Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been trying for nearly a decade to determine how Manhattan would have looked to its first European explorers, circa 1609, in an effort he’s named the Mannahatta Project1. When it’s completed, it will include, as a recent New Yorker profile on Sanderson noted, “a virtual re-creation—a three-dimensional computer map—in which you will be able to fly, as it were, above the island, land wherever you want, and have a look around. In place of your local cell-phone shop or O.T.B. parlor, you may see a trout stream, or a black bear browsing amid blueberry patches.”
I’d read this article on my flight to Orlando this morning and was thinking about it after arriving at the hotel here that I’m staying in tonight, the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center.
As its centerpiece, the hotel boasts a 4.5-acre, perhaps dozen-story-tall glass-enclosed atrium that includes “a variety of themed environments”: there are streams and ponds and actual alligators and giant lizards in the Everglades section, there’s a giant yacht floating in Key West on which businesspeople can throw parties, and throughout there are towering palm trees, flowers and other plants, pools of koi, waterfalls and rocky outcroppings.
All of it is lit by the sun through the atrium dome, like a biosphere, although the glass is thick enough and angled as such that I couldn’t even hear when it was raining, to the degree that I was startled when I walked outside to find it storming. Indeed, the atrium trumps the outdoors and its swaths of scrub grass run through by highways, new subdivisions and strip malls.
Earlier, I was checking out one of the ballrooms for a meeting my company’s staging here tomorrow and while a hotel staff member was pointing out the grand balcony accessible through a set of double doors, she noticed a ubiquitous-in-Florida small lizard skittering around at the base of the door. She cracked the door, patiently shooed out the lizard and apologized. Gotta keep the environment at a controlled level of reality.
1 I find it interesting that Inwood, my neighborhood and Sanderson’s favorite part of Manhattan because of its largely unchanged topography and forestry, is one of the few parts of the city where one “can get around successfully with a 1782 map.” [back]