A new map-based exhibit opened at the Museum of the City of New York titled, “Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City.” The exhibit consists of historical accounts, maps and computer models that explore the ecology of Manhattan from the time before it became a city, with the aim to reveal new details about the place that so many call home.
The exhibit is the work of Eric W. Sanderson, a landscape ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, and Markley Boyer who created many of the computer simulations. The project took Sanderson and team more than 10 years of in-depth historical research and computer mapping and modeling to compile. The exhibit is accompanied by a detailed book that debuted in May, and is now on the New York Times Best Seller List.
Visit the slideshow on the New York Times website for an in-depth tour of tour of the exhibit. You can also read a New York Times book review of the volume here.
The project also has an interesting before and after map view on the website that harnesses the Google Maps API to render views of the island before development, and as it looks now. There’s a transparency controller that lets you bring up the 1609 image into the foreground and gradually make it transparent to explore different areas of the island.
Among the many credits on the site is one for the ESRI Conservation Program for donations of GIS software.
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The Mannahatta project is a tour de force of GIS, ecological analysis, and overall synthesis of many disparate data sets. The map you mention also has deeper links to the contemporary city: Make sure to zoom in on the Mannahatta map, click to highlight a block, and then click “About This Block Today”. This will bring you to the new version of the Open Accessible Space Information System (OASIS), where you can see a contemporary mapped view of the area in rich detail, view aerial imagery from 1996 through 2006, and access in-depth information about each spot on the map (not just Manhattan, but throughout NYC and in the metro area). Direct link to beta version of OASIS here: http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/oasis/map.aspx