What did New York look like before we arrived?
aspires to minute verisimilitude, down to the varieties of moss, and will facilitate a kind of naturalist’s version of George-Washington-slept-here. Eventually, Sanderson would like to put up plaques around town calling attention to this or that bygone pond or dune, or even to post re-creations of 1609 vistas on the city’s next generation of bus shelters.
The attempt to strip one layer from the other, and to see where they match up, seems to stimulate some as yet undiscovered cerebral nodes devoted to before-and-after visualization. The fantasy of depopulation, whether retroactive or futuristic, appeals to our sense of vanity and self-loathing. It may help explain the success of the book “The World Without Us,” in which the author, Alan Weisman, describes what would happen to the earth if humans were no longer around. It’s Mannahatta in reverse.
One day, I went to visit Sanderson in the W.C.S. offices, which occupy a cluster of trailers in a parking lot at the Bronx Zoo. He greeted me in bare feet: a morning of torrential rain had caught him mid-commute, from his home on City Island, and soaked him to the knees. His trailer was a paradise of field guides and cool maps. Sanderson is forty, with a gentle manner and a soft voice but the intense eyes of a functional obsessive. He grew up in Walnut Creek, California—the East Bay.
For every element of the Mannahatta project, Sanderson has consulted dozens of sources: “Catalogue of Plants Growing Spontaneously within Thirty Miles of the City of New York” ; “The Moss Flora of New York City and Vicinity” ; various soil guides, which describe much of the city’s soil as “coarse anthropogenic material,” also known as garbage.
We walked along a glass-strewn stretch of uncut grass between some handball courts and a row of tenements trawling denim-strewn laundry lines. Well-trod paths cut through an adjoining thicket. Boyer said, “One thing we’ve found is that the places we like to go are places where gay cruisers like to go.” Sanderson was wearing a panama hat and navy-colored bushwhacking clothes. Boyer, lean and bright-eyed, had on black jeans and a white shirt. They had a G.P.S.
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