen to the earth if humans A USA Today Bestseller four "ecological communities" in all, ac- were no longer around. (In short, it A 2007 Michael L. Printz Honor Book cording to Sanderson, from pitch-pine would both bounce back and go to hell, barrens to peatlands to eelgrass mead- in interesting ways.) Ifs Mannahatta in ows—made it an unusually abundant reverse. Weisman devotes a few pages to

www.rnarkuszusak.com ALFRED A. KNOPF corner of the continent. Without the Sanderson's project, surmising that its city astride it, the island might still be findings will give us a clue as to what

46 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007 Manhattan would become in our ab- West Thirty-third Street. Over the cen- sence. But, of course, the Manhattan of turies, the island has fattened up. The 1609 is lost. The city is far more than a Dutch started it by dumping their refuse TELE flesh wound. into the coves and wetlands and bays. BOTTOM Sanderson caught his first glimpse of By 1782, the shoreline had already ex- prelapsarian Manhattan in a map that panded two blocks east (Pearl Street to BILLION had been prepared by the British during Water, Water to Front), thanks to a the Revolutionary War. It is called the steady diet of excavated earth, garbage, Why the Poorest C ountries are Failing British Headquarters Map, and it de- and sewage. Since then, the shoreline and What Cr picts, in meticulous detail, at a scale of has been straightened and filled, and l Be Done About It six and a half inches to a mile, the is- girdled by highways; it seems weird land's contours and topographical fea- even to use the word "shore." The old tures, its streams and swamps, so as to coast would have cut Ground Zero in aid the British in defending it against half. (The terrestrial half would have General Washington's Continental consisted of thirty-foot hills, rising Army. The map emphasizes marchabil- quickly from the shore, dense with oak PAUL COLLIER ity. In 1782, when the map was likely and chestnut trees—so cry not for Radio completed, most of the island's pre- Row.) Many of the city's hills, especially Hudson topography and hydrology, if those on the southern half of the island, not its ecology (the Dutch and English have been levelled, and its dells and had already introduced dozens of spe- creeks have been filled. Murray Hill, for cies, and chased away a few, too), was example, used to be a prominent ridge, 'The best nonfiction largely intact—although the map does running from present-day Forty-sixth book so far this not show, for example, that the British, Street and Sixth Avenue southeast to its cut off from the rest of the continent high point on East Thirty-seventh. Ap- year." during the war, had chopped down all proaching it from the north, you would —Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times the trees. ("The island is totally stripped," have seen a steep hemlock forest. Now observed in 1781.) you hardly notice any incline at all, After the Revolution, and especially heading downtown on , "This slip of a book is after the adoption of the grid system, in unless you are on Rollerblades, skating set to 1811, the island's surface, and even its into the wind. become a classic." innards, were irrevocably altered. —The Economist The grid ran roughshod over the ne day, I went to visit Sanderson landscape. In 1808, John Randel was O in the W.C.S. offices, which oc- dispatched to survey the entire island, cupy a cluster of trailers in a parking lot for the purpose of laying out the grid. A at the Bronx Zoo. He greeted me in "Read this book. You decade later, he began a series of ninety- bare feet: a morning of torrential rain will learn much you do not know. It had caught him mid-commute, from two maps, called the Farm Maps—me- will also change the way you look ticulous closeups, with an elevation his home on City Island, and soaked reading for the northwest corner of him to the knees. His trailer was a par- at the tragedy of persistent poverty every intersection on the new grid. adise of field guides and cool maps. in a world of plenty." Sanderson pieced these together and Sanderson is forty, with a gentle man- --Financial Times also found Randers notebooks at the ner and a soft voice but the intense eyes New-York Historical Society, which of a functional obsessive. He grew up in contained even more detail. Then (and on) Walnut Creek, California— Sanderson, along with some colleagues, the East Bay. He recalls that his drive- "A path-breaking went out into the field with an altime- way was always full of frogs. In the early ter and a G.P.S. locator and squared seventies, Sanderson remembers, the work providing penetrating Randers findings with their own and Army Corps of Engineers converted the insights into the largely unexplored with the British Headquarters Map. Fi- creek into a concrete ditch. The frogs borderland between economics and nally, they created a new contour map, disappeared. Once, when he was a Boy drawn by hand—a template for the res- Scout, a counsellor told him to sit next politics." —George Soros toration of 1609. to the Stanislaus River for three hours Sanderson's map depicts a more slen- without moving. "I thought I was done der and sundered Manhattan than the after fifteen minutes," he said. "After one we know. The coast is notched with thirty minutes, I was totally bored. And OXFORD I www.oup.com/uso com/us coves, streams, and tidal marshes. There then things got interesting. I began to UNIVERSITY PRESS are stretches of sandy beach, induding a notice things." Available at bookstores everywhere four-mile strand from the Battery to Nine years ago, he moved to New

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007 47 York, to work for the W.C.S.—a hard- of trees—several varieties of each spe- luck deployment for a nature boy. The cies. "Then the software will start plac- city has, somewhat ironically, long been ing trees semi-intelligently," Sanderson a major nexus for naturalists, both ama- said. He is predicting accuracy down to teur and professional, who, congregat- one block. ing here out of institutional or commer- For every element of the Manna- cial necessity, sought an outlet for their hatta project, Sanderson has consulted Linnaean inclinations. The ratio of field dozens of sources: "Catalogue of Plants DA -vnimal CODE notes to actual field may be higher in Growing Spontaneously within Thirty New York than anywhere else. Sander- Miles of the City of New York" (1817); son, anyway, began to notice things. BOOKSELLERS AqREE: "The Moss Flora of and Sanderson has devised a systematic Vicinity" (1916); various soil guides, THE NEXT qREAT way of recording and representing an which describe much of the city's soil as LITERARY ADVENTURE ecosystem. He calls it the Muir web, "coarse anthropogenic material," also IS HERE. after John Muir, the pioneering Amer- known as garbage. As far as phantom ican naturalist. In the Muir web, each water is concerned, a favorite is James species of plant or animal, and each Reuel Smith's "Springs and Wells of characteristic of habitat, has a full set of Manhattan and the Bronx, New York needs and associations, which, taken City," which Smith researched, begin- ENNIFER LEE CARRELL together, form a tangle of connection ning in 1897, by riding a bicycle around and dependency. If you have a par- town and taking photographs of springs ticular bird, it means that you'll have a and wells (an approach unavailable to particular tree bark, or nut, or bug, and him in the preparation of his "Springs so on. To evoke 1609 Manhattan, he and Wells in Greek and Roman Liter- throws out the non-native species— ature"). So far, the only funding San- such as the cardinal, which didn't ex- derson has received is thirty-five thou- WIT pand its range this far north until the sand dollars from the Hudson River twentieth century—and adds those he Estuary Program, which is underwrit- EIR can fairly presume were here. He must ten by New York's Department of En- catalogue the conditions under which, vironmental Conservation, plus the book say, white pines exist—shallow, sandy, deal, which is from Harry N. Abrams. sterile soil—and make an educated guess The president of the W.C.S., Steven as to where they may have been. He Sanderson (no relation), has allowed said, "I may be going out on a limb, but him to devote a great portion of his time at least I'm trying to document whose to Mannahatta. Steven Sanderson told limb I'm out on." By the time he's done, me recently, with a note of admiration, One woman is about to he expects to have four thousand ele- if not quite impatience, "It will be won- unearth a long-lost play by ments in his Muir web. He then plugs derful, finally, to get all of this squeezed them all into his customized modelling out of Eric's head into some available William Shakespeare—a discovery software, which places them on the format." that could lead to both untold map, as nature, or a creator, might have. fortune and unspeakable crimes. The software mimics that of social-net- Show him your ephemeral creeks," working sites. His son, who is six years " Sanderson said to Amanda Huron, old, once asked him to explain it, and he a City University graduate student, who said, "This program writes programs was busy modelling tidal levels on a that tell the mapping program to make computer. As Sanderson and Boyer the maps that predict where all the spe- looked on, she pulled up a representa- "Plot twists worthy of cies were." tion of the , the site of a Le- The Da Vinci Code.... This spirited Eighty per cent of the work is build- nape settlement, and later of Five Points, and action--packed novel delivers ing the data sets. The glory part is turn- an infamous slum, and now of Foley constant excitement:' ing that data into 3-D pictures. This Square, home to several government is the bailiwick of Markley Boyer, a buildings. The pond supplied the city rubbsj•,,, digital-photography entrepreneur who with drinking water into the nineteenth heard about the Mannahatta Project century, until it was polluted by tanner- while working with the W.C.S. in ies and slaughterhouses; it was then filled Gabon, and volunteered to help. For ex- with dirt and garbage that settled and A member of ample, using line drawings from books, moldered and stank—which is one rea- penpin group (USA) DUTTON www.peturuin.com and photographs of bark, seeds, and son that the neighborhood built over it leaves, Boyer creates computer images was a slum. Huron's diagram showed

48 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007 )e- that a pair of streams pouring out of the the forty-six-story Trump SoHo hotel merly Bloomingdale Road, had followed LC — Collect Pond, one heading east and the rising above Spring Street.) There was a the course of an old trail up the on other west, joined tidal creeks that me- pebbly brook on Maiden Lane, where spine of the island. The Lenape had to andered, in turn, into the East and Hud- the Dutch girls would do their washing. likely followed the game; Broadway be- son Rivers. At high tide, Sanderson There are still stories of streams running longed to cougar and deer. a- thinks, the Lenape could paddle a canoe through the kitchens of fancy restau- ed from one side of the island to the other. rants or the basements of schools. Best ne day this summer, I met Sander- Its "It's like the L train," Boyer said. known, perhaps, is Minetta Brook, a Oson and Boyer at the entrance to According to the 1782 map, Man- creek whose burbling waters supposedly Inwood Hill Park, on Isham and Sea- 7); hattan had more than seventy miles of surface, after storms, in the lobby of an man Streets, near the northern tip of rid streams and at least twenty-one ponds. apartment building on lower Fifth Ave- Manhattan, where the woods are as near The longest stream was the Saw Kill; it nue, into a bonglike contraption of clear as anything in town to an original state. as flowed from present-day tubing. (The term "original" is tricky, since SO to what is now the Seventy-first Street At Astor Place, a series of sand hills- twenty thousand years ago the island lay )M exit off the F.D.R. Drive. The Great zandbergen—supported pitch-pine and under a thirty-stories-deep sheet of ice.) t es Kill went from Times Square to the scrub-oak barrens, like those you see in Boyer said, "This is one of the few parts of Hudson, near the entrance to the Lin- southern New Jersey or eastern Long Is- of Manhattan where you can get around ,rk coln Tunnel. The soggy ground of the land. The Upper West Side was a pla- successfully with a 1782 map." The idea Ii — Lispenard Meadows, under what is now teau of upland forest and meadow, was to start our field trip as far back in rid SoHo and the northern part of Tribeca, abloom with asters (not Astors), cardi- time as possible. The further uptown Lgs is responsible for the dearth of skyscrap- nal flowers, monkey flowers, red colum- you go, the more traces you'll find of to ers in that part of the city and the dip in bine, and black snakeroot. For this rea- 1609, as if a multigenerational campaign Lgs the skyline between downtown and son, the Dutch called it Bloemendael, to obliterate them lost steam as it ad- midtown. (It's no obstacle to today's en- which became Bloomingdale, a name vanced north. For this reason, Inwood is gineers, who can reach the bedrock deep that stuck until the mid-nineteenth cen- Sanderson's favorite part of Manhattan. below the muck. Witness, if you must, tury. Broadway, parts ofwhich were for- We walked along a glass-strewn it- n- ok en Introducing ed He was a hardworking farm boy. Rosetta Stone® Version 3! ne )1d She was an Italian supermodel. The world's leading )n, language-learning software n- He knew he would have just just got better. ed one chance to impress her. )le

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THE NEW YORRER, OCTOBER I, 2007 49 stretch of uncut grass between some a leopard-skin umbrella and a guy (my handball courts and a row of tenements guess was Senegalese) in a Che Gue- trawling denim-strewn laundry lines. vara T-shirt talking on his cell phone. Well-trod paths cut through an adjoin- From a promontory, we followed the ing thicket. Boyer said, "One thing we've path down into a gulch and the oaks found is that the places we like to go are gave way to immense tulip poplars, places where gay cruisers like to go." many of them as old as the British 1 0 ,121 t+ glow Sanderson was wearing a panama hat Headquarters Map. "There were Le- am and navy-colored bushwhacking clothes. nape living in here," Sanderson said. 0, as ,0041%.1. Boyer, lean and bright-eyed, had on He pointed to some caves on a talus black jeans and a white shirt. They had slope, which were largely sealed off a G.P.S. and an enlarged printout of about seventy years ago. "The ridge a portion of the British Headquarters gave them protection against the pre- Map, on which they'd superimposed the vailing winter winds," he said. We Onboard QUEEN MARY 2r street grid—an oddly thrilling docu- came out of the woods at the spot -continues to be the event it was in the ment, as endlessly scrutinizable as the where, as a plaque explained, Peter cover of "Led Zeppelin IV." Minuit supposedly bought Manhattan Golden Era. An occasion to dress in Sanderson's hybrid map indicated from the Lenape for trinkets worth your finest and share the legacy with that there had been a creek a few blocks sixty guilders. Acres of landfill now south. We hopped down off the grass separated it from the waters of Spuyten new-found friends.This evening begins onto a sidewalk, and then over an old Duyvil. A pair of tourists were standing with your grande diescente into the stone wall and into the woods. There there, trying to make sense of their were wild raspberries, and empty Ba- map. They looked at ours and said, stunning three-deck Britannia Restaurant cardi bottles, and a sign saying, "Do "You guys have a good map." where sommeliers pour wine selected Not Feed Pigeons." We came into a "Ours is a little old," Boyer said. slight clearing and an almost impercep- We made our way back to where from the most extensive wine cellar tible depression in the earth, which Boyer had parked his Subaru, which afloat.TOMOITOW, choices abound. Boyer and Sanderson thought could be had a Segway in the back. We took a sign of the stream. From the phan- Dyckman Street to the River Whether you dine at Todd English on tom creek bed, we headed north along Drive and drove down to East 106th creations from Boston's renowned chef a path of crumbling asphalt, which Street, where another F.D.R. exit fol- seemed to follow the course of an old lows the course of a vanished tidal creek. or simply enjoy a lunch of traditional road on the map. Up here, there were This one, called Pension's Creek, ran British fare at the Golden Lion Pub, giant, healthy oaks. 'We think that this west from the all the way is more or less what it looked like," past Fifth Avenue to the current shore your voyage will be filled with one Boyer said. A parks-department em- of the , in Central Park, culinary adventure after the other ployee sped by in a golf cart; we passed before turning north. The island had

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iLIEF CrirArci?" THE MOST FAMOUS OCEAN LINERS IN THE WORLD - "Your hopes and dreams—we saved themfor you." been nearly bisected here by water. said. "I was thinking that maybe we ADVERTISEMENT Harlem was, first and foremost, defined could get some salt-marsh core samples by this creek. (It is odd, in this sense, from beneath the Meer. But it turns out that Ninety-sixth Street, and not 106th, ifs lined with cement." became the de-facto boundary between on ,he town

