Fascinating

This looks great: Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City by Eric W. Sanderson, and the Mannahatta Project website.

“Mannahatta” is more art book than typical natural history tome, and it’s all about envisioning: see the salt marsh that is now Delancey Street, the grassy plains of Harlem, the water moving slowly through what is now Times Square to the forests along the banks of the Upper West Side, which may have been untouched even by the Lenape Indians who used to live there. The computer-generated illustrations, by Markley Boyer, are aptly called “visualizations,” and are paired with photos of the contemporary real thing: for example, to portray the red-maple swamp postulated to have been where the ESPN Zone stands in Times Square today, Sanderson photographed a red-maple swamp in Orange County, some 40 miles north.

I often find myself envisioning Chicago "then and now", but my "then" usually only goes back 100 or 150 years, and rarely to pre-settlement times. Though I've never even been in Manhattan, I think I would love this book, which makes me think that similarly sympathetic Gothamites might really love it.