The name of Cheesequake State Park got its name from the Lenni-Lenape Indians, via either a forgotten word or one that meant “upland.”

Additional, related fact: roughly half of the names of the United States derive from Native American words or phrases (or mispronunciations/bad translations of those).

Boing Boing noted today (via Kottke.org) designer Richard Howe’s photographic documentation of every street corner in Manhattan, “The Manhattan Street Corners.” (Howe’s site was temporarily unavailable with an exceeded bandwidth limit when I tried checking it out.)

It reminds me of Caleb Smith’s resolution (which, like Howe’s project, took two years) to walk every street in Manhattan.

It also reminds me of conceptual artist/photographer Dylan Stone’s plan to photograph not only Manhattan's street corners but the four sides of every block, for a series he named “Drugstore Photographs, Or, A Trip Along the Yangtze River.”

For comparative purposes, Howe took 11,000 photos covering every corner in Manhattan. Stone, who reckoned he’d need “between one and three rolls of film” per block to accomplish his feat, had taken 26,000 snapshots by the year 2000—and he never finished the project, having covered only the blocks below Canal Street.

“My project, at heart, is about conservation,” Stone wrote. “It is a living, precious photographic archive of an entire city.” And this statement gained resonance after 9/11, as part of his mundane city record included photos of the World Trade Center.

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]

1. *Lydia didn’t leave for a better job as she’d suggested. Her boyfriend, 10 years older than her, made her quit to be with him as often as possible. He made her sell her Jeep, took away her cellphone and carefully monitored her friends. Those friends she had told her to watch out, or else in five years she’d be a stay-home mom with three kids and no life. But she was smitten with the guy. She had a photo of the two of them on her desk at work, he standing behind her, two-feet taller, his large hands over her shoulders. He may have hit her once, a few years back. Or maybe she really did walk into a doorframe, or whatever that excuse usually is. Nobody’s heard from her in awhile.
2. George can’t stay awake at work. His body lolls until his head hangs low, nearly touching his computer’s keyboard. This only happens maybe every other day for a few minutes at a time, then he snaps back up and resumes work like nothing happened. His cubicle is positioned as such that only one person can see him, and she’s being discreet. There’s talk of drugs; he does seem to be in the restroom a lot. Then again he’s young and handsome, muscular. Maybe he only stays out late.
3. Catherine flat out told Bennet that nobody liked him—really, just that: “Nobody likes you.” He was over at her apartment at the time, just sitting on her couch, when she sprung it on him. What his reaction was, I wasn’t told, but knowing him, I can imagine it was one of sheepish resignation. And if that wasn’t enough, she told him that if he really hated his job so much, he should just quit. It’s unclear whether this is a shame of Catherine, Bennet or of them both. But what kind of person tells someone that? And what kind of person wouldn’t know he was despised to that degree?
4. Eliza choked on a piece of chicken at a business luncheon a few years back. She was surrounded suddenly by 300 concerned executives, who had stopped eating to form around her a loose, staring ring. One man stepped forward and performed the Heimlich maneuver, but it didn’t take, and he had to do it all over again before she chucked out the partially chewed meat, 300 concerned executives watching it land on the carpet. She tends to bring this up when someone at a cocktail party spills wine on himself or drags his sleeve over the butter at dinner. “At least you didn’t choke on a piece of chicken in front of 300 strangers,” she’ll begin. So I suppose it’s not much of a secret. But she never told me.

* Names have been changed to ones picked at random from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

A few days ago, walking from my apartment to the subway, I spied this brochure lying on the sidewalk of my street. It’s copyrighted 1957 and in pristine shape, and I can only surmise it was discarded by the Metropolitan Montessori School nearby.

The brochure’s concern is Operation Bootstrap, a campaign founded in the 1940s by Teodoro Moscoso that transformed Puerto Rico from an agricultural to an industrial nation. It’s written in a propaganda-like fashion, proudly boasting of all the “many products being manufactured in Puerto Rico’s new factories,” including:

• Ball-point pens
• Chemicals and pharmaceuticals
• Cigars
• Electric shavers
• Fluorescent lamps
• Home appliances
• Jewelry
• Leather belts and shoes
• Machinery and metal products
• Men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing
• Optical lenses
• Paints
• Plastics
• Radar, radio, and television components
• Textiles
• Tools and dies
• Toys

The operation was a success with the brochure noting that by ’56, industrial production had overtaken agricultural production for the first time in the island’s history, thanks to duty-free access to U.S. markets and tax incentives that attracted U.S. investment. These days, Puerto Rico’s chief exports are pharmaceuticals and other chemicals, electronics, clothing and food, including canned tuna and beverage concentrates.