Environment
Explore the Lush, Overgrown Ecology of 1600s Manhattan
Search block-by-block for the animals, plants, and Native Americans who occupied the island before European settlement.
Before bankers and club kids, Manhattan had gray wolves, harbor porpoises, and the Lenape (aka Delaware Indians). Now New Yorkers can explore where these historical humans and wildlife likely roamed—right down to the block they live on today.
The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Welikia Project (named after the Lenape term for “my good home”) is an ambitious, interactive re-creation of what Manhattan was like in 1609, when the Dutch began settling the island. The landscape would be pretty much unrecognizable to locals today, the society writes: