With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

You can now see what every block of NYC looked like 400 years ago

Where the Chrysler Building stands, there may have been gray wolves and hoary bats. Chinatown was home to a long tidal creek and salty marsh. A Lenape trail wound through the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. 

This was Manhattan in 1609, on the brink of European settlement, the year Henry Hudson sailed into New York Bay. It was a hugely diverse and rich landscape, threaded with trails used by Lenape indians. The island’s biodiversity per acre was “rivaled that of national parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Great Smoky Mountains,” writes the creator of the Welikia Project, landscape ecologist Dr. Eric Sanderson, who founded the project almost 20 years ago.

Welikia, which means “my good home” in Lenape, is the expansion of Sanderson’s original goal — to create a map of pre-modern Manhattan’s natural landscape to include all of the city’s boroughs. As 6SQFT pointed out recently, the project has launched a Google Maps-powered interactive map of its research, which allows you to search through every block of the city to find out what was there 400 years ago — from a comprehensive list of mammals and plant life to information about Lenape trails and camps.

Read entire article at Gizmodo