East Harlem and the Upper East Side.) T ater, we drove down Fifth Avenue, BE THE FIRST TO HEAR ABOUT EVENTS, The Dutch called the south bank Ot- along the edge of what used to be PROMOTIONS, AND SPECIAL OFFERS terspoor, owing to a preponderance of hilly, boggy wilderness, the intransigence FROM NEW YORKER ADVERTISERS. river otters. On the British Headquar- of which helped preserve it long enough ters Map, a thin strip of dry land be- for it to be viable as a park (although it tween Pension's Creek and a rocky hill, gave the Park's landscapers fits). Like- in what is now the Park, was called Mc- wise, the other parks, to the north—such Gowan's Pass, in honor of the family as Morningside, Fort Lyon, and Mount that owned a nearby tavern. It's the Morris—are on land too steep and rocky Karbala Gap of the Upper East Side. to be easily developed. We emerged into Washington shot through the pass the blinding mayhem of midtown, parked prior to the Battle of Harlem, and dur- in a garage on West Forty-eighth Street, ing the War of 1812 the locals built a and walked down a block to the Dia- fort there as a defense against the Brit- mond District, into what was once a ish, who had attacked Connecticut. pond-pocked hemlock forest. Five blocks Nowadays, McGowan's Pass is de- to our south, on the ridge of Murray Hill, fended by Knish Nosh, a snack bar next there had been stands of white pine, ten to the . On the to fifteen stories tall—which, ideal for day we visited, it was manned by a young ships' masts, were doomed, well before Russian who daimed to have pumpkin any Coliseum Books could sprout up, and bagels (he meant muffins). The patrons, then close, in their place. Looking down that morning, consisted of a group of Sixth Avenue, Sanderson gestured to- summer campers engaged in a scaven- ward the herds of pedestrians stretching ger hunt, and a fleet of hospital patients away from us and said, "You see all those in wheelchairs, attended by a few nurses. heads, and you think that the six hundred A man drifted by on a bicycle, with Lenape who used to live on Manhattan "DETAILED" "Brick House" playing from a boom could have fit on that one block." box. As tempting as it was to rue the ab- We stood on the north side of Forty- Just arrived at Dillard's, this brand-new sence of otters, egrets, and acres upon seventh, looking across the street at the collection of true American-inspired acres of spartina grass waving in the row ofjewelry shops—the Futurama Di- breeze, there was something beguiling amond Exchange—and tried to picture a sportswear offers a blend of modern about this assemblage in the Park on a cool, shady forest. The citizens of the style and must-have details interpreted summer weekday morning. world streamed past, intent on making in luxe casual clothing that looks great We climbed up onto the hill over deals. A Chinese-restaurant deliveryman the pass, and looked north and east out asked us to move so that he could unlock anytime. Especially notable are the over the barrio. In place of the brown- his bike. Boyer had his G.P.S. out. We woven shirts for their innovative fabrics stones and bodegas, there would have were searching for the site of an ancient been a vast grassy plain. There would pond, which they had seen on the 1782 and custom detailing that add interest have been heath hen, now extinct. The map. Gradually, we dosed in on it. "Right and style to a weekend staple. The entire ground was flatter than in most of here," Boyer said. The pond's shore Manhattan, because the rock there is stretched from David S. Diamonds to the collection is wash and wear for the marble (called Inwood marble), rather National Jewelry Exchange. It occurred ultimate in everyday ease. If you're than the schist that undergirds, and oc- to me that the stall where I'd purchased looking to add a little fashion to your fall casionally juts out of, the soil in most of an engagement ring ten years earlier was Manhattan; it is softer, and so it had right on top of it. We decided to stop by. wardrobe, you can check out "Detailed" been ground down by the ice during The dealer, recognizing me, said, "What exclusively at select Dillard's stores; call the last ice age. The Lenape had prob- are you doing here?" We tried to explain. ably burned the plain every ten years or He said that he knew nothing about any 1-800-345-5273 for stores. so, to keep it clear, for better farming pond and then gave us a look suggest- and hunting. ing we'd better just move along. As for the Harlem Meer, directly Dillard The Style of Your Life. below us, it is, like most of the water- ways of Central Park, man-made. "I was NEWYORKER.COM talking to a palynologist," Sanderson More images from the Mannahatta Project.

52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007